Drupal Planet

It’s a fact that you get a hideous amount of markup with the Panels module straight out-of-the box, even if you use it to create a single column page without changing any of the options.

This is because each layer of the rendering process brings its own markup to the party. 

Panels and layers

Panels are structured in layers, which is what makes them so flexible for any given requirement. Within a layout sit the regions and inside these are panes.

Each of these panes are configurable by providing CTools plugins. You can render panes and regions with style plugins and the layout with a layout plugin.

Each of these layers have their own wrapping markup and things can get excessive quickly. 

Help is at hand

Luckily for us, there’s quite a lot of help for Panels straight out-of the-box. Firstly, there’s a ‘naked’ style plugin which drops all the wrapping markup and can be applied to your panes and regions. While this is a good start, the layout will still need markup specific to the site’s theme.

You can override each Panels layout as it’s presented by a theme hook. It’s literally as simple as copying a template to your site. 

For most simple panels, it’s just a case of copying the panels-onecol.tpl.php file into the theme and customising it. 

If you’re using a CSS framework or grid system (we use Bootstrap at Deeson) then this file is where you can re-work the markup to be specific to the system you are using.

My Panels page

Keeping all this in mind, I’ve created a simple Panels page which lists recent content to authenticated users. It’s built from a bean, a view (with an access rule) and some custom markup. It uses the one col layout.

Here’s my oh-so-simple panels-onecol.tpl.php file in my theme:

<div class="panel-display panel-1col clearfix" <?php if (!empty($css_id)) { print "id=\"$css_id\""; } ?>> <?php print $content['middle']; ?> </div>

And here’s the markup you’ll get when viewed as an unauthenticated user:

<section id="block-system-main"> <div class="panel-display panel-1col clearfix"> <div class="panel-pane pane-block pane-bean-recent-content-header"> <h2 class="pane-title">Recent content</h2> <div typeof="" about="/block/recent-content-header" class="entity entity-bean bean-editable clearfix">[...]</div> </div> <div class="panel-pane pane-custom pane-1"> <p>Login or create an account to view this content...</p> </div> </div> </section>

Let me know what you think!

Web analytics software is being used in most organizations for basic analysis and reporting, but provides little (if any) actionable insight into marketing efforts. Many people login to analytics searching for “the magic answers to their business problems”, but they don’t have specific goals, or challenges they want to analyze/address. Then they become overwhelmed with the amount of information they receive. They throw their hands in the air and concede defeat.... Read more

As I write this, I’m on a plane back to the US after a whirlwind 10 days in Amsterdam for DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014. As always it is so gratifying to meet and work with the international Drupal community. I love getting to take a look at what everyone is working on and collaborate with people that you might otherwise only know as IRC nicks. Here are my highlights of DrupalCon Amsterdam:

Sprints and Drupal.org Logging

I volunteer my time to help the drupal.org infrastructure team with their logging infrastructure. I was very happy to be able to sprint for 3 days, mainly on drupal.org infrastructure. On Sunday, Friday, and Saturday, I worked with the Drupal.org Puppet configuration to get a new CentOS 6-based log aggregation host ready to go running the latest versions of the ELK (ElasticSearch, Logstash, and Kibana) stack. The new Logstash configuration that we’ll be rolling out is much simpler. Stay tuned to the blog for information on some of the improvements we made in the process. We hope to deploy the new logging host within the week.

DevOps Meetup

Tuesday evening, I attended the DevOps Amsterdam meetup.  The meetup was sponsored by ElasticSearch, who bought a delicious dinner for all attendees as well as some drinks. During dinner, I sat with some folks from Germany and had a chance to speak with a number of ops-attuned folks about Docker and the possible use cases for it.

The meetup had some great content. There was a talk on how GitLab uses omnibus to package GitLab with far less hassle, a talk from fellow d.o infra team volunteer Ricardo Amaro on building the next-gen Drupal testbot on Docker, and a great talk from the DrupalCon Amsterdam DevOps chair Bastian Widmer on developing culture and sharing knowledge in an agency.

LSD Leadership Meeting

Earlier this year, Phase2 contributed some of its innovation hours to the LSD project and worked with Acquia to present a webinar on Behat and release a pre-built virtual machine designed to make it easy to start doing automated testing using Behat. During the LSD leadership meeting I joined Melissa Anderson of Tag1 Consulting and Hugh Fidgens of Pfizer in a breakout session discussing Behat. Quite a few organizations present were very interested in how they could use Behat to enable a behavior-driven development workflow with their developers, or to develop a good set of automated tests that could be run either as smoke tests or as end-to-end integration tests.

Behat Everywhere

In addition to the LSD leadership meeting, automated testing and BDD were topics on everyone’s minds throughout DrupalCon.

I attended 2 BoF about automated testing or Behat, the Testing Drupal 8 BoF, and Hugh Fidgen’s Organizational Behat BoF. These talked about how we could better leverage automated testing tools in Drupal core and in client work we build today, respectively. Many people have had some success in getting automated tests or a BDD workflow started, but there was a lot of talk about writing good sustainable tests and how to integrate these tools into your workflow.

Speaking of writing sustainable tests, my favorite session of the conference was definitely the session by Konstantin Kudryashov (the creator of Behat and Mink) on how to do BDD with Behat. The session was remarkable and left an impact on many folks who went there. It really emphasized the point that BDD must be about identifying and delivering business value in our projects, and that doing that is the way to write good tests. It is definitely worth an hour of your time to watch.

As testing best practices are refined in the Drupal community as well as in Phase2, I’m very excited that the talented Jonathan Hedstrom has joined the Phase2 team.  Jonathan is a maintainer of the Behat DrupalExtension, and is sure to help us further refine our testing practices as Phase2. Jonathan has been doing work recently on upgrading the DrupalExtension to support Behat 3 and has plans to generalize the drivers that the Behat DrupalExtensions provides so that it could be used with Mink for writing tests in straight PHP without needing to use Behat.

My “Open Source Logging and Monitoring Tools” Session

On Wednesday I presented my session “Using Open Source Logging and Monitoring Tools.” I covered a lot of information in my session including using Logstash, ElasticSearch, and Kibana.  Thanks to the tireless work of the DrupalCon A/C crew, the video recording of my session is online, and the slides are available on SlideShare if you would like to follow along.  The session had an excellent turnout, and there were some great questions and discussions following my session. I was quite pleased at the large turnout, and so was @KrisBuytaert, who been bringing information about DevOps-related topics to DrupalCons for years.

I need to rephrase my state of #devops and #drupal conclusion, 2 years ago in Munich there were 10 people in this talk ..(1/2)

— Kris Buytaert (@KrisBuytaert) October 1, 2014

Back then by @samkottler , this year @stevenmerrill ‘s talk is packed , we are winning this ! #logstash, #drupalcon #elasticsearch

— Kris Buytaert (@KrisBuytaert) October 1, 2014

We were also fortunate to have Leslie Hawthorne of ElasticSearch in the audience. She gave out ElasticSearch ELKs to sprinters at the Friday event.

Packed house for @stevenmerrill in #DrupalCon #DevOps track. About to learn how the d.o infra team uses #elkstack pic.twitter.com/MThDhkA48E

— Leslie Hawthorn (@lhawthorn) October 1, 2014

Takeaways

Based on the sheer number of people interested and sessions to devoted to both topics, it is clear that there is a growing interest in both logging and metrics and automated testing or BDD in the Drupal Community. This is also the 11th DrupalCon I’ve been to, and this year’s keynotes were the best I could remember. I really enjoyed Dries’s ideation around sustainable methods for getting contributions to Drupal core and contrib, and getting to see Cory Doctorow speak live about the perils of DRM and restrictions software freedoms was also excellent.

This is an exciting time for Drupal. Drupal 8 beta 1 is live. The community is active and engaged around making Drupal better, both by contributing to Drupal 8 and by doing a better job testing projects built on it. The DA and an army of volunteers have made huge strides on improving the infrastructure around core testing as well as around all the online communities under drupal.org.

Today, Mediacurrent is extremely proud to announce that we have been named the 2014 Best Overall Small Business by Salesforce. The award celebrates the best overall marketing and sales story at the SMB level (1-100 employees). Over 100,000 companies use Salesforce, and hundreds of nominations were submitted for the Salesforce Surfboard awards, so saying “we’re honored” to, not only be nominated, but win this award would be an understatement.

As expected, I had a great time at DrupalCamp Atlanta 2014 last weekend. While I enjoy attending sessions, it is the chance to catch up with old friends and make new ones that I love.

I want to thank all of those who made this camp a great one (sponsors, ADUG, presenters, volunteers, and attendees)!

Some of my session notes can be found below (unedited):

Sessions

• Building web apps with Drupal and Mongo Entity - Bart Nason
  • Mongo Entity
    • Quickly create new entity types without database schema
    • Store entire entity in a MongoDB collection
    • Embed entities
  • Consider using Watchdog with the MongoDB module
  • Could use Mongo Entity to integration Drupal and MeteorJS
  • Use EFQ to query
  • Entity API required the ID in MongoDB to be integer IDs
• DIY Continuous Integration: Know It. Do It. Now. - Johnnie Fox
• I wasn't able to attend :( Got there too late and the room was full. Can't wait to catch this one on video soon!
• Hybrid Drupal/Angular.js apps - Jitesh Doshi
  • Could we embed Meteor apps in a Drupal app or Drupal in a Meteor app?
  • Better UX because front-end is faster
  • Faster development
  • Demo app - http://restng-demo.spinspire.com
    • Uses JSON Web Token (JWT) used for security
    • Uses RESTful Web services module
    • The cart related div is pure AngularJS, but the reset of the page is Drupal

Blog Category: 

• Drupal

Drupal 8 is almost here, and it’s bringing big front-end improvements, including new methods to display data on mobile devices using breakpoints, build flexible templates in Twig and better management for tools and libraries.

Most importantly, changes to the display layer mean that Drupal has become much more agile and extendable for Front-end Developers.

The journey so far

Up till now, Front-end Developers have been working with a display layer that was originally introduced in Drupal 4.5, here’s how it worked...

DrupalCon Amsterdam was something of a family outing for me. My wife Francesca attended all week and my kids were able to come out Thursday evening to attend Trivia Night and the Friday sprints. My daughter Victoria had sewn a dress and a cape to appear as Drupal Girl on Thursday evening. Her weeks of work on that really paid off; she was a big hit. She also got to meet her Drupal idol, MortenDK, who was the inspiration for her brand new Drupal.org and Twitter username: Drupal_Princess. There's a great photo of her meeting Webchick floating around online, too.

The community site for our OS Initiative is now live! var switchTo5x = false;stLight.options({"publisher":"dr-75626d0b-d9b4-2fdb-6d29-1a20f61d683"});

This is a simple trick which (unless my googlefu simply failed me) I didn't find described anywhere when I had a quick look:

$ drush ev '$file = file_load(21749); var_dump(file_delete($file, TRUE));' bool(true)

This means all the appropriate hooks are called in file_delete so the Drupal API gods should smile on you, and you should get to see the TRUE/FALSE result reflecting success or otherwise. Note that we're passing $force=TRUE "indicating that the file should be deleted even if the file is reported as in use by the file_usage table." So be careful.

To delete multiple files you could use file_load_multiple but there's not a corresponding file_delete_multiple function, so you'd have to loop over the array of file objects.

That's all there is to this one.

This is a short screencast showing the basic concept of Codit and Codit: Local and where to place them in a Drupal site.

• Read more about Codit and Codit: Local Introduction Video

DrupalCon Amsterdam has come to an end (well, it ended last week, buy hey, I need to catch up on some work as well). It was the biggest DrupalCon in Europe ever, 2,300 attendees! Pretty impressive. I've written a couple of blog entries, trying to capture my stay in Amsterdam and my feelings for a DrupalCon which I attended for more than three days (which has been the case with DrupalCon London and DrupalCon Munich).

Not only did Drupal 8 get a BETA during these days, but a lot of sprinting was happening (as always) and it was pure joy walking through the Berlage in the center of town and at the venue, seeing all that work being put into Drupal.

Tuesday and Wednesday was filled with interesting sessions, and both Tuesday evening with nice boat rides and pub crawl and Wednesday evening with open museums (the light installations at the EYE was spectacular!) was very nice indeed. Thursday, the day for separation for many of us, was also filled with good sessions and the closing talk with Holly and Stephanie both invited us to DrupalCon Barcelona next year, as well as presenting cool statistics about the Con.  

The good...

All of the sessions I attended was good, and, as always, I'm impressed by the time and energy people devote to making Drupal happen and spreading the knowledge and some love. Dries Buytaert's keynote ('the Driesnote') was inspiring, but I didn't agree with everything he said. He talked about the "free-riders", the ones who doesn't help out with Drupal, the ones who only take advantage of the system witouth giving something back. Such a thing is a bad thing, according to Dries. But I think that we also need those free-riders, becuase those free-riders are the ones using the system, making the statistics for Drupal go up worldwide, spreading the word of Drupal. If we don't have free-riders, are the only ones who should use Drupal the ones who code it and support it? If so, Drupal won't get far...

Amsterdam RAI, the venue, was a good venue. Apart from some sessions being very popular (which is a pain in the a** forseeing) so I couldn't get into them, the rooms and hallways were good for sessions and sprinting. The technique was good as well, sound and vision in the sessions was flawless. Big thumbs up for that. The recorded sessions was also professionally made, at least the ones I've had time to watch. Finding them on YouTube the same day or, to some extent, the next is also impressive. Big thumbs up to the techinal team who worked on that during the Con.

The evening activites was also impressive. Ingenuity, local connection and very nice people raised the bar a lot. I kind of fell in love with the architecture of Amsterdam with it's old crooked buildings, canals and the narrow streets, and the boatride on Tuesday evening was magical!

...the bad...

But there's always something that brings a frown to the face. This time I frowned upon three things. The wi-fi. The coffee. The food.

The wi-fi. It's shouldn't be that hard to calculate that if 2,300 persons gather in a closed area and at least half of them have both laptops and phones, there will be much traffic. I don't want to drag Drupal Association of the local community in the dirt here, they hired a company to manage the network and wi-fi, but it's irritating trying to get online for various reasons, and the network dies several times a day.

The coffee. Apparantely the coffee last year in Prague was bad. The worst thing about coffee this year, was that it wasn't free. It cost me 2.5 Euro. When I pay this much for a ticket to a DrupalCon I kind of expect coffee or some other drink to be free. If it's too hard to calculate, try giving out beverage tickets, two or three per day. Some will get lost, some won't be used, but at least I won't have to pay 2.5 Euro for a small cup of coffee that's not even that good.

The food. A small bowl of pasta or paella. A sandwich and some dessert. I was hungry three hours later. I had the opportunity to visit DrupalCon Munich in 2012 and the food there was out of this world. Every DrupalCon after that will always have worse food. But this one is a killer. No imagination. Lots of garbage (in a time where we try to limit our carbon footprints). No drink. (At least I couldn't find any. Or maybe I was supposed to go and buy me a drink for 2-3 Euros.) Didn't get that. Didn't do that either.

There. Now that's out of my system. I won't remember that when I', 60. But I'll remember the rest of DrupalCon Amsterdam. The sessions. The laughs. The excursions.

...and the ugly...

Well... I found an ugly statue somewhere in town, but otherwise that headline was only in it for the Clint Eastwood reference.

Special thanks to...

It takes a lot of work making a DrupalCon happen, and the Drupal Association pulled it off with a gold star I think. Sure, there were flaws, but then perhaps those won't happen next time, or there were good reasons to why there were flaws. But the Drupal Association do this for a living, so I will only give them a normal-sized 'thank you'. The big 'thank you' goes to the local community who gave the DrupalCon a Dutch feeling. I also want to say thank you to those people who were mentoring before, during and after DrupalCon. Instead of working with the code like you perhaps wanted to, you devoted your time and energy to encourage us lesser beings who want to learn more about Drupal. Also, a big hug to Annertech, who made the Quiz Night happen. It's not an easy task trying to get Morton and Bert the crowd quiet so you can present questions and answers. The man with the microphone also liked the name of our team - Fools drush in - which was nice!

You all know who you are - THANK YOU!

Drupal 8 presents major improvements to the existing Drupal ecosystem. It offers much, including a revamped Entity API that adds tremendous flexibility to content modeling, a core-level translation system for multilingual sites, responsive theming, in-place editing and the configuration management system. But with all of its improvements, Drupal 8 presents some hurdles for agencies like Chapter Three to identify and overcome.

User reference fields (aka entity reference fields) are great. As you may have guessed, we can use these fields to reference users on other entities (e.g. nodes).

Say we had a user reference field on the Article content type... by default, when selecting a user to reference, we could configure the field widget to be an autocomplete. This allows us to begin typing the user's login name as a way to reference them. This works well in most cases.

What if we had an address field on our user entities, and collected the user's first and last names? It may be more usable for site administrators to be able to search across the user's actual name instead of their user name for logging in.

We can use hook_menu(), hook_form_alter(), and a custom callback function to provide a custom autocomplete widget that searches across our address field's values instead...

Mediacurrent has made a commitment to work with the Drupal community to help maintain and improve modules for the leading Marketing Automation services. In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up the newly upgraded Pardot (a Salesforce Company) module.

Published: Tue, 10/07/14Download this episodeHarmony Forum

• What is Harmony Core?
• What prompted you to develop it over using the core forum module?
• Did you take a look at the Advanced Forum module?
  • What didn’t you like about it?
• So what are some of the features?
  • Kill switch
  • Entities
  • Revisions for Post entity, integration with Diff module
  • Views provides all listings including on a thread page
  • Flag action for "Like" of posts
  • At.js
• Does this integrate with other community related module? ie: Organic Groups
• What are some of the sub-modules, or add-on modules that enhance Harmony Core?
  • Harmony Access
  • Harmony Forum Access
  • Harmony Search
  • Harmony Moderation
  • Harmony Migrate

Use Cases

• Who’s using Harmony now?
• You mentioned some upcoming events what are those?
• How can people get involved?
• Where should people go to find out more?

Questions from Twitter

• Scott Wilkinson
  What kind of moderation tools will Harmony have? Like pruning posts or users? Forum Moderators?

Episode Links: Alli on drupal.orgAlli on TwitterForum development group on g.d.oGet on the email listFeatures listDemo of the frontendTags: ForumsCommunity Modulesplanet-drupal

One of our clients wanted to regularly update a list of dealers along with the parts carried at that dealer, and show them on a map. As I dug into the challenge, I was a bit surprised to find very little information on the web about how to hook up a migration that would essentially import a join table. So I had to create it myself!

MigrateDrupalDrupal PlanetERPRetailManufacturingDealersentityreferenceTechnical

Last week was all about DrupalCon Amsterdam.

Deeson’s MD, Tim Deeson, sat on a panel Q&A, I rallied the community with giveaways and things to play with and our Solutions Architect John Ennew joined in hackathons. We also organised Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions.

For those who want to know more, here is our complete guide to Europe’s biggest Drupal conference event which celebrates the community and experiences working with Drupal’s open source software.

1. The keynotes

The two main keynotes at the conference were delivered by Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert, and science fiction author, activist, journalist, blogger and co-editor of Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow. They were very different in style and approach, but both were fascinating and highly informative.

Dries Buytaert

Dries’ keynote focused on the maturity of Drupal as a platform and community. He touched on the inevitable growing pains and the tough choices we all face as Drupal expands its reach and influence.

He drew on proven growth principles, such as the Tragedy of the Commons, to illustrate Drupal’s ‘journey’. He highlighted how Drupal's reach can grow with community support, from local leadership initiatives to rewarding Drupal contributors.

Watch Dries' keynote

Cory Doctorow

Cory discussed the significance of free and open source software, highlighting the challenges and issues which impact us all.

As a tech evangelist, he shared his expert insight into the importance of software transparency in an age where tech and devices infringe on our everyday lives. It was pretty sobering.

2. Drupal 8: the beta release

Dries announced the beta release of Drupal 8. The Drupal community will now be working together to find and fix bugs before the full release of Drupal 8. 

3. The sessions

Tim took part in a business-focused panel session entitled: 'Life in the fast lane - achieving sustainable growth'.

The hour-long session went through issues and challenges faced by Drupal agencies, shops and freelancers trying to achieve growth. Read the key takeaways here or check out the video:

4. Mentoring

John signed up as a sprint mentor for the first time and taught new contributors to Drupal Core how they can set up contributing tools. 

Mentoring the Drupal community builds confidence and empowers developers to become regular contributors to Drupal Core.

5. Swag demand

The event may focus on code but t-shirts feature heavily. 

Our designer, Rachael Case, created a stunning Deeson DrupalCon tee which flew off our stand. They were so popular, people even nabbed the display tees off the wall!

6.Frame of Fame

As you might understand by now, community is at the core of Drupal. 

We wanted to celebrate the community who worked on Drupal 8 with our Frame of Fame. Check out the faces behind the code, contributes and commits…

We took the Frame of Fame into the digital world with The Drupal8r...

7. The Drupal8r

Our developer, Chris, created an amazing data visualisation tool, The Drupal8r shows who in the Drupal community developed Drupal 8 during the last 5000 commits. Give it a whirl yourself!

 

8. The Dries interview

It’s not everyday you get to interview the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. But we did.

We’ll be sharing our conversation with Dries soon, so sign up to our newsletter at the bottom of this page to find out about the successes and failures in Drupal 8 delivery. 

We’ll also be publishing our #AskDries video where Dries answers questions from DrupalCon attendees. Watch this space!

9. The BoFs

John and I ran BoFs at DrupalCon Amsterdam. John focused on experiences of integrating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems with Drupal while I explored the need for personas in the site build process.

You can read the full write up of John’s session here. My session summary is here in a shareable Google Doc which highlights the basic persona questions, plus links to a few resources for persona newbies.

10. Nos vamos a Barcelona para DrupalCon 2015!

DrupalCon Europe 2015 is in Barcelona. So we're going to brush up on our Spanish. ¡Vamos!

New Relic APM (Application Monitoring) is an amazing tool to help you tune the performance of your Drupal website.

read more

Dan and I went to Symfony Live London last Friday to find out what was happening in the world of Symfony.

Here's a summary of the six talks we attended:

1. The Dependency Trap

Jakub Zalas gave an interesting talk about the difficulties of relying too heavily on third-party services and classes.

He went through the process of thinking about writing code while avoiding being overly reliant on a third-party. The main benefit is when you need to change your code or third-party service at a later date, it should be easy enough to do without having to re-write half of your application.

2. How Kris Builds Symfony Apps

Although I haven't been working with Symfony that long, the name 'Kris Wallsmith' keeps coming up when looking around at various bundles. He talked about his approach to building apps.

He went through the different layers involved in building an app, such as controller, models, services, event handlers, etc. He dismissed the myth of 'thin controllers, fat models', by looking at what the controllers, models and services actually do at each level.

In his view they are all just 'mapping layers' between the different data abstraction layers apps have. When you look at it like this, you end up with 'thin controllers, thin models' and 'thin services with thin events'.

3. The Naked Bundle

Matthias Noback introduced the self-titled, 'Noback's Principle: Code shouldn't rely on something that it doesn't truly need'.

He suggested we should limit our dependency on the framework as much as possible. 

We should try to limit to the point where pretty much everything that you would normally put inside a Symfony Bundle (which is a concept very much tied to the framework) can be moved in some way into framework agnostic, re-usable components.

The talk was enlightening, but it made me wonder whether I am ready to break away from Symfony so soon!

4. One Commit, One Release. Continuously Delivering a Symfony Project

Javier Lopez went through the continuous integration process they used on a project. The talk explained that a release to production doesn't have to be a such a daunting task.

Interestingly, they had managed to reduce the time it took to deploy a release from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. They released most days, rather than once a week or each fortnight. Also the product owner could trigger a release rather than relying on a developer to do it.

At Deeson we are using continuous integration for our web build projects more and more.

5. Converting a Website to a New Religion: Symfony

Michael Cullum has been involved in the rebuild of phpBB using Symfony and went through their approach to rebuilding such a large scale app.

When looking at rebuilding a site, you can be tempted to copy and paste a lot of code.

Michael highlighted the problems with repasting code. In fact when we have the opportunity to rewrite code, we should be tackling it head on.  

We all write code which we look at six months or a year later and think, "what was I thinking when I wrote that?" He told us to understand what we are trying to achieve and write efficient code now.

What was interesting is that they had looked at a section of phpBB at a time. They started with the home page and got that working, then moved onto the next page. 

This is different from the norm of building the functionality and then getting theming working across the entire site as a second step.  

6. Decorating Applications with Stack

Beau Simensen was introducing 'Stack' - a convention for composing HttpKernelInterface middlewares into your application.  

He went through its history, which applications can currently use it (Symfony, Silex, Laravel 4, and Drupal 8) and a brief overview of how it can be used.

Although an interesting concept, it didn't seem immediately relevant to our experience.

A worthwhile event

As we're using Symfony more and more, it was interesting to be part of the event and to attend such a range of interesting talks.

Over the last few months, Dave Reid, one of the most active Drupal developers, has been giving a presentation called "Future-proof your Drupal 7 site".

Dave talks about decisions can you make now on your current or new Drupal 7 sites to make transitioning to Drupal 8 easier.

He comes up with a list of modules that have been backported to Drupal 8. Using those modules means you won't have to re-train your staff for Drupal 8.

Dave also has some recommendation for modules to avoid, because they've been replaced by alternative solutions in Drupal 8. Here are 6 modules that might be worth avoiding if want an easier update to Drupal 8 in years to come ...