Software

In a previous post I showed how to use Drupal 8 RESTful services.

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

After speaking to dozens of higher ed institutions over the last several years, I’m convinced now more than ever that open source technology, particularly Drupal, is the best fit for these organizations. I know I’m echoing what many in the Drupal community have observed for a while, but I’d like to describe why Drupal makes so much sense for higher ed.

 Streamlined workflows are important for sites of any size. Today it is very common to update your readers via multiple social sites, namely Twitter and Facebook. However, it can be tedious sometimes to update your site, then update Facebook and Twitter separately with the correct links (especially if you publish a lot of content). In this series we are going to explore different ways of pushing content to your social media platforms automatically.

read more

At Deeson's PhpStorm is our IDE of choice. Working with PhpStorm's Live Templates can save you some valueable time. In this post I'll show you how to use Live Templates to surround strings in simple t functions in template files.

Live templates

PhpStorm’s Live Templates are chunks of code which can be quickly inserted into a file. Surround Live Templates allow you to select a piece of text and surround it with template.

Drupal's t function

It's Drupal best practice to wrap all strings in a t function - this allow the sting to be translated. In a template file this looks like:

<span><?php print t('This is good Practice'); ?></span>

On most sites there will be hundreds of these strings, so anything that can shave off time will be worthwhile.

Take a look

Here’s an example of Surround Live Templates in action. It’s quick and easy to surround a string with a simple t function.

PhpStorm Live Templates and T function

Shortcuts

To show the Surround Live Template list on Macs use Cmd+Alt+J and if you are on a Windows machine use Ctrl+Alt+J.

Setting up Live Templates

To set up a Surround Live Template, go to Preferences > Live Templates and click the plus symbol in the top right of the window.

A Surround Live Template needs to have ‘$SELECTION$’ in it, which is replaced with the selected text. The template also need to be available in the correct contexts.

Here's one I prepared earlier...

Have a go

To set up this T string Surround Live Template, the template text needs to be:

<?php print t('$SELECTION$'); ?>

It needs to be applicable in the ‘HTML’ context.

That’s it! You should now be able to use the template. Let us know if you've got any PhpStorm tips too.

Drupal 7.33, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. See the Drupal 7.33 release notes for a full listing.

Download Drupal 7.33

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is recommended. There are no major new features in this release. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Security information

We have a security announcement mailing list and a history of all security advisories, as well as an RSS feed with the most recent security advisories. We strongly advise Drupal administrators to sign up for the list.

Drupal 7 includes the built-in Update Manager module, which informs you about important updates to your modules and themes.

There are no security fixes in this release of Drupal core.

Bug reports

Drupal 7.x is being maintained, so given enough bug fixes (not just bug reports), more maintenance releases will be made available, according to our monthly release cycle.

Changelog

Drupal 7.33 contains bug fixes and small API/feature improvements only. The full list of changes between the 7.32 and 7.33 releases can be found by reading the 7.33 release notes. A complete list of all bug fixes in the stable 7.x branch can be found in the git commit log.

Update notes

See the 7.33 release notes for details on important changes in this release.

Known issues

None.

Front page news: Planet DrupalDrupal version: Drupal 7.x

Episode Number: 177

Have you ever had to try to hide a title on a page in Drupal? Maybe you created a page to be your front page and don't want the Node title to show up. The Exclude Node Title module makes this situation or any other situation in which you need to hide a node title, as simple as a few clicks of the mouse.

Tags: DrupalDrupal 7Drupal Planet

I had a chance to try the upcoming (Drupal) Acquia Certified Developer - Front end Specialist Certification Exam. Thanks to Acquia Certification Team for allowing me to try it out.

 

I have been able to clear it with an 83% score. That was way beyond what I was expecting. I expected the exam to focus heavily on advanced CSS and JS and hence was not expecting a good score. But it turned out the exam gives good weightage to Drupal theming and templating and various other concepts in Drupal that gave me a fair chance to score.

 

The exam evaluates you on the following areas:

• Fundamental Web Development Concepts

• Theming Concepts

• Sub-Theming Concepts

• Templates

• Template Functions

• Layout Configuration

• Performance

• Security

 

The official exam blue print and curriculum is not released by Acquia yet. So I do not have the links here for you. They should be out soon. The exam is scheduled to be released for public on December 1st.

