Software

The Drupal Features module covers a lot of our needs with automating the deployment of database settings for Drupal 7. It allows you to export configuration to code and nicely wrap it up as a module. This means you easily deploy your changes to the live site (or a staging site) without having to repeat the configuration changes. It also means you can apply the changes to a different site.

But using Features is not always the best approach. Even if you can export something using Features, it doesn't mean you always should. Read on to find out when it is not appropriate to use Features and what you can use instead.

Tags: Drupal Module DevelopmentDrupal DeploymentFeaturesPlanet Drupal

tl;dr:

We will be presenting a session on the business value of DevOps at Drupalcon Amsterdam and would greatly appreciate your response to this (very) brief survey on Drupal and DevOps from a business perspective.

The wordy version:

At the upcoming Drupalcon in Amsterdam, Adrian Rollett and I will be presenting work we did to derive the true business value of the DevOps activities within Bluespark through real life analysis. This will be a particularly useful session for those who either plan on, or are in the process of introducing devops within their organization and need some concrete arguments to help them with the process.

To measure the success of DevOps implementations within Bluespark, we developed a framework that allows us to quantify various aspects of our processes into specific business gains. We then inspected a number of different projects, analyzing a range of issues such as time logs, number of times a specific activity took place, etc. As a result we were able to quantify the efficiencies gained by implementing automated testing, continuous integration and other DevOps principles. We will be presenting this framework and the results obtained in Amsterdam.

In addition, we are seeking to get a sense of the current adoption of DevOps in the Drupal world from a business perspective. We have created a very brief survey to gather this information. This is a complementary effort to the very excellent and more technically-oriented survey that is planned (http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/upcoming-conferences) for a different Drupalcon session. We will of course be sharing the insights we gather with the entire community.

Many thanks in advance for your responses, and we hope to see you in Amsterdam!

Click here to fill in the survey

Tags: DrupalconDevOpsDrupal Planet

The next issue of Drupal Watchdog features articles about Drupal as a Services Platform. Several authors in the issue and the executive editor will be sharing various perspectives on web services in Drupal and in the wider world. With hostess Amber Himes Matz and her guests Peta Hoyes, Scott Hooker, Lin Clark, and Larry Garfield.

• DrupalCon Amsterdam
• Community Summit
• Pacific NW Drupal Summit
• BADCamp
• Drupal Watchdog
• Eaton's discussion of Headless Drupal
• JSON Schema Considered Harmful
• Tim Bray's response
• Robin Berjon's Web 2024
• RESTful Web Services Cookbook
• Martin Fowler's article on Richardson Maturity Model

We’re still working with Drupal 6 at work, and we’re triggering our notifications and other cron related tasks through a small script that crontab is running, and with the help of drush at the command line. The following problem and description of the scenario we had applies to Drupal 7 too as these are pretty much close with regards to implementation.

Drupal’s cron job will most often run smoothly and without any issues, it will appear to “just work”. The reason for that is that behind the scenes, anything related to creating scheduled tasks in Drupal will have to implement hook_cron, and simply enough, not a lot of modules will be doing that. So when you first setup your Drupal application and get it to run, you’ll wrap up any issues with cron and from there it’s smooth sailing… Or not! There are practices you should be aware of when you program modules in Drupal that are not related to cron, yet can still mess it up.

So back to the story, at some point we noticed our notifications aren’t being sent out in our development environment, and because cron is responsible for running the notifications, then that’s the immediate suspect. Problem is, debugging cron isn’t that easy, mainly because Drupal will just fire off those hooks and you’ve got no idea where the culprit code is.

Search for the problem begins by checking quickly all the modules that implement hook_cron, primarily your very own and recently added modules are the prime suspects. If that yields no results, as did in my case you’re going to have to broaden the search and a good way to quickly figure out where this happens is by inspecting Drupal’s module.inc to catch the cron hook. One way of doing that is through a debugger, another quick and easy way is by using Drupal’s own watchdog (or PHP’s own errorlog) function to capture this data:

function module_invoke_all() {
$return = array();
foreach (module_implements($hook) as $module) {
$function = $module .'_'. $hook;
if ($hook == 'cron') watchdog('cron', "hit $module cron"); // add line to log in db log

…

}

}

Inspecting the information there from the change or through the debugger we’ll be able to see which cron hook last ran successfully.

