It's often useful to let the machines do the work, and output something that's dynamically computed on an entity. By that I mean something that can't be hardcoded as a fixed value for all entities of a particular type, but that varies for each entity, in a way that allows it to be generated in code rather than laboriously entered into each entity form by humans.

For example, you might want a backlink for an entity reference, or a link to a view that has an argument for the entity's ID, or something that depends on field values on the entity.

It's true, no April fools. You can make your Browser tests run much quicker. How? By deleting them!

You will of course need to add a corresponding Kernel test - and that's the trick. Kernel tests run much faster than Browser tests.

But Browser tests make requests to the test site using an internal web browser, I hear you say, whereas Kernel tests make API calls directly. Kernel tests have their uses for testing APIs, but Browser tests are needed to test actual HTML output.

Module Builder now has its own documentation site.

This covers the many options it offers developers for fine-tuning their module code, from dependency injection to plugin inheritance, entity base fields, form elements, permissions, library asset files, and more.

At LocalGov Drupal Dev Days in London earlier this month, the topic came up of releasing custom project code as contrib modules.

Rector is a really powerful tool for making refactoring changes to your codebase. It's easy to use, but it's not obvious, and a lot of the documentation and articles about it are outdated or incomplete. For instance, when you go to the project page (https://www.drupal.org/project/rector) there's no clear indication of how to install it!

Attributes are here and they're great. I hated annotations; they were a necessary evil, but putting working code into comments just felt wrong.

My site is back up, after a brief interlude: I moved hosts, because Gandi doubled their hosting costs. I'd left it quite late to renew, because up until now it's just been a case of ticking a box and paying money, so I didn't have much time to shop around.

I chose Krystal, because they use green energy and their procedure for transferring my domain seemed simple (there was a German hosting firm I was recommended too, but that one said something about filling in a form in a PDF and it looked horrendous).

When I start writing a class that has a dependency injection, I have a clear idea about which services it needs. I generate it -- the plugin, form, controller, or service -- and specify those services.

Then nearly always, unless it's something really very simple, I find that no matter how much I thought about it and planned it, I need to add more services. Maybe remove some too.

Fortunately, because Module Builder saves the configuration of the module code you've generated, it's easy to go back to it and edit it to add more services: