Tips, Tricks and Workarounds
Issues in Drupal
Drupal is often considered the best choice for complex, content heavy websites with high traffic. Over half a million websites are currently built on Drupal, including corporations (Tesla, Nokia) sports teams (Dallas Cowboys, Patriots), entertainment (NBC, Fox, Turner) and higher ed institutions (Oxford, Stanford and Oregon State University). That being said, nothing is perfect.
Below are issues that content editors will occasionally run into along with some useful tips, tricks and workarounds.
Moving Large Blocks
If you are having a hard time dragging and dropping large blocks, uncheck the "Show content preview" option at the top of the page. This will make the blocks much smaller, and much easier to manage. When you are ready to see the content again, you can recheck this option.
Creating Space on a Page
If you need to create some breathing room on your page between blocks, try using the Whitespace block. This allows you to easily add configurable amounts of space without causing accessibility problems or layout issues for mobile users.
Menu Not Displaying Updates
Sometimes changes made to a menu do not display as expected. When this happens, try clearing the cache. Do this by hovering on the Tools icon (which is displayed as the Drupal Drop on the admin toolbar in the upper left hand side of the screen) and click Flush all Caches. This will often reset the system so you can view the changes you have made in a menu.
Menu Not Displaying Dropdown Submenu Items
If you have child navigation items nested under the main navigation and those submenu items are not displaying as expected, check to ensure that the top level item has the box checked to "Show as expanded." This setting can be found under the Display settings accordion item.
One Extra Tip
If menus still are not displaying as expected, check to ensure that Render Submenu box is checked on the Configure Block page. That can be found under Structure > Block Layout, then scroll down to Main Navigation and click configure. The Render Submenu box is about halfway down the Configure Block page. After that box is checked, be sure to Save Block at the bottom of the screen. Then you may need to Flush all caches again for your changes to display.
Layouts/Blocks Reporting Timeouts
Some sites have encountered an error message saying "there's a problem with your form submission. Please wait [number] seconds and try again."
This is due to spam protection being enabled on all forms. Layout Builder counts as a form; if a change is submitted too fast, the site thinks it was a bot and will block the change, i.e. "submission," from going through.
If you see this error, please email web.help@wwu.edu for help adjusting spam protection settings.
Security Updates Error Message
Sometimes you may see an error message stating "There are security updates available for one or more of your modules or themes. To ensure the security of your service, you should update immediately!"
It's okay. We have an in-house security team who is dedicated to fixing those. You can safely ignore that error message.
Centering Headings within a Card Block
Usually when you want to center a heading you can uncheck display title, place the title inside the body field, toggle the text format from Basic to Full HTML, then center the title using the text alignment icon on the text editor. However this doesn’t work as expected for the Card Block.
Instead it’s best to use the code: text-align-center in the custom class field to center the text.
