Très Bien Blog

WordPal: Theme Drupal with WordPress block themes

theodore — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:40:27 +0000

WordPal: Theme Drupal with WordPress block themes

One of the difficulty with starting a Drupal website is the lack of diversity in available themes. There has always been more choice in the WordPress world for themes. Maybe, just maybe, Drupal could use WordPress themes and get the best of both worlds?

theodore October 5, 2026

Drupack: Drupal infrastructure in a single binary

theodore — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 08:16:55 +0000

Drupack: Drupal infrastructure in a single binary

A few years ago I said Drupal needed infrastructure innovation, and I finally took the time to work on it. While I really like DDEV, I'm really not a fan of having to use Docker for everything so I'm trying to do something about it.

theodore September 22, 2026

Drupal Code Search now index recipes

theodore — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:48:19 +0000

Drupal Code Search now index recipes

Made it easier to get a list of projects that are included in a particular recipe. It's thanks to the sponsorship of Vardot, and previously Palantir.net that I'm able to spend time on tooling for the community. Many thanks to them.

Code search:

theodore September 15, 2026

composer drupal-patch-check

theodore — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000

composer drupal-patch-check

A composer plugin created to make it easy for humans to upgrade their patched Drupal websites.

If you ever wanted to know if you still needed that patch after an update, or if your custom patch would still apply to the new version of the module, or if your 15 levels patch tower still applies after the update, this is the tool for you. Install the composer plugin and get started using the remote API.

theodore September 7, 2026

A tool to painlessly update a heavily patched Drupal site

theodore — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:31:48 +0000

A tool to painlessly update a heavily patched Drupal site

Picture a Drupal 10.6 website with a several months stale composer.json: 120 contrib modules, 47 patches. You need to update it to Drupal 11.4. This means hours of manual patch checking, does the patch applies to the new version, is it included in the latest release… I don't want to deal with this several times a year so I improved the Drupal-Code-Query MCP server with a few more tools.

theodore August 26, 2026

Drupal code query MCP Server

theodore — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 23:27:46 +0000

Drupal code query MCP Server

A few months ago I put an api online to search and query the whole Drupal code ecosystem. With the release of some more capable local AI models I thought it could be good to release a MCP server with that same data optimized for LLM use. Same data, different packaging. The address for the MCP server is:

https://mcp.tresbien.tech/mcp

Add the server to your setup of choice and you'll be able to ask things like:

theodore August 20, 2026

An opportunity to help Web standards move in a good direction

theodore — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:03:08 +0000

An opportunity to help Web standards move in a good direction

Drupal now ships with HTMX, and there is currently a proposal to add a few of the building blocks into the HTML specification. The effort is nicknamed the triptych and the goal is to add three new HTML features:

theodore June 17, 2026

Visualization of Drupal Core Change records over the years

theodore — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:14:55 +0000

Visualization of Drupal Core Change records over the years

How many Drupal Core change records (CR) has there been over the years? Is it a manageable amount for contrib maintainers? How many are about something new or deprecated? This is what it looks like since 2018. For visual effect I grouped CRs in 4 buckets:

theodore May 22, 2026

Ten years of Drupal Code history

theodore — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:55 +0000

Ten years of Drupal Code history

When I setup the Drupal contrib search engine, the goal was to detect modules we'd break with a code change in Drupal Core. It works but I wanted to know more than that, so I spent a couple of weeks getting more data. I want to start with a huge thank you to my long time sponsors: Palantir.net and Vardot.

theodore May 7, 2026

LLM harm reduction, policy proposal for Drupal Core contribution

theodore — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:58:34 +0000

LLM harm reduction, policy proposal for Drupal Core contribution

I've been following and participating in the conversation about applying AI tools to the Drupal core issue queue, and the broader community. I've been listening, reading, and experimenting quite a bit in and out of Drupal. It's been a wild ride since last December and for the past few weeks a few things started to solidify.

theodore April 21, 2026

Dig for gold in Drupal Contrib code

theodore — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 06:02:59 +0000

Dig for gold in Drupal Contrib code

Fixing the contrib code search problem.