 

But for any of you taking the exam pre-release, or if you are planning to take the exam immediately after the release, here is some information for you that could help you in your preparation before the official study guide comes out.

 

Fundamental Web Development Concepts

There were questions about CSS, JS, Jquery. Some of the resources that could help:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en­US/docs/Web

• http://html5doctor.com/

• http://www.webplatform.org/

• http://css­tricks.com/

• http://codepen.io/ ­ Try out your code and see it in action
  (From WebChick’s Guide to ACD examination)

 

CSS Selectors:

• http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.asp

• http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/the-30-css-selectors-you-must-memorize--net-16048

• http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_selectors.asp

 

Positioning:

• http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_positioning.asp

 

Javascript and Jquery: (The below ones are too generic. But I would recommend a full refresher of jquery and javascript if you are a backend developer attempting the certification)

• http://www.w3schools.com/js/

• http://www.w3schools.com/jquery/

 

Drupal + Javascript:

• Drupal JS API

• Working with JS in Drupal

 

Drupal + CSS

• Adding Stylesheets

• Adding styles through API

• Overriding Style Sheets

 

Responsive Web Design:

• http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_mediaquery.asp

 

Grid Systems:

• A fair idea of any one of those CSS grid systems would help

 

HTML 5:

• Knowledge of some of the new elements in HTML5

• http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_intro.asp

 

Theming Concepts

You should make yourself thoroughly familiar with all the Theming and Advanced Theming chapters in The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

 

• Info file of a theme

• Regions . Adding Regions to themes.

• What are the Default Regions and Hidden Regions? Significance of why you would need to have some of them for things to work. (Ex: Devel, Admin Menu Module, Contextual Links).

• When to have a region? When to hardcode?

• Managing your CSS, Adding, Removing CSS,

 

Sub- Theming Concepts

• Base and Sub Themes

• Creating Subtheme

• Inheritance in themes

• Preparing your base theme

• https://www.drupal.org/node/225125

 

Layout Configuration

• Layout Strategies

• Managing Blocks

• View Modes

• Views Theming

• Customize Views Output

Templates

• Template Files

• Common Templates

• Overriding Templates

• Global Variables in templates

• Working with Variables in themes

• Naming Conventions

Template Functions:

• Theme Functions , Creating them, Calling them, Overriding them

• Theme Hooks, Suggestions, Suggestions and Template Files, Suggestions and Theme Functions,

• https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules%21system%21theme.api.php/group/themeable/7

• Preprocess Functions, Preprocess Hooks, $VARIABLES

• Using Render, Render Elements, Working with Render Elements, Render Arrays  

• Theming Forms

• Form Alter Hook

 

Performance:

• Aggregation, Compression

• Front End Performance

 

Security:

• Handling User Input

• Handling Text

 

This notes is very specific to the Front End Specialist Certification. If you are looking for Acquia Certified Developer examination, check out my previous post on Cracking Acquia Drupal Certification.

 

Drop in your comments below if you have any additional resources that would help in the exam preparation that I have missed above.

 

In Drupal 8, we’ve significantly improved the way pages are rendered. I will explain the entire render pipeline, which will also cover:

• render caching — blocks and entities are now render cached automatically!
• cache tags — finally we have the cache invalidation system we’ve always needed!
• assets — only the necessary assets are loaded anymore, thanks to asset dependencies!
• bubbling — rather than relying on global statics that broke caching, we now correctly bubble up all attached metadata — no more frustrations!

But I will also explain what is going to be possible in Drupal 8:

• anonymous page loads: invalidating Varnish/CDNs with perfect precision
• authenticated page loads: not completely regenerated on every page load, but assembled from render cached parts
• alternative render strategies, like Big Pipe

Where relevant, I’ll compare with Drupal 7, how you can write Drupal 7 code today that will be easy to upgrade to Drupal 8, and which Drupal 7 backports exist (hint: Big Pipe does exist!).

Slides: Drupal 8's render pipelineConference: DrupalCamp GhentLocation: Ghent, BelgiumDate: Nov 7 2014 - 09:30Duration: 45 minutesExtra information: 

See http://ghent2014.drupalcamp.be/sessions/drupal-8s-render-pipeline.

