Drupal 8

The Shield module prevents access to a Drupal site by putting a Apache authentication system across the entire website. This means that to access the site you need a username and password.

This is useful in a number of different situations, but I use it most for protecting dev and staging sites from access. It's not the most complex authentication system in the world, but it's enough to prevent the embarrassment caused by having staging sites being spidered by search engines.

Drupal 8's comment system has the ability to be threaded so that users can reply directly to other users comments and create threads of conversation. I have always found this difficult to use and difficult to read so I wanted to turn it off when I set up this site. The only issue I had was I could turn off the threading but couldn't alter the ordering of the comments.

The default ordering of comments in Drupal 8 is by thread. This means that even if you turn off threading the comments are always displayed in thread order. The CommentDefaultFormatter class is used by Drupal to display comments and contains this line of code.

The Search API Solr Search module has a bunch of controls for boosting certain fields. This allows you to give more weight (i.e. boost) to the title and less weight to the body, which means that when a search term appears in the title of a page it has more weight than a page that only has the term in the body. This weight value is ultimately used to calculate the score of the page and this directly effects the ordering of results.