Software

DrupalCon Amsterdam

Following the success of our DrupalCon t-shirt last year, Team Deeson is back and ready for the 'Dam armed with stickers, posters and a new tee to give away (because we're nice like that).

Deft with the Delft

This year we've taken The Netherlands' traditional and iconic Delftware as our inspiration for our DrupalCon Amsterdam tee - well, when in Amsterdam....

Drupal blossoms

Our swag has been produced by our insanely talented designer, Rachael Case.

Rachael reversed the colour scheme, and added elements of other ‘classic’ Dutch imagery, including a windmill (of course), tulips and a bike. But if you look closer, the tulips ‘blossoms’ out of the Drupal drop. We also have the Drupal logo perched jauntily on the bike. 

To finish it all off, we also added a rather tongue in cheek strapline, celebrating the ‘social’ side of Amsterdam...

Roll up, roll up! Tweet to get a tee

So if you want to grab your swag - tweet us @DeesonAgency and we’ll sort you out at DrupalCon Amsterdam. Zie je daar!

For posters and stickers, come and see us at stand 203 at DrupalCon for a chat. Don't leave it too late though, they have a habit of going fast!

See you there

So if you want swag, come and find us in Amsterdam between 29th September and 3rd October. John, Tim and I will be around to chat about all things Drupal, open-source and open data.

Episode Number: 170

In this DDoD we look at the jReject module. This module allows you to display a modal popup notifying the user / visitor that their browser is outdated and wont work well with the site. In the video, you will see that jReject comes with a wide variety of customizations to fit your brand and preferences.

Tags: DrupalDrupal 7Drupal PlanetTips and TricksJavascriptModal Forms

My first trip to a DrupalCon is just about to start! The yearly DrupalCon Europe is held in Amsterdam from 29th of September to 3rd of October 2014. There are a lot of sessions to be seen, wide array of sprints, social events and much more.

PHP_CodeSniffer is a PHP5 script, which can validate PHP, JavaScript and CSS type source codes according to the different coding standards. In other words, you can easily check your source code’s standardization with a script, instead of knowing every detail about the coding standards by heart. You can use PHP_CodeSniffer in different ways, for example you can run it simply from terminal but thanks for the PhpStorm’s built-in support it becomes a much more effective tool.

It’s the Friday before DrupalCon Amsterdam, and we couldn’t be more excited for what’s in store. As we prepare to dive headlong into a week filled with fun, friends, and Drupal, there are a few things that all DrupalCon attendees (and would-be attendees) need to be aware of.

Late pricing ends today

At 23:59 tonight, ticket pricing will move to onsite prices. You’ll still be able to register for tickets online, but in order to get the late pricing you must register to attend DrupalCon Amsterdam before midnight tonight Amsterdam time.

DrupalCon Amsterdam is our biggest European DrupalCon yet

We’re thrilled to announce that over 2,000 people have registered to attend DrupalCon Amsterdam, which makes it our biggest European DrupalCon to date. With so many people signed up to attend, there will be tons of opportunities to network, learn, and make new friends.

The fun starts before Tuesday

Excited to get the DrupalCon party started? Many of our amazing community members are starting the celebration early: the Tour de Drupal is cruising across Europe, and a student training with over 200 attendees is happening right now, thanks to the local Dutch community.

We wish you safe travels on your way to Amsterdam. Whether you’re taking a plane, a train, a bike, a boat, or some other method of transportation, we hope that you have a fun and safe trip, and we can’t wait to celebrate the best community in Open Sourced with you.

See you in Amsterdam!

Welcome to the 8th and FINAL installment of an 8-part blog series we're calling "The Ultimate Guide to Drupal 8." Whether you're a site builder, module or theme developer, or simply an end-user of a Drupal website, Drupal 8 has tons in store for you! This blog series will attempt to enumerate the major changes in Drupal 8.