• Drupal

This webinar is an update to Dante Taylor’s TWIG: Getting Started in Drupal 8 presentation from October 2013. The most significant change to Drupal 8 theming is the introduction of the Classy Theme, which was part of the 8.0.0-beta2 release last month. In a nutshell, Classy is a base theme for those who want to have templates with the core classes. Setting Classy as a base is simple—add the following line to the theme.info.yml file inside the theme directory:

For all the sites I maintain, I have at least a local and production environment. Some projects warrant a dev, qa, etc. as well, but for the purposes of this post, let's just assume you often run drush commands on local or development environments during development, and eventually run a similar command on production during a deployment.

What happens if, at some point, you are churning through some Drush commands, using aliases (e.g. drush @site.local break-all-the-things to break things for testing), and you accidentally enter @site.prod instead of @site.local? Or what if you were doing something potentially disastrous, like deleting a database table locally so you can test a module install file, using drush sqlq to run a query?

For ToadCast 28 we have special guest Chris Bloom!

• Read more

hook_block_info and hook_block_view are gone in Drupal 8. What's more: the whole paradigm of creating blocks through the hook system is replaced with the Plugin API.

Drupal has everything you need to start a full-featured online business. Drupal is open, free and flexible – and it provides all the components required to integrate content, commerce and community features. With just a few of the 15,000+ modules, it’s possible to build almost any web application you need. With the ERPAL Platform Drupal distribution, Drupal developers and site builders get a pre-configured Drupal installation as a starting point for flexible and open business applications. As one of our first use cases, I want to show how you can use ERPAL Platform to build your complete online business within a single Drupal installation. In this blogpost I’ll cover the overall functionality of this e-commerce use case and in one of the next blogposts I’ll show you in detail how to build your online shop, complete with all the administration features you need to manage your online business.

Business processes first

No matter whether you sell services, projects, or products; no matter whether you sell them online or offline: all business will go through the same basic steps. Starting with the first customer contact to begin the sales process, you’ll mostly be tracking leads that will be transformed into opportunities and become prospects. In the prospect status you’ll create a quote for your customer in which you offer the products and services that the customer requested. After the quote is accepted, it becomes an order (which may be different from the quote). The order confirmation is sent as a receipt to your customer. Now it depends on the payment modalities negotiated before the order as to how and when you can create one or more invoices to get paid. You may get some upfront payment with the submission of the order, after some or all products have been delivered, or once you’ve reached a certain milestone in a project or manufacturing process. So no matter what you deliver to your customer, you get paid either in advance or upon delivery, or a combination of both.

This sales process is always fundamentally the same and it’s the core functionality that ERPAL Platform provides. With Drupal Commerce entities for quotes, orders and invoices, this business process is flexible and can be extended with fields, rules and views. With these features the administrative backend for the general business process is already in place, and you can extend it as you need. Read one of the first ERPAL Platform blog posts for more details about this business process and how it’s implemented in ERPAL Platform

Integrate a Drupal Commerce storefront

Since Drupal Commerce is already integrated into ERPAL Platform, it’s easy to extend the feature set with an e-commerce storefront. At the "frontend" you sell your products to your customers. They can buy any products directly in the web from an online store that’s built on top of your business process platform. If you already know Drupal Commerce, it’s easy to extend ERPAL Platform to expose a storefront to website visitors. In this use case, the ERPAL Platform features will serve a complete administrative backend – visible only to shop administrators – for all your business processes.

Imagine we have three commerce order bundles – order, quote and invoice – to separate these entities. If a user adds a product to her cart, this is an order entity. For an order entity that’s not yet checked out, as a customer you can request a quote, which can be used to compare products and prices with other stores or to show to another party (as PDF). If the customer comes back, she can continue with the order and complete the checkout process. After the checkout is complete, the invoice is created as a separate entity and both the user and the shop administrator can access all these receipts in the same Drupal installation: no synchronization between systems needed. If a payment is made, it’s added to the invoice and changes the balance. That’s it! There you have all you need to process your business in a nutshell. If you build an e-commerce site for a start-up you may want to begin lean and without heavy integration projects. With ERPAL Platform you have all the features in one distribution to start an online business and to continue to grow it in an agile way.

