Introduction

Have you ever wanted to preview a set of content changes across your entire Drupal site, before pushing them live? Not just one article, but a whole batch of changes? Drupal core’s Workspaces module can help you do this, but you’ll need more than what Drupal core provides.

In this post, I’ll show you the modules and customizations that you’ll need to build a production-ready Workspaces workflow.

Why Workspaces?

Consider these scenarios:

Romans 8:35 is often used to defend a Christian’s unconditional eternal security, with reasoning like, “Nothing that I do can separate me from God’s salvation of me.” Based on this verse’s context, I would propose that it may mean something more like, “Nothing that happens to me will make me stop loving God”. Don’t agree? Let’s dig in.

The verse in question states (in ESV translation):

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? (Romans 8:35, ESV)

How to maintain data integrity and allow granular editorial control of continuously-imported content in Drupal.

In content management systems, we want both control and flexibility. In this post, I’ll tell you how my team got both. In our case, we wanted to continually sync records into Drupal from an external data source for display on our website. We wanted to lock down parts of those imported records from being edited in Drupal, but allow other parts to be edited. The goals were to both maintain data integrity* and provide an easy editorial experience.

tl;dr:

1. Drupal doesn’t load its path alias system when executing update hooks, so don’t try to save entities in update hooks. If you load a node’s URL during an update hook, you’ll get the internal path (“/node/123”) instead of its alias (“/pictures/cute-cats”).
2. Nor does it load aliases in post-update hooks (contrary to the docs), so avoid it for saving entities, too.
3. You can, however, safely use Drush’s hook_deploy_name() for saving entities. All systems are available during this stage.

Long version