I will spare the rest of the debugging process but the research led to Drupal’s own implementation of hook_cron which further led to module calls of node_invoke and node_invoke_nodeapi where it was then failing. At that point, all custom, and recent changes to anything the codebase related to hook_nodeapi revealed the culprit:

function my_module_nodeapi($op...) {

switch ($op) {

case ‘view’:
drupal_goto(”);

break;

}

}
This makes perfect sense. Nodes get loaded through the node_load() and the rest of Drupal’s hooks for the sake of handling the notifications, which in turn calls nodeapi hook all around, and having a drupal_goto() doesn’t really help drush when its running from the command line.

Lesson learned.

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

The post “Oh you lazy cron!” – learning on Drupal cron issues appeared first on Liran Tal's Enginx.

Episode Number: 166

In this episode you will learn how the Drupal 7 Node Class module works with the basic page content type. The simplicity of the Node Class module provides an easy way for site builders and themers to add a CSS class directly to the wrapper on the node. Using this module allows for various different layouts and styles to be called based on defined CSS rules.

Tags: DrupalContent TypesDrupal 7Layout ToolsDrupal PlanetCSS

What's new with Drupal 8?

It has been a month since the last update on Drupal core development. In the meantime we met and worked hard together at TCDrupal and Drupalaton at the start of August triaging outstanding critical issues and resolving some. Also we collaborated on making Drupal's frontend better at Frontend United at the end of the month.

We've been doing such a great job taking care of the beta blocker issues that we are currently down to only one beta blocker as of this writing. What does this mean? Once we are down to no beta blockers left, a final alpha release is published. If there are no more beta blockers identified during a two-week window, the first beta release is published. Then we'll focus on resolving the hundred or so remaining critical issues to get to release candidates (once all of them are resolved).

Right now, help with the remaining beta blocker as well beta deadline and beta target issues is most welcome. Beta target issues may get in anytime later, but beta deadlines may not unless re-evaluated for inclusion regardless.

The best opportunity to get to work with Drupal developers in person is the 9 (nine) days of sprint opportunities coming up at the end of September at and around DrupalCon Amsterdam. It is the best way to learn Drupal 8 hands-on and help on the way.

Where's Drupal 8 at in terms of release?

Last week, we fixed 8 critical issues and 12 major issues, and opened 4 criticals and 7 majors. That puts us overall at 104 release-blocking critical issues and 644 major issues.

Where can I help? Top criticals to hit this week

Each week, we check with core maintainers and contributors for the "extra critical" criticals that are blocking other work. These issues are often tough problems with a long history. If you're familiar with the problem-space of one of these issues and have the time to dig in, help drive it forward by reviewing, improving, and testing its patch, and by making sure the issue's summary is up to date and any API changes are documented with a draft change record, we could use your help!

• Issue #2330121: Replace ContentEntityDatabaseStorage::getSchema() with a new EntityTypeListenerInterface implemented by SqlContentEntityStorageSchema is part of our only remaining beta blocker, in which we factor out the SQL database creation from going through the ModuleHandler and instead introduce onEntityType(Create|Update|Delete)() methods to cover our use cases. The beta blocker is purposely broken to smaller issues to help reviewers. Look for more sub-issues under #1498720: Make the entity storage system handle changes in the entity and field schema definitions later on.
• Issue #2313159: [meta] Make multilingual views work is a collection of problems related to making multi-lingual views in Drupal 8. A number of the sub-issues are "Major", meaning they have significant repercussions but do not render the whole system unusable.

More ways to help

• Pick a critical issue or beta deadline issue, take the time to thoroughly read the issue (including doing some background reading if necessary to understand the problem space), and then update the issue summary for the issue. Include a summary of the current status and remaining tasks for the issue, and identify any API changes the issue would introduce. Consider whether the change would require a change record or updates to existing change records. Consider what the implications of not resolving the issue would be, or of resolving it after the first beta or after release.
• We also need help writing help text for core modules like Field UI, Image, Taxonomy and Toolbar. This is an easy way to learn the Drupal Core contribution process and start contributing to Drupal Core.

As always, if you're new to contributing to core, check out Core contribution mentoring hours. Twice per week, you can log into IRC and helpful Drupal core mentors will get you set up with answers to any of your questions, plus provide some useful issues to work on.

You can also help by sponsoring individual Drupal core development.