In one of our next blogposts, we’ll present a step-by-step guide for building an online business based on ERPAL Platform.

In our upcomming webinar with the Commerce Guys, we will talk about open integration of Drupal Commerce and give a real use case of an ERPAL Platform project that integrates all online-business process in one platform. 

Being part of the community - a non-techie perspective

Recently our Sitebuilder Boris shared his thoughts on the Drupal community. So I thought I’d share my thoughts on it too, but from a perspective of a non-techie!

It’s been one and a half years since I joined the Amazee Crew. Within the first 6 months only one day a week complementary to my studies in Business Administration. Yep, you’ve read that correctly, I don’t have any background in tech, not to mention open source CMS. HTML, CSS and PHP were only a couple of letters to me and people sitting behind the screen coding seemed somewhat geeky to me. I would have only been involved with Drupal if some of the fashion and beauty blogs that I read would run on Drupal.

Fascinated by the colored lines of code on the screens of our developers (who I hold dear and absolutely enjoy working with) I very much looked forward to my first DrupalCon in Prague in 2013.

Truth be told, I was quite overwhelmed by the immensity of the community. And honestly, walking into a sprint room did make me feel a bit like being in the wrong place, but I decided to join the fun and give it at try (no I did not sprint, that wouldn’t be helpful to anybody).

I attended various sessions, in some of them I could actually understand something, some of them were just way to tech for me. During the week I’ve met a lot of really nice people and I had to admit that I did the community wrong in the first place. It wasn’t all geeky and tech talk; you’d be surprised what kind of hidden talents you can find there! Singers, musicians, paragliders, you name it.

A year later my HTML, CSS and PHP skills are still bad, but I did learn a bit and can do some basic stuff by myself. I enjoyed DrupalCon Amsterdam even more and found myself hanging out with and getting to know more people of the community from all over the world.

You’ll probably never find my coding the next big module (but then never say never) but you’ll definitely find me at a Drupal event. Because what I have experienced along the way is quite similar to what Boris experienced; Drupal is way more than just an open source CMS. And the community behind it is way more than just a bunch of geeks; it’s a community whit highly versatile skilled people who certainly know how to have fun and will give you a warm welcome, no matter what your background is. I never would have thought that a non-tech girl like me would end up in an open source CMS community and actually finding her way to contribute, even if it’s not writing code. That in fact is another aspect I like about the community - the chance to be able to contribute even if you’re not able to write patches.

As for me, I’m looking forward to the next DrupalCon in Barcelona and might actually even try and check out the local Drupal User Group. 

86 sessions you don't want to miss at BADCamp this year

Are you interested in contributing to Drupal, but don't have the coding skills or experience necessary? Good news, now you have an awesome opportunity to contribute! Drupal is currently in the application process to be a part of the Google Code-In ( http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014 ) contest for pre-university students ages 13-17. Our current need is building a list of quality tasks for students to work on during the contest. Please realize these don't have to be code related tasks, but should fit into one of the following five categories: Code, Documentation/Training, Outreach/Research, Quality Assurance, User Interface.

The application process started Tuesday October 28th and ends this Monday November 10th. Our goal is to submit an application with at least 50 quality tasks. Please contribue by adding task ideas directly our open to the public Google Spreadsheet ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sFf5wnuCSkNauNw26-Kml0snplF4Fx0j... ) until midnight UTC-6 Sunday November 9th. After that, we need to see if Drupal is approved for the contest. If approved, we will need help creating, documenting, and mentoring an additional 100-200 tasks. The more tasks we setup the more opportunities we have to contribue to Drupal.

Did you know that organizations accepted into the GCI contest send the top two students on an all expense paid trip to Google in Mountain View with a parent/guardian ( http://www.google-melange.com/gci/document/show/gci_program/google/gci20... )? I know that I would be very excited as a young computer nerd to even have a chance to participate in such a program. As a community, we have a very good chance to make connections with young students who could end up spending a good amount of time focusing on Drupal after completing the contest. A good way to find quality contributors might be Drupal sending a few young people to California/GoogleHQ...

GCI Summary:
"Code-In can be thought of as the "Summer of Code" for pre-university students. Rather than specific coding projects, students age 13-17 take on smaller tasks in five categories: Code, Documentation/Training, Outreach/Research, Quality Assurance, User Interface."

