Drupal Planet

Come to think of it, I almost decided not to go to the RAI in the morning! All the official sessions are over since thursday and yesterday there was only ‘codesprinting’ left. This is where you can help contributing to the Drupal community in an informal setting with other Drupal users.

Since I’d never taken part before I was wondering what I could possibly add, next to the most imposing names always circulating on drupal.org, that were also present at DrupalCon. But when I heard all my colleagues were going also (except for our hardworking guards left at the office) I couldn’t let them down of course and stay behind. 

De last few days were (visually) exhausting and it cost me great effort to step out of bed and pack myself together to get started.

In the RAI they were buzzing already! When I tried spotting someone I’d know, I was helped by the so-called ‘Mentors’ (which Marc and Bart were also part of!) and they were trying to give me helping hand.

The new Drupal 8-beta release was freshly installed and intact, waiting for me on my laptop, to be tackled. And since I had nothing else to do I thought: ‘let me try some exercises to find out how it works’.

The first thing that immediately struck me was that I sometimes could and sometimes could not navigate to the homepage. I found that noteworthy and it also felt inconsistent. Each time I was intuitively hovering in the upper left corner of my screen trying to find a home link.

Well let me see what was causing the problem? I found out that when you opened a new tab and surfed directly to an admin page the home link didn’t show up.

Strange! Would this already have been discussed? I could hardly imagine I would be the first one to complain. Quick: let’s see if the ‘issue cue’ could clarify. No! It wasn’t mentioned before!

And so, after only five minutes of work, I found a job that kept me busy all day. Marc explained to me how I should handle this and introduced me to the right people. First I had to create an issue, I had to define the problem, and suggest a solution. It wasn’t real rocket science by the way: it only cost me three lines of code, but to get them reviewed and accepted by the right maintainers was a whole other story… well let me spare you, I won’t go into detail. The good news is: at the end of the day I stood there, shining happily ever after, next to my colleague Daniël, and suddenly we were just ‘Core Contributors’! Everyone was applauding, we were filmed and a live commit of the patches we created was done by ‘Webchick’.

Also Patrick, my other colleague had discovered a bug en managed to get this reviewed, fixed and committed the same day.

So only one day of codesprinting on DrupalCon had passed, but Triquanta gained three new Core contributors: Well done!

And I haven’t yet mentioned the important work that has been done by Jur (on Facet API) and my colleague Elibert who discovered a bug in CKEditor.

As I said before: this DrupalCon was the best ever. For example, I enjoyed so much the visit to photomuseum FOAM where Drupalists could get in for free on Wednesday night, during the ‘cultural evening’ which I also helped organizing. And the musical event subsequently in café the Prael, where Peter en Jur gave a great concert was every bit as successful. Thursday night I was invited by the Drupal association to have dinner with the other volunteers and afterwards I took part in a very funny group to answer the most hilarious questions at the big Trivia night in café Panama.

Next year DrupalCon will be held in Barcelona. Whilst everyone wants to go there, this might turn into a huge battle! At least I know where to focus: I will, if necessary use my newly acquired status as a Drupal contributor to win this game!

• Drupal-planet

I really think that a debate needs to continue around Keynote: Dries Buytaert for the purpose of understanding the forces at work competing for the future of Drupal and indeed all open source projects. Leaving to one side without comment the really weird Dries doppelganger designed somehow to elevate the image of one of the sponsors, it was indeed saluted by many as being very special. A glance at the tweets feed for the keynote, for example, (or this one) were by and large ecstatic, and many interpreted the talk as exceedingly progressive. "The power of the people"... #digitaldisruption... "This is @Dries most socialist #Driesnote ever." "Applause even in the overflow room..." "Most relevant and interesting #DriesNote in a long time. Well done..." "Exciting. The best Dries keynote ever."

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Picture: Thomas Ricker

A thick fog had settled in Amsterdam. Moist was gathering in my beard and a nice drupal was forming. I had a clear goal in mind and a blurry world around me. As a tourist in my own country I biked among thousands of spoked wheels. I passed hipster parents with children in carts throwing clouds at each other. And soon the Amsterdam RAI showed up. My first community sprint was about to start.

It was the last day of Drupalcon and we had built up a routine. And as one of the human beings we are, I picked the wrong building. Luckily one of the mentors (our own @marcvangend) was helpful enough to show me the way. I entered the building early in the morning and a wall of orange shirts greeted me, a full fledged team of volunteer mentors in the colors of our beautiful hosting country. Armed with name tags, stickers, sprint task cards, a lot of energy and patience they were fully equipped to guide us rookies through the day.

So, what am I? According to the relatively new system of sprint task cards (pdf) I could be an Explorer, Community Contributor, Issue Mover, Developer or Mentor. Since I already had Drupal 8 installed, and played with it during, for example, the Drupal 8 Multilingual Hands-on of @gaborhojtsy and Aimee Degnan, I was up to some community contributing.

Sprint stickers

We, the mentored, were seated upstairs while the more experienced once worked more focussed in teams on certain projects at ground level. During the day some of us would descend for some specialized guidance. But first we had to set our teeth in "something". The theme of the day was: get "something" done and get ready to teach others. So, if you didn't know what to do, you where presented an issue to work on or you could search for an issue tagged "novice".

Among the tasks we undertook where: testing and reviewing patches, making screenshots (so helpful, as Angie would show later) or creating a solution on your own. Wait, no, not on your own. You weren't seated alone and the mentors were all over the place to step in at your earliest convenience.

In my case I wanted to see if a core 7 bug I had found earlier was present in 8. So I set out to create a little module for my scenario. But, where to start, which files are needed and how do I name them? Jesus Manuel Olivas @jmolivas and Larry Garfield (@crell) to the rescue, with respectively the nice console module to generate D8 modules from the CLI and the session recording of the Drupal 8 Crash Course.

Ok, ready to test some hook_form_alter. Result: failure one. It's so simple, but why doesn't it work? Mentor @BartFeenstra to the rescue: it seems you checked out branch 8.x instead of 8.0.x, d'oh stupid me. Luckily, after some testing the D7 bug seemed to be gone in D8. However, during my testing I found another new problem.

Because drupal.org was under such a pressure and the issue search didn't really work any more, I descended the stairs in search of a core fields maintainer with the simple question: is this a bug and is there an issue for this problem? And it was a bug, empty multiple field items should be deleted after a node search, and there was no issue for it. Using the dreditor, a nice browser helper plugin for people working in the issue queue I was able to create my issue in no-time.

In the meantime upstairs the temperature had risen while the ground floor was still comfortable cool, outside it had become a nice early autumn day (meteorologic speaking), and my table neighbour and colleague, Valerie Valkenburg Gibson (@valvalg), had created her first core issue and patch.

Since it apparently isn't allowed to get a patch in core without at least 20 comments and multiple people working at it I was offered the opportunity to help improving the patch. So mentored by @marcvangend and Théodore Biadala (@nod_) I checked if the patch was confirm the coding standards and got rid of some duplicate functionality. Next I did some finger exercises and create a diff, another diff of two diffs, uploaded the new diff and interdiff and licked my chupachup. Then it was time to go to the live core commit session hosted by Angie (@webchick).

Everybody gathered in front of the big screen while the necessary group pictures where taken and we waited in anticipation. Then Angie showed us how a core committer reviews, tests and finally commits. She even almost mistakenly used branch 8.x instead of 8.0.x, but was quickly corrected by the crowd. And I didn’t feel so stupid anymore.
Finally, as the closure of the day, we were treated with two live commits and, like my collegue Gerben Spil (@gerbenspil) always says: there was much rejoicing!

Picture: Patrick van Efferen

Of course so much more happened, there were fun, food, facts and many friends.

And by the way: can I have my new sticker now?

Daniël Smidt (@dmsmidt)

• Drupal-planet

For many years, I've been using Drupal as many people do - by clicking, publishing information and creating websites through the addition of modules and themes. I know how to code in PHP, but with my involvement in the local Drupal community, organizing three DrupalCamps in Gothenburg (2012, 2013 and 2014) and having family and friends, there hasn't been much time to dig down into Drupal and help out with issues and writing code.

When DrupalCon Amsterdam came closer I chose to take a couple of vacation days, and stay for the sprints after the camp. To take part in the First-time Sprinter Workshop on Friday and learn how to code in Drupal.

First-time Sprinter Workshop

We were a big bunch of people, gathered in a room at the Amsterdam RAI, to learn how to code, or at least how to help out. We would have three hours of introduction, which I had high hopes for. Apart from us, there were about 20 mentors helping out. The first thing we had to do was to install all necessary programs, like GIT, Acquia Dev Desktop, Limechat etcetera. Since I work with GIT, have been on IRC for many years, nothing of this was new. Installing the Dev Desktop was troublesome though, and much time went to figure out what was wrong. During this time I couldn't pay attention to what was said about drupal.org and the issue queue, so suddenly I had no idea of what to do with my (slightly) new coding environment. I just didn't know what to do. I asked one of the mentors, and he said to go find an issue in the Drupal Core and work on that. Work on it how? What should I do with it? This was why I wanted to stay for the sprinting, to learn what to do, perhaps even how to do it. Frustration was creeping up on me...

YesCT to the rescue!

So I sat down in front of the issue queue and tried to find something to do. I didn't know what to look for, and I ended up helping out on IRC and helping a guy sitting next to me, who knew less about GIT than me. Felt good to help someone, and to actually feel useful. Then suddenly Cathy Theys, YesCT on Twitter, comes in and asks some of the guys in the room if the mentors had explained what to do when the coding environment installation is done. Since they hadn't been that thorough, Cathy took some time to do so, and that was so welcome. Suddenly I actually had some clue of what to do. A little better clue anyway. With Cathy's words in mind, I also asked a mentor called Andy if he could help me finding something to focus on. He took care of me, placing me next to two other guys who are new to Drupal coding as well, and together we explored the issues queues, trying to find appropriate tasks to do.

"Is that a wall heading my way?"

I realised quickly that even an issue tagged with 'novice' was often to hard for me, since I'm new to Object Oriented Programming, but after a while I started reviewing a patch here, a patch there and summarizing an issue here and an issue there. A fellow podcast member, Kristoffer Wiklund, said that even though everyone here wants as many as possible working on, patching and reviewing Drupal 8, there are still thousands of themes and modules out there, both getting re-written for Drupal 8, but also having issues for Drupal 7. Therefore, I also took time to look at some of the modules and themes that I use, to see if I could help out there. And I could! You can't imagine the feeling when I'm suddenly taking baby-steps towards helping out more and more. My Dashboard on drupal.org was, within the hours, filling up with comments of what I've summarized, what I've added and reactions to my comments. That, my fellow Drupalistas, is something you can't put a price tag on.

Ending on a high note

The day started quite bad, but ended much better, in two ways. Apart from the wounderful mentoring of Andy, we were also approached by some other mentors handing out a handful of cards, with different tasks on them. It was Sprint task cards, and when summarizing what I've been doing with Drupal for the last 4 years and what I've done during DrupalCon Amsterdam, I suddenly was eligible for 4 out of 6 cards. Sure, the mentors were a bit nice on some tasks, but it felt really good on getting 4 stickers with "Explorer", "Mentor", Issue mover" and "Community contributor". The last one was extra nice, since I work quite hard on arranging the DrupalCamps in Sweden.

"One more thing..." 

But that was only one thing that made the day extra special. What about the other? At 5 o'clock, Cathy entered the room and announced it was time to see when webchick, Angie Byron, commits patches to Durpal 8 core live - on stage. Well, there wasn't a stage, but at least in front of everybody. I was sitting at the desk in the front, so I had a very good seat. They did the commits, and denied some, and everything was nice and so. Webchick has a really good sense of humour which made everything extra nice. In the end she thanked the people who had made the patches she committed this afternoon but then  - and I could applause this for a very long time - she also said that it's all of us who are important, from the tiniest little bug reporter to those who do screenshots and write summaries. That showed me that I really can make a difference and that I shouldn't pack it up and go home, just because I can't write code that fixes all the major bugs in Drupal 8. And now for the good part - when Angie asks everyone that had helped out with patches to stand up I thought I shouldn't stand, but my mentor Andy encouraged me to stand up. Sure, I had helped, but I didn't think it mattered that much. But he did. And I thank him for that. That extra encouragement made me want to go home and continue looking through the issue queues at Drupal.org, helping out, fixing it. So we can get Drupal 8 out the door. Together.

(I ended up visiting an art exhibition of LEGO statues called 'Art of the brick' that evening, but that's a different story.)

Drupal 7 comes by default with the simpletest (Testing) module which allows you to run test cases against your code, whether it's a small piece of code such as a function, or an entire workflow.

var switchTo5x = false;stLight.options({"publisher":"dr-75626d0b-d9b4-2fdb-6d29-1a20f61d683"});

This is a continuation of the discussion started here: http://bit.ly/DrupalAVKits

The session record kits we tested at DrupalCamp Fox Valley 2014 show a lot of promise for easy-to-use, affordable recording stations. There are some issues that need to be worked out and some additional testing to be done before we can approach the Drupal Association to consider making them available for camps.

While most sessions were recorded flawlessly, we ran into a few issues:

• One presenter laptop (MacBook Air) never successfully made a connection, but luckily we were able to capture a QuickTime screen record
• There is no indicator of the audio levels, and three sessions were lost due to no audio
• The record is stopped if the presenter laptop goes to sleep, so we lost a session due to that
• The touch audio panel is visually misleading to presenters, and very touch sensitive
• There is only one audio input, so to record multiple presenters, we need to test a small mixer to accept multiple inputs and output one audio channel to the recorder
• The projector must be able to take a 1920x1080 signal
• The VGA to HDMI adapter didn’t hold a tight connection to the VGA cord for the projector, so we scored some tip ties from the venue AV department. This was inconvenient when we had to switch out the cords
• The audio was a bit too quiet, so we should have used the +20db boost for the records
• There is a detectable clicking on some of the audio records, though can’t say why
• Additional dongles need to be purchased and tested to capture from various tablets for presenters that come in without a laptop

Next Steps

Before this can be ready for prime time, the audio issue definitely needs to be overcome. I’m hoping to find a digital audio recorder that can feed audio out, which would then pipe into the recording device. This would give direct feedback via the audio recorder as well as a backup audio channel. If we had this, we could have saved three session records, since the video capture was perfect. 

The mics proved to be the weakest link. Three sessions were lost because of no audio channel. Hard to say why, but it’s possible that the on/off switch was inadvertently switched off after initial setup, or the unit was muted (seems less likely). It would be worth testing if a portable audio recorder can feed audio in to the record device. That would also overcome the issue of multiple presenters.

Also, with better communication with the presenters, after we hook up the kit, they can be in charge of the start/stop of the record, since that big red “easy” button can’t get any simpler. Maybe a simple printed sheet listing the various indicators on the device. This would eliminate the need to trim and re-process in post.

Ultimately, with predictable/boosted audio and no need of trimming, session videos could be uploaded directly from the thumb drives.

Bonus points if there is a converter out there to take the 1080 signal out of the recorder and downsample it for older projectors.

The Beta Kit

Record Device - $140
Hauppauge HD PVR
http://www.amazon.com/Hauppauge-Rocket-Portable-Recorder-Systems/dp/B00G...

This device provides a pass-through record of the presenters laptop directly onto a USB thumb drive. The movie format is an H.264 1920 x 1080 AAC 30 FPS MP4 video. 

The unit takes HMDI or component video (with a provided adapter cable) in and provides HDMI out. For audio, there is a 3.5mm microphone jack. To start and stop the record, you basically push the big red button. The audio touch panel lets you mute/unmute the microphone, increase the volume and add 20db boost. 

Powered Microphone - $32 
Audio-Technica ATR-3350 Lavalier Omnidirectional Condenser Microphone  
http://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATR-3350-Omnidirectional-Condenser-...

HDMI to VGA (connects to projector) - $10
VicTsing 1080P HDMI Male to VGA Female Video Converter Adapter Cable For PC Laptop DVD HDTV PS3 XBOX 360 and other HDMI input
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00G9UWP94

VGA to HDMI (support non-HDMI PC laptops) - $25
IO Crest VGA to HDMI Convertor with Audio support (SY-ADA31025)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006FILNV6

Mini Display Port to HDMI (support non-HDMI Mac laptops) - $10
PNY A-DM-HD-W01 Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter
http://www.amazon.com/PNY-A-DM-HD-W01-Mini-DisplayPort-Adapter/dp/B007B6...

Additional Untested Equipment

2-4 Presenters, if a standalone digital audio recorder does not work

4-channel mixer - 17.44
Nady MM-141 4-Channel Mini Mixer
http://www.amazon.com/Nady-MM-141-4-Channel-Mini-Mixer/dp/B0009X9H9I

1/8” to 1/4” - 2.3
Hosa GPM-103 3.5mm TRS to 1/4" TRS Adaptor
http://www.amazon.com/Hosa-GPM-103-3-5mm-TRS-Adaptor/dp/B000068O3T/

1/4” to 18” - 1.95
Hosa Cable GMP386 1/4 TS To 1/8 Inch Mini TRS Mono Adaptor
http://www.amazon.com/Hosa-Cable-GMP386-Inch-Adaptor/dp/B001CJ68KE

Various tablet support and alternate dongles

Cable Matters SuperSpeed USB 3.0/2.0 to HDMI/DVI Adapter for Windows and Mac up to 2048x1152/1920x1200 in Black - 47.99
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BPEV1XK

VicTsing Dock to HDMI AV Cable Adapter for iPhone 4 4S iPad 1 2 New iPad (1080P) - 11.99
http://www.amazon.com/VicTsing-Cable-Adapter-iPhone-1080P/dp/B00979QONC/

Lightning Digital AV Adapter - 43.37
http://www.amazon.com/Apple-MD826ZM-Lightning-Digital-Adapter/dp/B009WHV...

EnjoyGadgets Thunderbolt to HDMI Video Adapter Cable, with Audio Support - 9.98
http://www.amazon.com/EnjoyGadgets-Thunderbolt-Video-Adapter-Support/dp/...

Micro HDMI (Type D) to HDMI (Type A) Cable For Microsoft Surface - 5.99
http://www.amazon.com/Micro-Cable-Microsoft-Surface-Compatible/dp/B009XL...

Skiva MHL Micro USB to male HDMI cable (6.5 feet) for Samsung Galaxy S3 (SIII LTE i9300 L710 i747 i535 T999), Samsung Note 2, Galaxy S2, Galaxy Note, HTC One X, LG Optimus HD and other MHL Devices (HD-X3) - 11.99
http://www.amazon.com/Skiva-Samsung-Galaxy-Optimus-Devices/dp/B00A9H30LU/

LinkS Micro USB to HDMI MHL cable +Micro 5pin to 11pin adapter + 3 Feet Charging Cable in Black Kit-(Compatible with any MHL enable smartphones and tablets) (Adapter kit) - 12.99
http://www.amazon.com/LinkS-adapter-Charging-Compatible-smartphones/dp/B...

Cable Matters Gold Plated DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter (Male to Female) with Audio in Black - 11.99
http://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Plated-DisplayPort-Adapter/dp/B005H3...

Samsung ET-H10FAUWESTA Micro USB to HDMI 1080P HDTV Adapter Cable for Samsung Galaxy S3/S4 and Note 2 - Retail Packaging - White - 28.91
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-ET-H10FAUWESTA-Micro-Adapter-Galaxy/dp/B00...

USB A Male to Mini 5 pin (B5) Female Adapter - 2.97
http://www.amazon.com/USB-Male-Mini-Female-Adapter/dp/B001VLIL3K/

Various HDMI converters - 13.99
AFUNTA Hdmi Cable Adapters Kit (7 Adapters)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AA8MAUK

HDMI cable - 7.69
Twisted Veins 1.5ft High Speed HDMI 3 Pack
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FX6KO8Y

VGA to component video (would still need component video cables) - 7.24
StarTech.com 6-Inch HD15 to Component RCA Breakout Cable Adapter - M/F (HD15CPNTMF)
http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-6-Inch-Component-Breakout-Adapter/dp/...

Personal Voice Recorder Option

Personal Voice Recorder with audio line out - $160
Zoom H2n Handy Recorder
http://www.amazon.com/Zoom-H2N-H2n-Handy-Recorder/dp/B005CQ2ZY6/

Zoom APH2n Accessory Pack for H2n Portable Recorder - $40
AC adapter, case, wired remote, tripod, and other goodies
http://www.amazon.com/Zoom-APH2n-Accessory-Portable-Recorder/dp/B005CQ30A4

3.5mm audio cable - $9
FRiEQ® 3.5mm Male To Male Car and Home Stereo Cloth Jacketed Tangle-Free Auxiliary Audio Cable (4 Feet/1.2M)
http://www.amazon.com/Jacketed-Tangle-Free-Auxiliary-Samsung-Android/dp/...

32MB SD Card - $17
SanDisk Ultra 32GB SDHC Class 10/UHS-1 Flash Memory Card Speed Up To 30MB/s
http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Frustration-Free-Packaging--SDSDU-032G-AFF...

Tags:

• drupal planet
• drupal camps
• session recording

WYSIWYG editors are the bane of my existence, yet they are a necessary evil if you have clients that want to edit their site content.

But somewhere between all the inline styles they create to editing source code, there simply had to be a solution that would let me open up my theme css to content creators. 

After much searching and testing, I have found that unicorn. 

CKEditor populates the style drop down menu with a js file, and it lets you override it. Problem is, as stated in the docs, it doesn't work. And there were a few various options posted in the CKEditor module issue queue. 

First off, you create a new js file to name a function that will build the drop down select items and the parameters for each. Contrary to what has been suggested in various posts, I put this in my theme's js folder. That way it won't get overridden by a module or library update, and it just makes sense since it's tied to my theme. Only CKEditor will be looking for this file, so there's no need to call it in your template files nor add it to your .info file. 

For example, I created a file named ckeditor_styles.js like so:
 

( function() {
    CKEDITOR.stylesSet.add( 'my_styles', [ // this is the styles set name you will call later
        { name: 'Teal Heading 2', element: 'h2', attributes: { 'class': 'teal' } }, 
        { name: 'Teal Text', element: 'span', attributes: { 'class': 'teal' } },
        { name: 'Unbold Heading', element: 'span', attributes: { 'class': 'unbold' } }
    ]);
} )();

It's pretty straightforward. The name parameter is what you will actually select in the drop down. The element is where you specify where to inject the class. If it's a block-level element (h1, h2, div, p, etc.), the class will added. If it's a span, then the selected text will be wrapped in a classed span. As for attributes, that's where you specify you are calling a class, and also provide the name of the class you want to inject. The resulting drop down will be split into block styles and inline styles.

The second step is to let CKEditor know where to find this file, via the advanced options section in the configuration. Navigate to admin/config/content/ckeditor and edit the profile you wish to add this to, most likely Full HTML. Docs will say you only need to set config.stylesSet, but as gleaned from the issue queues (and tested personally), you need to also set config.stylesCombo_styleSet.

Expand the Advanced Options field set and add the following to the Custom JavaScript Configuration with your styles set name and the path to your js file:

config.stylesCombo_stylesSet = 'my_styles:/sites/all/themes/mytheme/js/ckeditor_styles.js';
config.stylesSet = 'my_styles:/sites/all/themes/mytheme/js/ckeditor_styles.js';

Clear your caches and you should now be able to pick styles from your drop downs that will add either standard elements or spans with the desired classes. 

Sources:
http://docs.ckeditor.com/#!/guide/dev_howtos_styles
https://www.drupal.org/node/1287432

Tags:

• theming
• configuration
• drupal 7
• drupal planet
• site building

At DrupalCorn Camp 2014, there seemed to be a fairly high number of camp organizers in attendance, so we held what I like to think of as a SuperBOF. I think we pulled four banquet tables together in order to fit everyone.

The purpose was to share pain points and just brainstorm camp stuff. Notes were taken and the doc is shared publicly here: http://bit.ly/drupal-camps

Most of the discussion was centered around information sharing and coordination of efforts and how to accomplish that. We had thought that creating a private group on g.d.o for organizers to share not-ready-for-prime-time information would work. Turns out, that's not the case, as "private" only means there is moderation on who can join, but all posts are fully public.

Why a private group? Well, mostly for shared contact lists, proposed dates for coordinated planning before announcements, things like that. The intent also is to publicly share as much knowledge as we can, but in a centralized place that's a little less cumbersome than g.d.o.

In addition, we created a #drupalcamp IRC channel, and you should totally join if you are a camp organizer. 

So stay tuned, add your name to the doc if you want to be included on the proposed quarterly meeting, and join the channel so collaboration can start now!

Tags:

• drupal camps
• drupal planet
• irc

Wrapping up today, Drupalcon Amsterdam created a big buzz around Drupal 8. A crew of over 2,100 participated in sessions, sprints and keynotes, and celebrated the release of the Beta 1 version of Drupal 8.

Sadly all good things must come to an end.   Here at the CiviCRM 2014 Edale Sprint we've been working closely with members of the core team. As well as fixing bugs, working on integrating Google Summer of Code projects, and readying extensions for release, it's been an excellent opportunity for the Future First Software Developers to learn directly from the CiviCRM experts themselves.   In a presentation I showed something that the Future First Software Development Team made recently - a brand new contact screen. It went down a treat, so here's a blog article revealing how we did it!   Background:   Future First is a charity that helps state-funded schools and colleges mobilise their former students for the benefit of their current students. Former students can do this by attending in-school events to inspire current students, by offering mentoring or work experience opportunities, by assisting in fundraising, or even by appearing on a poster displayed in the school!   A key part of Future First's offering is a Teacher Dashboard that teachers can log into to engage with their former students. This mostly involves an extensive search system and a communal inbox. It is built from a combination of Drupal custom modules and CiviCRM custom extensions.   The legacy:   Future First's Teacher Dashboard is a legacy system. Initially a screen was created to allow teachers to view contacts, based off a profile (with a separate screen to edit). Then notes were attached, so that teachers could add, edit, and remove notes about the alumni. When our Mailbox was operational we added each mail send to and from that alumnus to the profile screen too. Afterwards we added the ability to record mobilisations, so they made their way onto the screen as well!   The result was not pretty: an overburdened, messy screen that didn't allow teachers to view or edit all of the information that was being stored by CiviCRM. It was very slow, as all the mobilisations and emails had to be loaded just to add or remove a note. And everything had to be loaded once to view the contact, then again to edit it, and then a third time to see the saved edit.   It was time to start over.    The requirements:   Our main requirements were:  - fast - have only one screen for both editing - neater - view and edit everything - maintainable. Our system is growing rapidly, and the screen should be ready to support that.   The plan:   With three members of staff to work on the project, it needed to be modular. The data was broken into logical categories, and an api and template file was created for each of these. This structure translated directly into the different tabs.   Only the data on the first tab is loaded. When other tabs are clicked AJAX calls the API function for that tab. This retrieves the relevant data, which some jQuery then puts into the appropriate place.   Inline editing was used for each field. This feature, provided by the CiviCRM core, allows our users to view and update data without needing to move between different screens. Sadly, this didn't let us update custom data, so we patched it and offered our patch to the core!   The results:     AttachmentSize contact_screen_1.png86.5 KB contact_screen_2.png69.15 KB contact_screen_3.png97.02 KB contact_screen_4.png65.94 KB

• Drupal
• Extensions

Drupal has immersed all our lives in the web, and the biggest conclusion we can draw from this DrupalCon is that Drupal in particular and we, as creators and consumers of Drupal, are all being rocked to the core by the fast pace of change in the industry. Changes in the development, scope, architecture, process and workforce dynamics prevalent in the development and acquisition of ever-more complex web applications and systems are rocking Drupal too, and the result is a scrambling for solid footing.

The footing we all find, and the journeys we take to find it, will determine our future.

First and foremost we need to come to grips with the debates, with what is shaping up. We need to learn a lot just to fathom the consensus on what the options are now. Then we must prick up courage and make choices.

But one truth is acknowledged by all: there is no simple and straightforward path forward, from here on in we mix and match, we build on an industry-wide workbench to common standards, or we build not at all. There is no more protective balloon, the big blue bubble has burst, or worse, is in the act of bursting now.

But this is not a bad thing. We just need to keep our heads, even if Drupal cannot. If we can drive @eaton's Promiscuous Drupal to its logical limit, if we can Keeping it Simple with @sdboyer we can "bring that knowledge back to the community" no matter what, as @crell guides us through Managing Complexity (be sure to check out his reading list) and the portals decouple, while beset with New Wave PHP, and at every turn: Drupal in the Hip Hop Virtual Machine with the @outlandishjosh.

That's the intoxication of sampling the key presentations from this historic DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014: let's find out what it's all about.

Of course, this is just my own shortlist (grouped by topics, of which, it is worth pointing out, headless is second only to Drupal 8 and way ahead of anything else as a concern), but whether or not I left out any well-deserving items from the list, it's more than enough to be able to say "Wow, we live in interesting times".

Keynote

• Keynote: Dries Buytaert

Drupal 8

• Drupal 8: The Crash Course
• Managing Complexity
• Drupal 8 CMI on Managed Workflow
• Twig and the new Drupal 8 Theme System
• Drupal 8 multilingual hands-on
• Drupal 8 Media

Headless Drupal

• Turbocharging Drupal syndication with Node.JS
• Decoupled Front-end and the Future
• Building Modern Web Applications with Ember.js and Headless Drupal
• A Decoupled Drupal with Silex
• BOF: Zariz & RESTful - We've got your headless covered
  • Video

PHP Renaissance

• Drupal in the Hip Hop Virtual Machine
• New Wave PHP
• OOP For Drupal Developers
• Drupal’s PHP Component Future

Web Dev Future

• Styleguide-Driven Development: The New Web Development
• Distributed Companies are the Future
• Open Source Enterprise Continuous Delivery with "Go"

Drupal 7

• Future-Proof your Drupal 7 site

Check some of these out, we need to talk about this over the next few days.

And in later articles and repos, I will be sharing concrete examples of how I am dealing with all of this, and how I am planning, well, my future.

read more

Episode Number: 171

The Drupal 7 Search Krumo Module extends the Devel module and makes it easier to debug PHP variables while developing Drupal modules or building Drupal themes. It adds a simple search box that allows you to quickly search through the Krumo output that is generated by the dpm function.

If you want to try it out quickly, simply download and install the module and run the following code on the variable you want to debug:

Tags: DrupalDrupal 7Module DevelopmentTheme DevelopmentDrupal PlanetTips and Tricks

Situation

Suppose you build a site, it works great, the client loves it, you launch it, and the client still loves it. Yay! Now life goes on, and six months later, the client comes back to you saying they see a red box when they are logged in, with a message about security updates. You look and see that Drupal core, ctools, rules, views, commerce, date, and a handful of other modules have updates availalbe. Some are security updates, and others are bugfix/feature updates.

So you want to update this code to resolve security issues and improve the functionality of the site. But how can you be sure that these code updates will not hurt or break any of the existing functionality? You could revisit all of your feature work from six months to a year ago and confirm that those features still work as intended. But that can be time consuming and disrupt your other work.

So how do you make updates, whether updating contrib code or doing new custom work, with confidence that you're not breaking essential funcionality and without wasting countless hours doing a bunch of manual testing?

A Better Solution: Automated Testing

Let a machine do it for you. There are several categories of automated testing:

• Unit testing. This tests that a small piece of code, a function, behaves as expected.
• Integration testing. These combine several Unit tests in logical groups, to ensure that they work together properly.
• System testing. This tests the system as a whole, and is mainly code oriented, but starts to touch how real people would use the system.
• Behavioral testing. Acceptance testing. Customer testing. This involves clickthroughs, user behavior. This is what we are mainly interested in, and what I am talking about today. You will also hear this referred to as BDD or Behavior Driven Development.

Enter Behat

Behat is an automated testing system. Its strength is in behavioral testing, so it fits perfectly in our use case.

Behat tests are written in plain English phrases which are then combined into human readable scenarios. This was inspired by Ruby's Cucumber project and Gherkin syntax. This is probably the most appealing aspect of Behat. Most tests are understandable by anyone, whether you're a developer, project manager, or business owner.

Behat is the core framework used for running tests. It is capabable of testing several types of systems: terminal commands, REST APIs, etc. To enable Behat to test web pages, you need to add Mink and a browser emulator to the mix. Mink functions as the connector between Behat and browser emulators, and provides a consistent testing API.

There are several commonly used browser emulators. Some, like Goutte, are very fast, but don't support JavaScript. Others, like Selenium and Firefox, are full-featured browsers, but will run more slowly.

So when you hear people talking about Behat, they're usually talking about all three components: Behat, Mink, and browser emulators.

Why Behat Versus Others?

Mainly becuase of popularity, which comes mainly from its human readability. There are certainly other contenders with other strengths, but we're focusing on Behat today because it is a popular PHP-based testing framework. Its tests are written as human readable scenarios, can be easily extended by writing additional PHP methods, and, as you'll see soon, getting set up is not too difficult.

Business Use

Even though this all seems like a good thing, it does take some time to write tests, set up a testing environment, and determine what the best tests are. We need to allocate time to do this, and it shouldn't just be a surprise at the end of the project. Automated testing should be considered in several phases of a web project. When writing custom code, it's a good practice to write unit tests, and time should be allocated for that. When developing custom features for a site, behavioral tests should be written to accompany them, and again, time should be allocated. It's good if clients know at the beginning of a project that test writing is part of the development process, and test running is part of deployment.

Things that are measured always get more attention than things that just happen. Clients should have a large say in what is measured and tested. As a result, project managers can gain a better insight into priorities of the client and project. By making behavior tests something that is intentionally done, project stakeholders must clarify and prioritize the most important aspects of the site.

Run Tests

Let's use the scenario where we're ensuring that the user login experience is correct. This will verify that the site is up & running, that valid users can log in, and that invalid credentials will not work. Here's a test run, using a local development site:

And it only takes a few seconds to run.

If you run this test after a code update and find that the test fails, you know immediately that something must be fixed before it can be deployed to the production environment.

Write Tests

Behat tests are written in "Feature" files. They're just text files with a .feature extension on the name, instead of .txt or .php. They are usually placed in a "features" directory inside your Behat directory. More on that in the next section.

In the test run above, I was in my project's Behat directory, and ran bin/behat features/loginout.feature. That launches Behat and tells it to run the tests that are in loginout.feature. Here are the entire contents of that file:

Feature: Log in and out of the site. In order to maintain an account As a site visitor I need to log in and out of the site. Scenario: Logs in to the site Given I am on "/" When I follow "Log In" And I fill in "Username" with "admin" And I fill in "Password" with "test" And I press "Log in" Then I should see "Log out" And I should see "My account" Scenario: Logs out of the site Given I am on "/" When I follow "Log In" And I fill in "Username" with "admin" And I fill in "Password" with "test" And I press "Log in" And I follow "Log out" Then I should see "Log in" And I should not see "My account" Scenario: Attempts login with wrong credentials. Given I am on "/" When I follow "Log In" And I fill in "Username" with "badusername" And I fill in "Password" with "boguspass" And I press "Log in" Then I should see "Sorry, unrecognized username or password." And I should not see "My account"

Indentation is only for readability, and has no impact on how the tests are run.

Now let's look at each line and see what each is doing. The first few lines are essentially comments.

Feature: Log in and out of the site.

^ Name of the feature.

In order to maintain an account

^ Benefit.

As a site visitor

^ Role.

I need to log in and out of the site.

^ Feature itself.

Behat tests are written in the form of scenarios, and they comprise the rest of the feature file.

Scenario: Logs in to the site

^ Description of the first scenario.

Given I am on "/"

^ The context. This is the first line that is actually executed. In this case, it will load "/" (the home page) in a browser.

This (a "Given") as well as the next things ("When" and "Then") are each called a "Step."

When I follow "Log In" And I fill in "Username" with "admin" And I fill in "Password" with "test" And I press "Log in"

^ The events that need to happen. When kicks it off. And adds more events. If Behat is unable to do any of these events, the test will fail. I follow "Log In" looks for a link with the text "Log In" and clicks it. I fill in "Username" with "admin" looks for a field with the label of "Username" and types "admin" into it. I press "Log in" looks for button with the text "Log in" and presses it. Pro tip: follow is for clicking links, and press is for buttons on forms.

Then I should see "Log out" And I should see "My account"

^ The desired outcome. Then starts it, and And adds more outcomes. These are the actual tests that need to pass. Other testing frameworks often call these "assertions". I should see "Log out" looks for the text "Log out" anywhere on the page.

The other two scenarios follow the same format, as well as using not to ensure that certain things do not happen.

That's the quick walkthrough of writing scenarios, but you can dig deeper at http://docs.behat.org/en/v2.5/quick_intro.html#define-your-feature and http://docs.behat.org/en/v2.5/guides/1.gherkin.html and find out about other aspects like Scenario Outlines, Backgrounds and Multiline Arguments.

Get Set Up

I've looked at several resources from behat.org and elsewhere, and ended up just having to piece things together to get something that will work. I've consolidated those notes to ease the setup in the future. Behat Installation and Use.

There are a number of dependencies, so the easiest way to handle them all is to let composer do it for you. So install composer if you haven't already. On a mac, using homebrew works great: brew install composer.

Make a Behat directory, either for a project you're working on, or in a generic location. Copy this composer.json file into it. Run composer install, which might take a while. It's installing Behat, Mink, several Mink extensions, and webdriver, which is for Selenium. Then run bin/behat to make sure that Behat is actually available and doing something. You should see something like No scenarios.

Install selenium. This part is optional, if you don't need to test Javascript. Download the latest version of selenium-server-standalone. You'll also need Firefox and a Java runtime installed. If you get output from java -version you should be good.

In your Behat directory, add a features folder if there's not one already, and add a something.feature file to it. You can use this loginout.feature as an example.

The last thing you need is a behat.yml file in your Behat directory. Use this behat.yml as an example, replacing the domain with the site you want to test. Also remove the selenium2 line if you're not using it.

At this point, running bin/behat in your Behat directory should run any tests located in the features directory.

Hopefully, that gets you started on your road to readable automated testing. The best resources I've found are on the behat site. You'll probably be redirected to something like http://docs.behat.org/en/v2.5/. Please leave a comment with your successes or other suggestions. Thanks for reading, and good luck!

Announcing the sprint cards! My team created these cards as a condensed version of the DrupalCon Autsin mentor training. They summraize the top tasks needed for new contributors and coders and can be printed at any local print shop (usually in 12-24h) because we formatted them to be printed on standard business cards. So they are cheap to print and ready when you need them.

These cards have been seen at many Drupal events now and they get a good response wherever they go. The first sprint where they appeared was at the Jersey Shore (thanks again to the NJ team for bringing us there!) and they have since been at camps across North America and now at DrupalCon Amsterdam.

You can find them on our DrupalGive page, or use this handy PDF link.

Printing Specifications

Take this information to your local print shop.

• Business card size (formatted for North America, so 3.5 × 2 inches... in metric that is 88.9 × 50.8mm [you may ask them to "scale" the PDF to your local size])
• cardstock (thick paper)
• matte (not glossy... sometimes people want to write on them)
• double-sided
• color
• "no bleed" (extra cropping not necessary)
• PDF file
• quantity $x (most print shops have a special rate for different quantity, good to ask)

Category: Drupal 8Drupal Planet

You will find often find the less you are allowed to do with a computer the more user friendly it seems. This is hardly a coincidence. You need to make your decisions on how much inconvenience you are willing to take for freedom in computing. The first and most important step is to make these decisions deliberate. Perhaps after the keynote this necessity is clear.

I will detail my choices and my rationale. As Doctorow said, I avoid everything Apple. They have made DRM'd computing mainstream and I do not really want anything to do with them. When work makes me use a Mac (happens) then I use a very old second hand Mac Mini but have plans to switch to a Hackintosh. The best is if you can find a free hand down piece to make sure you are not fueling the Apple ecosystem even indirectly. And, I run OS X 10.7.4 because 10.7.5 comes with Gatekeeper and that software is simply not acceptable because it can limit the computer to only run Apple sanctioned applications. Another possible choice is to refuse work that requires a Mac -- I never claimed to be perfect.

Alas, the above decision makes you use Linux as your primary OS. Mind you: there are no good choices in the OS space. The "classic" Linux problems of laptops not sleeping, wifi, projectors are gone by now. Buying printers need a little care but most work.

Probably you want a smartphone and with the iPhone ruled out that probably means an Android phone. Pick one with an unlockable bootloader and install a custom recovery and a custom ROM. Consider as you install each free app on what are you giving up. I decided that using Google Maps is worth it for me but that's something everyone needs to decide for themselves and that's one of the hardest decisions. Practice healthy paranoia by sniffing your own traffic with tPacketCapture or a similar tool from time to time to make sure you know what's happening on the phone.

Speaking of traffic, make sure you can trust your router: buy one that is compatible with open source firmware and flash one. I was much afraid to make this step because I feared I will get another maintenance and/or stability nightmare but nothing like that occured. These days you can find a few with preinstalled DD-WRT even. If you choose one of these, make sure to email the manufacturer saying you've choosen their device because of the open source firmware. This perhaps will spur them to make more of the same. There are companies that purport open source compatibility but at the same time the small print says installing such violates warranty. Ask them why.

In eReaders, avoid the Kindle. I had a Kindle once -- the Paperwhite screen made me waver -- but no longer. These days I have a Kobo Aura HD for the beautiful screen of it. Make sure your eReader radio is off. Another of those convenience vs freedom decisions -- I very strongly prefer my device and my books being controlled by me and in turn I can suffer plugging the reader in to download a book or four. I recommend buying books from Barnes & Noble because their DRM is super easy to remove. Don't forget to email them thanking for this -- it's understandable they don't have the choice to sell DRM free books but at least they don't use the vile Adobe system many places use. Also, tech books at O'Reilly are DRM free, yay!

Campbell and I presented our session, Coder vs. Themer, Thursday morning and it was a huge success! The gist of the session was this: Campbell and I are both martial artists in addition to Drupalists, and we drew comparisons between our respective martial arts (Ninjitsu and Kung fu) and our respective Drupal roles (coder and themer). Then we both attempted, in real time, to build a Drupal site from a markup. I could only use the theme layer and Campbell could only use the code/module layer. The 302 attendees were more than spectators, they were active participants, cheering us on when we found clever solutions and booing when we took hacky shortcuts! Who won?!

Watch the video (slides with audio) and decide for yourself!!

Later that afternoon we also led a BOF (Birds of a Feather) expanding on our earlier session. We dubbed this follow-up Coder vs. Themer: Fight Club, and in it the attendees are divided into small development teams, each containing at least one coder and one themer. We then challenged them to collaborate and build out mockups. We had the luxury of having Augustin Delaporte and Robert Douglass of Commerce Guys there to provide development servers on their platform.sh hosting platform. All the teams did well and more importantly everyone had fun.

Drupalcon Amsterdam’s closing session always has the big reveal of next year’s European Drupalcon venue, and we were all very excited when it was announced that the 2015 Drupalcon Europe would take place in beautiful Barcelona, Spain on September 21-25. Campbell and I cannot wait and are already planning several new, fun, energetic, and engaging sessions!

Our industry needs a new position. A person whose entire job is owning, directing and overseeing a website. We need a new title for them. I propose we call them Digital Experience Directors. 

The current landscape for smaller companies

At best, people who currently do this work are called Web Master, Site Administrator or Marketing Coordinator—all titles which are low on the political totem pole. At worst (and more commonly), it’s a task tacked on to someone’s job, often forgotten or ignored.

How this hurts companies

Businesses suffer because of this hierarchy. The lack of long-term strategic oversight devalues the investments companies make in websites. Relegating content upkeep to roles without director-level authority creates headless websites. This usually produces sites with:

The biggest news from DrupalCon Amsterdam is the announcement that Drupal 8 is now in Beta. One of the most anticipated features of D8 is the Configuration Management Initiative, which aims to solve the well-known problem of "how do I deploy changes I made in my admin interface?"

We've been involved in this work over the past few years. Our CTO David helped architect the solution, and he and Co-Founder Matt Cheney presented the results in one of the most packed presentations at the Con:

Check out the video of their presentation to see the shape of things to come.

If you want to skip to the magic, it starts at around minute 20 with a live demo.

If you'd like to try this yourself, you can spin up a D8 Beta Site today and see the future of Drupal site development. For those of us who have been watching and waiting on this for years, it's an exciting moment to see that this solution is really going to work.

Blog Categories: EducationEngineeringRelated posts: Pantheon Drupal 8 Development (for free) Tweet

We sold Drupal to the world

(Illustration by Colin Panetta)

Much of the world has standardized on Drupal as their solution for a Content Management System for over a million websites. This is not hard to see. For example, Drupal makes headlines when organizations like NYSE (before merging with ICE) decided to switch to it.

NYSE
“Once we had those sites up and running there was a huge pent up demand for other sites in the company, and we launched 37 more. It was a big task, as some of those websites hold tens of thousands of pages - being highly regulated we are required to post everything we do online.”
- Bob Kerner, NYSE SVP & Chief Digital Officer 2010

“The important thing for us is that we are able to keep a relatively small team of 60 developers”
- Bob Kerner, NYSE SVP & Chief Digital Officer 2010

“We have tons of work to do, but we will rely on Drupal to build our social community.”
- Bob Kerner, NYSE SVP & Chief Digital Officer 2010

- https://www.acquia.com/resources/case-study/nyse-euronext

Another example is NBC Universal.

NBC
“[NBC Universal has] 30 to 40 leading brands, such as Bravo, Syfy, Telemundo.”
- Christopher Herring, Director, Publishing Program, NBC Universal

“We continue to push Drupal as our standard across the company.”
- Rob Gill, Director, Operations, NBC Universal

- http://www.acquia.com/resources/acquia-tv/conference/nbc-universal

One of the most recent large scale pushes to Drupal is well underway at Pfizer. I asked Mike Lamb, Director of Marketing Technology at Pfizer, a few questions about it.

How many Drupal websites are currently in action at Pfizer?
Approx 500 - 

How many people would you say it takes to support these sites?
Easiest to calculate suggesting a core team of 12 and then approx 1 person for every 15 sites, so approx 45 people. That’s to keep the platform running – projects and enhancements is additional.

How many non-Drupal sites will become Drupal sites over the next few years?
I’d say approx 200 migrations per year. Drupal launches are a combination of site migrations and completely new sites.

This is a serious amount of Drupal for one, although a big one, company. I gave this info as a talk at a Drupal Camp in Connecticut, MA. In two years, it will take the total attendance of that camp to support Drupal at Pfizer.

A little closer to home, I asked Gary Parker, Systems Analyst at University of Massachusetts (my alma mater), about it.

How many Drupal websites are currently in action at UMASS?

OIT hosts around 120 production sites.  I believe there are probably another two dozen hosted by various departments managing their own servers.

How many will become Drupal over the next few years?

Given the number of sites currently in development and our rate of growth, I'd expect 30-50 additional Drupal sites within the next year.

These numbers are lower but this is still a lot of Drupal. The holy grail of this type of information, however, is perhaps the growing list of Drupal sites in government. The “list includes embassies, parliaments, governmental portals, police, research centers, ministries/departments, monarchies etc. in more than 150 countries.” Check it out if you haven’t yet. It is awe inspiring.

How did this happen?

A popular answer involves a long list of Drupal’s amazing feature set. But how did that happen? Drupal is not alone. It is just another shining example of a wildly successful open source project. Drupal is to the Content Management System what Linux was for the Operating System. So how do these things happen?

The reason, I think, takes the following points as its premise:

• Open Source software is inherently inclusive and collaborative.
• The vast majority of participation is driven by intrinsic motives for personal growth, relationships, and helping others.
• Participating is an endeavor that creates actual happiness, dedication, and community.
• Open Source thrives to the extent it is shared.

It is fairly straightforward to get involved in open source. Despite current issues with tech culture, the code is available, the tools are collaborative, and the standards are, for the most part, objective. Community develops from solving intrinsically interesting programming problems. This is rewarding not only to the individuals involved, but open source and the world benefits from this collaboration.

Drupal has fostered such a community for itself by being adequately inclusive and collaborative. It is trusted experts, from this community, that are being asked what they recommend be the solution to the Content Management System issue. Across the world, they are saying, “Drupal, hands down.”

It is in this sense that we have effectively sold Drupal to the world. Now, we must stand by our recommendation. We must support it.

With worldwide adoption at the rate and scale we are seeing, there are some challenges that are coming with it. Here are some:

• Are we supporting our solution efficiently?
• Seeming talent shortage
• Team retention
• Recruiting
• Community

Each of these challenges are not unique to Drupal and are painfully experienced across the entire IT industry. Solutions are many and vary significantly between each challenge. Taken one by one, each tell a familiar story.

Are we supporting our solution efficiently?

Drupal is a powerful system with a lot of complexity. It has an infamous learning curve with nearly every Drupal project needing access to an expert a few times in its existence. Are we able to provide the needed level of Drupal support at a sustainable and affordable rate? The number of new Drupal sites is quickly outpacing the number of new Drupal experts. Salaries and rates have been increasing dramatically over the years. Is there a supply and demand issue with supporting Drupal?

A popular response from Drupal experts, “Is this a problem? What’s wrong with being in demand and making a lot of money?” During my survey on this topic, I also got responses like this:

We are basically pretty unhappy about that migration - it almost killed
support for Drupal on this campus, and still might. If we could do it all
over again we'd probably still be on 6.
-Name Withheld - VIP, A Five College Institution

The move from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 has been very painful for many. Affordable Drupal expertise is rare and in demand, but the show must go on even if it ends horribly at times. It is reasonable to believe that, if this experience were to continue, Drupal would be abandoned.

Seeming talent shortage

Facts on this are popular across the entire computing industry. This one is concise and popular:

Some 1.2 million computing jobs will be available in the US in 2022, yet United States universities will produce only 39 percent of the graduates needed to fill them.
-NCWIT “By the numbers”

With a couple hundred million people out of work worldwide, an industry with an apparent talent shortage should give us pause. If you are a professional in the IT industry, consider this question:

How did you get into your field?

Nearly all answers to this question involve an entertaining tale of happenstance abruptly ending in, “...and that’s how I got into IT.” A popular term for this is, “accidental techie.” Since no career path was chosen, nor specific degree given, the person’s resulting career was accidental. For example, it is not unusual to find an English or Math degree in a Senior Programmer position. To go even further, I don’t find it unreasonable to consider Computer Science degrees in a web developer position as “accidental” in this sense. There is no college course that teaches you how to optimize your local development stack or the importance of limiting rounds of revisions.

I don’t fully agree, however, with the widespread use of this term. I’m sure some people truly do accidentally fall into a career in IT, but the rest end up there by following their heart. The issue is that the paths to entry are confusing, intimidating, and just damn hard for seemingly no good reason. It is not so much that there is a talent shortage as much as the directions in are mostly undefined.

Drupal, it seems, is no exception.

Team retention

If there is a talent shortage, then retention will be a challenge. Many organizations are finding themselves a stepping stone for their employees to reach greener pastures. The big players, with deeper pockets and bigger promises, are harvesting talent from smaller players, leaving the latter’s quality of work inconsistent as they scramble to find and train new talent.

And then there are statistics like this:

56% percent of Women leave IT by mid career
-Harvard Business Review - #10094

Not only are we not producing enough talent to support this industry, but we are driving a staggering portion of it away.

Recruiting

On the question, “What is the biggest recruiting challenge your organization faces?” a Talent Technology 2012 recruitment survey found “Finding good candidates” way out ahead of the pack with, “Filling positions fast,” in close second. Not only can we not find good candidates, but we can’t find them fast enough. There is no surprise here given the discussion so far. 

Community

The last challenge to be considered is us; ourselves. What do we do about this? For challenges so closely related, our solutions tend to be astonishingly specific. What can we do?

Hack Talent Shortage? 

We can’t solve this by staying up late and building a website. And what good will it really do to find a way to pump more people into an industry where a substantial portion are going to leave mid career?

Buy more kegs for the office? 

The people who want more kegs aren’t missing from this equation. The issue is that we’ve hired all the people that are excited by this sort of thing.

Get recruiters access to some NSA backdoors?

Obviously no, but allowing recruiters to be more invasive won’t fix this.

“And, what did you do?” 
-Rita (Nana) Albrecht, My Grandmother (1914-2014)

When I was a kid, my grandmother used to do this thing when I would tell on my sister. I would come running to my grandmother, “She’s annoying me, she’s annoying me, make her stop.” My grandmother would always ask, “And, what did you do?” meaning, what had I done to my sister, which of course I would try to answer, “Nothing…”

She may have just been trying to get the full story but what always stuck with me was, if I just took a look at myself, I could see, I had a role to play in the situation.

So, community, we need to look at ourselves.

Talent Shortage - We need to look at ourselves

Find and support those working to ease entry into this field. Some example organizations (is there a good list somewhere?):

• NCWIT: http://www.ncwit.org/resources/careers
• Anyone doing anything with Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/

Here are two examples close to my home:

• CAITE: http://caite.cs.umass.edu/
• NERDs: https://nerdsummit.org

Groups are working hard on this already and they need our support and collaboration. Find and support organizations with goals of increasing student interest in, and preparation for, careers in STEM.

Retention - We need to look at ourselves

Here are some things we can do in our organizations to solve our retention issues:

Manager and Maker schedule distinction (see here)

I’ve seen this change IT company culture drastically for the better. This is a topic all its own, but the basic idea is in recognizing the value in giving your Makers uninterrupted time to complete their work. A Maker is someone who makes something. Writers, Craftsman, Musicians, Painters, and Programmers are examples of Makers. They need schedules with long stretches of uninterrupted time to focus on doing a good job. With this understanding, Managers work to be a distraction buffer, managing incoming issues in order to optimize the experience of the Makers, whose work quality then excels and personal enjoyment increases. Tasks deliver with higher quality resulting in Managers producing overall better projects. Teammates are much less likely to leave a team which works like this.

Consider who your policies and improvements benefit

Team retention means considering everyone. If your policies and improvements tend to focus on a subset of your team, other team members are at risk of increasingly feeling excluded. Not feeling like good fit, they will start to consider your team as a stepping stone to a better situation. A new ping pong table or keg in the office may seem a quick win for smaller homogenous teams but will foster fracturing in better evolved and more realistic situations.

Increase inner company dialog and communication

Have regular conversations about how things are going internally. Work to foster feelings of safety in sharing one’s pain points within the company. It is hard at first but invaluable once people become comfortable with sharing without fear of endangering their job and as people learn to listen without getting defensive. Increasing dialog, increases accountability and alleviates resentments that would otherwise lead to a breakdown in the team. 

Increase inner company transparency

This one is scary for many at first: Work to share more administrative details about the decisions that concern your team. Work to eliminate closed door meetings. Increasing transparency, increases trust, feelings of being trusted and feelings of true belonging to a group. It is also a way to share responsibility and, in that sense, ownership. Bad news is easier for a team to bear, and good news has a greater impact and is more intimate, when the decisions leading up to it were shared.

Make a Company Code of Conduct

Your team may be full of people that feel they don’t need something like this. They may think things like, “if people mistreat me, I’ll just tell them off” or, “we don’t need this because we don’t have a conduct problem.” There is nothing wrong with putting it in writing what is expected and what isn’t tolerated at your company. In fact, doing so means you take it seriously. It means you recognize that people are fallible, don’t always know how to act, and putting it in writing is the first step to actually making an effort to be considerate and accepting of each member of your team. You can be sure this is extremely important to at least a few people on your team, even if they haven’t found a way to express it. Do some research on other Codes of Conduct, it is very worthwhile.

Recruiting - We need to look at ourselves

We saw earlier that the biggest challenge recruiters face in an organization is finding good candidates, and fast enough. We can look at ourselves here and ask, “Who are we attracting?”

Does the organization prioritize things like:

• Beer outings
• Ping pong/Air hockey
• Long hours with big one-time rewards

The first two are examples of things that can feel exclusionary to a good candidate looking for a new team to call home. The last one doesn’t work at all for people with families, for example, and is really only a great thing for very specific individuals having certain responsibilities and not others, like children. Your organization may currently feel on top of the world with those example perks above, but your next great candidates are turning and running away.

We can also ask, “How are we attracting talent?” For example, is the classic intimidating job posting involved?

Consider replacing things like this:

If you think you have the drive and positivity to fill these shoes:

• One
• Million
• Bulletpoints

With things like this:

If you have skills in one of these and are excited by the rest:

• Fewer
• Bulletpoints

Adjustments to our hiring techniques that make them more inviting and less intimidating are essential changes to make. We must also take this further by asking ourselves, “How hard are we looking?”

Consider this fact:

26% of the computing workforce in 2013 were women. 
-NCWIT “By the numbers”

in the context of how you answered this question earlier:

How did you get into your field?

Most of us are having to find our way into IT accidentally, and many of us aren’t finding our way at all. The path to an IT career is currently pretty intimidating and rather obfuscated. It can be very hard to know whether or not you are going in the right direction or even just wasting your time trying.

 

Your next Drupal expert could be hiding beneath a rock of self doubt.

 

Community - We need to look at ourselves

Read the rest here.

Together with Fabian Franz & Marco Molinari from Tag1 Consulting, I had a talk about render caching in Drupal 7 and 8.

Slides: Render caching in Drupal 7 and 8Conference: DrupalCon AmsterdamLocation: Amsterdam, The NetherlandsDate: Oct 1 2014 - 10:45Duration: 45 minutesExtra information: 

See https://amsterdam2014.drupal.org/session/render-caching-drupal-7-and-8.

• WPO
• performance
• Drupal