Notable Commits

Some of the best of git log --since "August 4, 2014" --pretty=oneline (277 commits in total):

• Issue 1510544 by swentel, Bojhan, Gábor Hojtsy, merlinofchaos, Cottser, Wim Leers, plopesc, aspilicious, sannejanssen, larowlan, tim.plunkett, nod_: Fixed Show previews in front-end theme, able to select different view modes. This was a long time coming. Finally, your node preview will not appear on the backend!
• Issue 2248767 by effulgentsia, beejeebus, alexpott: Use fast, local cache back-end (APCu, if available) for low-write caches (bootstrap, discovery, and config). Improves performance for some critical data a great deal.
• Issue 2224761 by Gábor Hojtsy, alexpott, pfrenssen, effulgentsia, xjm, mlncn: Add a generic way to add third party configuration on configuration entities and implement for field configuration. Resolved a beta blocker by adding a facility for configuration entities to support third party settings. To be used for node types and other things as needed as well. Provides a simple solution when a full-on plugin architecture as in views is not suitable, but extension mechanisms are needed for configuration.
• Issue 1966436 by naveenvalecha, cesarmiquel, Berdir, mr.york, jlbellido, segi, vasi1186, Leksat, Gábor Hojtsy, Schnitzel, grisendo, Aron Novak, likin, penyaskito, vijaycs85, kfritsche, fago: Fixed Default *content* entity languages are not set for entities created with the API. Now made Drupal properly create entities in the right language regardless of through the UI or API (eg. when adding a tag or uploading a file). Also makes entities created from the creation of the site be in the right language always.
• Issue 2295469 by Cottser, dawehner | effulgentsia: Add support for static permission definitions with *.permissions.yml. Makes it possible to simply define permissions in a simple YAML file making this system consistent with several other in Drupal 8.
• Issue 2271529 by attiks, alexpott, Lowell, YesCT, Jelle_S | mdrummond: Move breakpoint settings to theme and module *.breakpoints.yml files at root level. Improves developer experience providing breakpoints.
• Issue 2317085 by pfrenssen | rteijeiro: Added the possibility to create a REST export when creating a new view. Makes it much easier to create simple web service views of Drupal content.
• Issue 2250119 by ParisLiakos, Devin Carlson: Run updates in a full environment. Now that updates are not supposed to operate in API-incompatible environments, their implementation was unified with any other Drupal environment.

You can also always check the Change records for Drupal core for the full list of Drupal 8 API changes from Drupal 7.

Drupal 8 security

With the API stabilizing we are focusing on security again. In our last issue we already reported on Twig autoescape now being on, sometimes resulting in unwanted HTML strings appearing on the page because of double escape bugs. Please check the meta issue if you see these.

• The router service is now access aware so there is no need now to separately access check the routes returned from it.
• Building on this, now menu links, shortcuts and link fields use a unified path validator service..

Drupal 8 Around the Interwebs

• Drupal.com was relaunched and it runs of course on Drupal 8! Read more about it in Dries Buytaerts' post.
• Adam aka phenaproxima is working on modernizing and extending the Drupal Module Upgrader, so you can get automated help upgrading your Drupal 7 modules.
• There are several good practices you can adapt in your Drupal 7 projects preparing for Drupal 8. One of them is using PHPUnit tests in Drupal 7. Lee Rowlands has a great post about this.
• Tobias Stöckler is explaining a Composer based Drupal 8 workflow for integrating Drupal 8 with other PHP libraries seamlessly.
• In D8FTW: Your Next Drupal Hire Isn't a Drupal Hire Larry Garfield says you should look farther than Drupal developers for hiring and suggests some techniques to connect with the larger PHP community.
• Nuvole's Fabian Bircher posted a teaser to his Drupal 8 training showing a Git workflow for managing Drupal 8 configuration
• Four well known Drupal core contributors Jennifer Hodgdon, Bojhan Somers Alex Pott and Cathy Theys sat down with Brian Lewis to talk about sustainability of core development and the Drupal Core Gittip team.
• Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire recorded and recently published a video podcast with Joël Pittet and Scott Reeves on Drupal 8's new Twig templating system.

Drupal 8 in "Real Life"

• September 5: First Friday D8 Contrib Sprint in Zurich, Switzerland as part of the regular series.
• September 6-7: Lviv Euro DrupalCamp in Lviv, Ukraine will have a sprint lead by top Drupal contributor andypost.
• September 12: Drupaldelphia in Philadelphia, USA includes sessions on Drupal 8 theming and Migrate.
• September 12-13: DrupalCamp Montreal in Montreal, Canada is full of great Drupal 8 content on theming, services as well as an introduction.
• September 19 - October 3: DrupalCon Amsterdam in Amsterdam, The Netherlands is going to be amazing with lots of opportunities to learn about and get involved with Drupal 8. It includes two hours of updates on propular contributed modules on Drupal 8 and nine days of sprints.