Details @links that explain everything about the contest:

• Official Website @ http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014
• Drupal's group to communicate about Code-In @ https://groups.drupal.org/google-code-in
• Drupal's spreadsheet to add code-in tasks pre-application @ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sFf5wnuCSkNauNw26-Kml0snplF4Fx0j...
• Drupal's issue queue after application @ https://drupal.org/project/issues/gci

Timeline:

• Tue Oct 28 - Application Period Starts
• Mon Nov 10 - Application Period Ends
• Wed Nov 12 - Accepted Organizations Announced
• Mon Dec 01 - Contest Begins
• Wed Jan 21 - Contest Ends
• Mon Jan 26 - Deadline for mentor orgs to submit evaluations

How can I help?:

• Create Tasks
  • Submit pre-application task ideas @ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sFf5wnuCSkNauNw26-Kml0snplF4Fx0jtw5xGWNSUeY
  • At least 25 tasks to apply (5 in each of the 5 categories)
  • Register as a mentor by listing your personal details and availability in task spreadsheet.

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sFf5wnuCSkNauNw26-Kml0snplF4Fx0jtw5xGWNSUeY

  • Need 100+ additional tasks if accepted.
  • Our goal is to focus on Drupal 8 based tasks as there is plenty to work on.
    • Example task: Create a Drupal 8 install walk through video tutorial
    • Example task: Attend a Drupal User Group Meetup
  • How to think of tasks?
    • Tasks from previous years/organizations are listed at legacy code-in websites.
      • http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2012
      • http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2011
        • Specific example @ http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2012/kde
    • Previous Drupal Code-In tasks can be found from last year's initative.
      • http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2013/drupal
• Review Tasks
  • Need at least 25 tasks for application, but will require 100-200 tasks if accepted.
    
    • Help is needed to review and verify tasks are properly documented.
    • Tasks will be ready for review/feedback for all skill levels fo mentors.
• Mentor Tasks
  • Feel free to take ownership of tasks by becoming the primary contact.
    • Be apart of the entire process of creating, reviewing, mentoring, commenting, and approving completed tasks.
      • You might end up mentoring the next webchick!
  • Mentoring is not required for creating tasks, simply leave the mentor field blank.
• IRC  #drupal-google
  • Hangoout and provide support to potential students/mentors
• Do you or anyone you know work at an educational facility with 13-17 year olds? If so, spread the word of GCI!

 

Feel free to contact me or create nodes in the g.d.o group for additional information.


- Matthew@Lechleider.com
aka Slurpee

The next beta for Drupal 8 will be beta 3! Here is the schedule for the beta release.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014 Only critical and major patches committed Wednesday, November 12, 2014 Drupal 8.0.0-beta3 released. Emergency commits only.

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Drupal Performance Tips

In the spirit of the computer video game Doom and its skill levels, we’ll review a few ways you can improve your Drupal speed performance and optimize for better results and server response time. These tips that we’ll cover may be at times specific to Drupal 6 versions, although you can always learn the best practices from these examples and apply them on your own code base.

Doom

Using indexes, and proper SQL queries can boost performance by a huge factor, especially if the affected tables are very big (millions of rows). Take a look at the diff below showing a fix to a not so proper, and ill-advised use of querying the database:

The bad performing query took anything between 6 to 60 seconds to run, depending on the data, and database load, and database’s current cache state. The newer query takes milliseconds.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

The post Drupal Performance Tip – “I’m too young to die” – indexes and SQLs appeared first on Liran Tal's Enginx.

The AmazonS3 module allows the drupal local file system to be replaced with S3, where the files can be uploaded or downloaded from S3. I used the following modules to achieve this:

•    Amazon S3(module)
•    Libraries API
•    AWSSDK for PHP(module)
•    AWSSDK For PHP(library)
  • Note: Verify that SDK library meets your system requirements. Refer this: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-sdk-php/guide/latest/requirements.html         

  Download and install these modules and place SDK library at sites/all/libraries/awssdk. Check  'Status report'  for information about the installation of  AmazonS3 and AWSSDK.     Here we go:  

•  In admin/config/media/amazons3, give your default bucket name which you would have created in S3.