theodore February 20, 2026

The Algorithmic Bias Against Drupal Community Values

theodore — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:30:00 +0000

The Algorithmic Bias Against Drupal Community Values

I don't usually fail at making my life easier, but hey, it's a whole new world lately. To try my hand at LLM during my trial of AI-assisted coding, I wanted to see if I could customize an LLM for a specific task: assigning user credit on Drupal Core issues. Depending on the complexity, activity, and number of contributors involved it can take me anywhere between 30 seconds and 30 minutes to assign credit when I commit an issue to Drupal Core. Maybe I could automate some of it?

theodore February 4, 2026

…and now I'm recovering

theodore — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 04:20:00 +0000

…and now I'm recovering

After just a month of use I can see that my relationship with Claude Code is unhealthy. Like I mentioned when I tried Claude Code for a month, even when it was wasting my time I was having fun. Pretty big red flag.

theodore January 26, 2026

I tried Claude Code for a month…

theodore — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

I tried Claude Code for a month…

Large Language Models are a pretty fascinating piece of technology. Back in December I saw some chatter about Claude Code and I wanted to try it out myself. It is really fun, it's jQuery in 2010 levels of fun. And, more concerning, it's fun even when it waste my time.

I tried it on a few things in the past 4 weeks:

theodore January 22, 2026

How to use HTMX with forms in Drupal 11.3

theodore — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 23:13:29 +0000

How to use HTMX with forms in Drupal 11.3

After a shorter than expected time in the core issue queue the HTMX integration in now usable in Drupal Core, Let's see how we can use it!

HTMX has a respectable pool of examples to choose from, today we'll focus on forms. How can we make an equivalent of the cascading select HTMX example in Drupal?

theodore September 13, 2025

Drupal and PHP fun with FrankenPHP

theodore — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 05:12:15 +0000

Drupal and PHP fun with FrankenPHP

I've been looking at FrankenPHP for a while because I really think it will help Drupal. I had fun looking into this, some of what I came across is below, whether it should be used like this or not I can't say yet :)

Let's assume we're in some flavor of Linux, with curl and sqlite3 already installed somewhere. PHP doesn't need to be installed:

theodore July 18, 2025

Drupal BigPipe now uses HTMX

theodore — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 14:46:59 +0000

Drupal BigPipe now uses HTMX

The BigPipe module in Drupal is a very clever and efficient little module. It's just a little bit heavy on it's frontend. How is HTMX helping?

theodore July 17, 2025

A Summer of Sponsored Drupal Contribution

theodore — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 05:40:26 +0000

A Summer of Sponsored Drupal Contribution

Much like my last update things are going well. I am able to spend 2 full days every week on contribution and my commit activity has increased quite a lot.

theodore August 8, 2024

Drupal is pretty expensive to host and maintain. There is already work well under way to address this with automatic updates and project browser. It’s great, and it’s not enough. What if we could ship drupal with a production-ready webserver that can handle real-time features? What if we could make HTTPS certificate management easier? What if we could significantly improve the performance of Drupal?

theodore April 5, 2024

Très Bien Blog

WordPal: Theme Drupal with WordPress block themes

Drupack: Drupal infrastructure in a single binary

Drupal Code Search now index recipes

composer drupal-patch-check

A tool to painlessly update a heavily patched Drupal site

Drupal code query MCP Server

An opportunity to help Web standards move in a good direction

Visualization of Drupal Core Change records over the years

Ten years of Drupal Code history

LLM harm reduction, policy proposal for Drupal Core contribution

Dig for gold in Drupal Contrib code

The Algorithmic Bias Against Drupal Community Values

…and now I'm recovering

I tried Claude Code for a month…

How to use HTMX with forms in Drupal 11.3

Drupal and PHP fun with FrankenPHP

Drupal BigPipe now uses HTMX

A Summer of Sponsored Drupal Contribution

Sponsored Drupal Contribution

Drupal needs infrastructure innovation