Responsive Web Design or RWD, has come a long way since it was first introduced in 2010, and you would think that by now, given the popularity of the subject, all things have been sorted out and all questions have been answered. Not quite.  RWD is a moving target that continues to evolve, but for the most part the majority of the techniques used to accomplish the goal of an adaptable website are unquestionable except one, images. 

If your site relies on user engagement, chances are you are using Drupal's powerful built in user modules. Sometimes, however, it can be difficult to understand what tweaks you can make to the default login process to make it a better experience all around. Should you present the login form on every page? Where should you put it? What methods can you use to display the login form in unobtrusive ways? What action does your site take after someone logs in? We're going to be presenting an array of options to hopefully point you in the right direction.

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Article

Static websites, comprising web pages that do not respond to any user input, may be adequate for listing information, but little else. Dynamic pages are what make the Web more than just interlinked digital billboards. The primary mechanism that enables this is the humble web form – whether a modest single button or a multi-page form with various controls that allow the user to input text, make choices, upload files, etc.

Anyone developing a new Drupal-based website will usually need to create forms for gathering data from users. There are at least two possible approaches to solving this problem: One approach mostly relies on Drupal core, and the other uses a contributed module dedicated to forms.

The Node Knows

If you understand how to create content types and attach fields to them, then that could be a straightforward way to make a form – not for creating nodes to be used later for other purposes, but solely for gathering user input. To add different types of form fields to a content type, you will need to install and enable the corresponding modules, all of which are available from Drupal.org's modules section.

Some of these modules are part of Drupal's core: File (for uploading files), List (for selection lists), Number (for integers, decimals, and floats), Options (for selection controls, checkboxes, and radio buttons), Taxonomy (for tagging content with terms), and Text (for single- and multi-line entry fields).

Other field-related modules have been contributed by the Drupal community, including:

Today, we are very excited to announce the latest release of our Drupal 8 theme Prius. Alongside a full support of Drupal 8 Alpha 15, we have included a number of new features. This release is particularly exciting as we are one step closer to an official launch of Drupal 8. Indeed, Drupal Alpha 15 is the first candidate for a Beta release. Meaning if no new beta blocker bugs are found within the next coming days1, we could see the first Beta version of our favourite "CMS" very soon.

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The Symfony Live events of this Fall (London, Berlin, NYC, Madrid) are around the corner, and for the first year, Commerce Guys is going to attend these events as a sponsor. Some people are wondering why, and I’d like to explain why Commerce Guys is very excited to engage with the Symfony community and its open source software vendor, SensioLabs.

In fact, there are 3 main reasons for Commerce Guys’ interest in Symfony and working tightly with SensioLabs:

Drupal 8 and Drupal Commerce 2.0

It’s no secret that Drupal8 will rely on Symfony components. This architecture decision is good, and paved the way for similar thoughts on Drupal Commerce 2.0. It also ties the destinies of both open source communities, we think for the better. The work on Drupal Commerce for Drupal 8, known as Drupal Commerce 2.x, started in June 2014. During a community sprint that included members of SensioLabs and other partners like Smile, Publicis Modem, Osinet, i-KOS, Adyax, and Ekino, we validated the idea that some of the core eCommerce components of Drupal Commerce 2.x should rely on Symfony and other general PHP libraries directly. The goal is to offer an even more generic and flexible solution that spreads the impact of our code beyond the walls of the Drupal community.

This effort is well in progress already. Bojan Zivanovic, Drupal Commerce 2.x co-maintainer, provides a great example of this in a recent blog post about our new Internationalization library. He explains how much improvement this component will bring to the software for managing and formatting currencies internationally via a generic PHP library called commerceguys/intl. Expanding the reach of our work to the broader PHP community will help us get more feedback, more users, and more open source contributors, ultimately leading to better software. Ryan Szrama, Commerce Guys co-founder and Drupal Commerce CTO, will be presenting this approach at Symfony Live in New York City in October. We strongly believe this vision will bring us closer to our goal of building the most popular open source eCommerce software.

Platform.sh now refined for Symfony projects

In a context where Symfony will be central to mastering Drupal 8 projects, we’ve pursued the goal to enable our development & production Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Symfony projects in general. We’re convinced that this will provide Platform.sh an edge, and wanted to be a driving force in providing tools that will fit both open source communities.

Since Spring 2014, Commerce Guys engineers have been collaborating with SensioLabs engineers to understand Symfony better. Few companies in the world have the expertise in enterprise PHP that SensioLabs has, and the Platform.sh Symfony experience is the outcome of lots of intense discussions with the SensioLabs’ team.

Our objective was to enable teams to develop and deploy Symfony projects faster and more productively on Platform.sh. That work is now done and we’re very happy to announce today that, with just a few clicks, Symfony developers can create a full Symfony development environment (starting from an existing Symfony distribution), in order to build and deploy highly scalable websites and custom applications. This will lead to a much improved development process, lots of time saved for developers and a reduced time to market from development to production. Sponsoring Symfony live is a way for Commerce Guys to share the hard work we’ve done to build a unique, cloud-based development experience for Symfony developers. We’re excited to share our work and get feedback from the Symfony community about this product.

A shared focus on the developers

The time we’ve spent with SensioLabs’ management team highlighted our common passion and interest: help developers be more efficient and successful and, as much as it depends on us, to enjoy their jobs even more. SensioLabs and Commerce Guys were both founded to design and develop open source frameworks, gather large and global developer communities, and enable developers to create great web experiences. Both companies aim at making developers happier and more successful by providing them the right tools. It’s on these values and fundamental principles that this partnership was built. It’s all very solid and here to stay!

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We're excited about the great swag we've got at the Drupal store-- so excited that we're going to award a €100 gift card to a lucky winner at DrupalCon Amsterdam!

Here's how it works.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we are going to hide puzzle pieces around the RAI Convention center. (The puzzle, for reference, is above!) If you find one of the puzzle pieces, bring it by the Drupal Association Booth in the exhibit hall.

We'll write your name and contact information on the back, and once the puzzle is complete-- or, at lunch on Thursday, whichever happens first-- we will select a lucky winner and award him or her with a €100 gift card!

Pro tip: during the hours the exhibit floor is open, we'll use the @DrupalAssoc Twitter handle to send out pictures of where the puzzle pieces are hidden. Keep your eye on that handle so you can have a shot at finding one of the pieces and winning the prize!

Note: there are only 15 puzzle pieces, so the odds of winning are great. Limit one puzzle piece per person.

Questions?

Come by the Drupal Association booth next to the bookstore or email Leigh Carver with any questions you may have.

Good luck!

Meet Ruth Fuller, she's here to help businesses get more out of Drupal by helping them engage more effectively with the Drupal community. She'd like to help you with effective Drupal and open source sponsorship, how to engage with the community, planning, coordination, presentation preparation, and public speaking coaching.

Welcome to the second article in the “Commerce 2.x Stories” series. This time we’re going to talk about addressing, and our efforts to improve the already good Commerce 1.x addressing implementation (addressfield).

By addressing we mean storing, manipulating and formatting postal addresses, meant to identify a precise recipient location for shipping or billing purposes.

Read on to see what we're doing to improve it...

I am going to explain how to setup your development tools so that you can debug Drush commands in real time, as they run. I've tested these instructions on Mac OSX.

In a previous blog post I outlined how to configure PHPStorm and Xdebug so you can step through the code of a webpage as it is executed. This allowed you to set breakpoints and inspect the value of variables at specific points in the code. The same can be done for Drush commands. You will need to have configured your PHPStorm as described in the first blog post.

Add Drush code to PHPStorm

Drush can be added to PHPStorm as an external library. This will allow you to view the Drush code within PHPStorm so you can add break points to it later. 

1. In the project pane, double click external libraries, which appears at the bottom of the directories.

2. Click the plus button in the bottom left of the PHP popup window. Now use the file brower to find where Drush is installed on your system. Select the folder and click OK and OK again. Drush should now be listed as an external library.

3. Click the telephone button in PHPStorm so it starts listening for executed code.

Configuring Drush to tell PHPStorm it is running

In the command line where you normally run your Drush commands, first type the following command and press enter:

export PHP_OPTIONS="-dxdebug.remote_autostart=On -didekey=PHPSTORM -dremote_host=localhost -dprofiler_enable=1"

Now, when you run a Drush command it will be picked up by PHPStorm.

If you have put in a breakpoint, then execution of the command will pause at that point. For example, open index.php in your project and place a breakpoint next to a PHP function as shown in the image. If you click between the line number and the code, a red spot will appear.

Now, at the same command prompt where you entered the export command above, run a Drush command, for example:

drush cc all

PHPStorm should open at the breakpoint. Now you can step through the code in the same way as before.

Executing the export command before running Drush commands will be a little time consuming. I recommend you add this to your .bashrc file or .bash_profile file in your home directory so it's available as soon as you open your terminal.

To stop PHPStorm opening every time you run a Drush command, simply press the telephone button again and hang up.

Campbell Vertesi and Adam Juran are at the top of their game when it comes to coding and theming Drupal. They're also deeply involved in and shaped by their study of martial arts. That's what makes this DrupalCon trailer so very good: they make an analogy for working with Drupal that pits the coder vs the themer, and it becomes the basis of their whole DrupalCon session. This trailer (which is meant to get butts into seats next week in Amsterdam), is a tribute to B-grade Kung Fu movies, and is true to Drupal's tradition of approaching technology with a good dose of levity and humor. I, for one, really enjoyed working with Campbell and Adam while shooting this, and am looking forward to their session.

Tags: Drupal PlanetDrupalDrupalCon

Published: Wed, 09/24/14Download this episodeConsensus Banana

• How did this all get started? and where does the “banana” come from.
  • From Morten: 2 years ago at BadCamp John Albin was holding a plastic sword from the pirate fest the day before. It was known as the sword of consensus. At DrupalCon Austin Morten had a banana that he was using to point to people and ask “So can we agree on X?”. That is how it became the banana of consensus. It was basically a pointing stick.
• Technically, what is the change.
  • Moving classes from core to a base theme called Classy.
  • Multi-phased approach.
  • Phase 1, move classes out of preprocess functions and into the core templates.
  • Create the Classy base theme.
  • Phase 2, copy the core template with classes to Classy, remove the classes from core.
• Why do themers need this.
  • Better options
  • Not everyone wants the same markup (themer survey)
  • Avoiding php
  • No time wasted undoing core.
• What work has been done, what is left.
  • Preprocess changes (phase 1) far along.
  • Classy is RTBC, waiting for Dries to approve.
  • Phase 2 to start at or just after Amsterdam (don’t need to wait until phase 1 is 100% complete)
• Chance of failure?
  • Changes have to be in by RC1.
• Who to thank?
  • joelpittet, mdrummond, crowdcg, lauriii, alexpott!
• Are there any other theme layer changes to look forward to that have come about because of the banana consensus?
  • addClass/removeClass is in, what about setAttribute/removeAttribute? Similarities to jQuery make this (hopefully) more approachable for frontend developers.
• Any other theming changes not related to banana?
  • Improved menu theming - menu.html.twig using a Twig macro

Use Cases

• What it means for themers. What it means for developers.
  • Preprocess is still there so contrib can add classes if necessary - but is it necessary? Could it be done as a data- attribute?

Episode Links: Scott on drupal.orgScott on TwitterDavid on drupal.orgDavid on TwitterConsensus Banana Issue QueueDrupal TwigTags: Drupal 8ThemingTwigplanet-drupal

After hours of munging through ctools and page manager module code I figured out how to load enabled panel pages programmatically in code.

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Question: Who should be asking "How much documentation is enough?"

Answer: Everybody. Developers, Themers, Managers, CEO’s. Everyone in Software Development.

Impressions and Acquia's presentation from the 2014 Government ICT 2.0 conference in London.