It's been quite literally years that I've been putting off updating my blog, both in the underlying technology as well as the content that resides within. While August is probably eight months too late to invoke the new year in a blog title, it's a theme that I can work…
I've recently been working with a client using Drupal, Varnish, and Cloudflare as part of their digital transformation journey. The client had requirements to ensure that requests coming in through Cloudflare, which should be all requests, would include a check to ensure only their internal IP ranges and ours would…
Over the last couple of days an internal thread has been making the rounds at Acquia about speeding up Composer for Drupal builds. With Drupal 8, Lightning and the BLT project making heavy use of Composer to manage its dependencies, users frequently rebuilding from source, or those in remote regions…
Quite often in my role as a Solutions Architect at Acquia, I'll see customers looking to bring sites under the multisite banner in order to enact a more controlled code governance model. Amalgamating codebases allows for a more controlled site development experience where 50 different sites can be thought of…
Recently I was posed with the question about verifying self-signed SSL certificates with drupal_http_request(). The usecase here would be to use private APIs to surface information, secured with SSL, yet using an internally created certificate. By default, drupal_http_request() does not verify the SSL certificate of sites…
The last thing any website owner, developer or administrator wants to hear is that they've been hacked. Whether the cause was the fault of insecure passwords, problematic file permissions, a vulnerability in the underlying code or the myriad other potential issues, it's an undesirable situation to be in. When Drupal…
For the most recent Acquia Professional Services All Hands in Boston I took the Acquia Backend Specialist certification and passed! Following the helpful blog articles about the general certification from Tanay Sai and Webchick, I felt it was only responsible to speak about my experience during the backend exam. One…
We all know Varnish is awesome. I went as far as presenting a topic on Varnish then writing about it. This is a known fact. However, what happens to all that caching goodness when you want to run your entire site over SSL? Out of the box, Varnish doesn't support…