Whew! That's a wrap!

Do you follow Drupal Planet with devotion, or keep a close eye on the Drupal event calendar, or git pull origin 8.0.x every morning without fail before your coffee? We're looking for more contributors to help compile these posts. You could either take a few hours once every six weeks or so to put together a whole post, or help with one section more regularly. Read more about how you can volunteer to help with these posts!

Was working with a customer who required simple IP-based redirection for Drupal Sites.

Was analyzing the various existing options:

• Smart IP : Looks good. But sets sessions which break Varnish Caching. Most Drupal sites run from behind Varnish Reverse Proxy and using Smart IP would mean either forgoing varnish caching or having to add complex VCL rules.

• Geo-Redirect : Again, would not work well with Varnish. The first redirection will be cached on Varnish and all subsequent users from different countries might be redirected to the cached redirection. Requires additional GeoIP.dat file to be downloaded and this should be updated frequently.

• Using MaxMind API : Most hosts like Acquia allow the Maxmind API to be integrated on the balancers so that Varnish maintains country code in the cache (preventing the same redirection to be cached). The country code is added to the headers in both request and response. This is the ideal way to implement GeoIP for any enterprise site. But it requires dedicated load balancers, and there is no plug-and-play module to utilize the API requiring custom development.

• And a plethora of other modules that break varnish in similar ways..

What I wanted:

• Simple country-based redirection

• Should not break caching / varnish

• Should not require GeoIP datafiles to be downloaded and maintained

• Should be simple and light-weight

• Good-to-have, though not mandatory : Zero or Low subscription cost

A hour-long search resulted in nothing significantly useful for Drupal.

Finally found this API : http://www.telize.com/ . Sounded promising.

• The API powering the site is opensource

• There is no rate limit of any sort at the moment, and the service is free for everyone to use.

• Used GeoLite data created by MaxMind

The API was exciting but still it was not something that could be plug-n-play’ed on Drupal.

Built this module - https://www.drupal.org/project/telize

• Simple Country-based redirection

• Redirection happens at front-end through JS. Works on top of Varnish

• Does not set any session cookies. Won’t break your Varnish

• No subscription required

• No additional files/libraries required

Try it out of you have simple GeoIP redirection requirements.

 

Topic: Drupal

After spending the summer in Boston, I'm ready to fly across the world ... literally, as I'm leaving on a two week trip to China and Japan later this week. I'm very excited about it as I've never had the opportunity to see either of these countries.

I will arrive in Beijing on Saturday, September 6th, for the Young Global Leaders Annual Summit. A private path from where I'll be staying, Commune by the Great Wall, leads to a non-restored section of the epic Great Wall of China. Exploring this truly untouched piece of Chinese history still in its original landscape should be a special experience! Stay tuned for photos.

Following my time in Beijing, I'll transfer to Tianjin to attend Summer Davos. In addition to that, we're organizing a meetup with the local Drupal community - https://groups.drupal.org/node/434658. If you are in the area on September 10th, please stop by for a drink. I'd love to meet you and learn about the State of Drupal in China.

I'll end my two week trip in Tokyo, Japan. My time will be split between meeting the local Drupal community - https://groups.drupal.org/node/440198, understanding the adoption rate of Drupal in the Japanese market, and attending private meetings with digital agencies, Acquia partners and others to learn about the state of the web and digital in Japan.

Xièxiè and dōmo arigatō to those that have helped plan these events and gather the Drupal community for some fun evenings!

If you aren't able to make either Drupal meetup, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

The world is full of Drupal news sources - Planet Drupal, Drupal Fire, Groups.Drupal.Org, and many many more.  So of course we've decided to build another one. 

Why?  Because we can. And because we've been spending a lot of time playing around with Rebelmouse.  So - aggregating content from all over the planet, we bring you Drop News

• Drupal
• Planet
• Planet Drupal

I am unabashedly an engineer. I obsess over the pursuit of finding the most efficient solution to any problem.

In the realm of open source software, this approach has served me well. We read, reverse-engineer, fork, improve, and share. I want my process to be faster, more flexible, and maintainable for the long haul.

As I’ve investigated different methodologies, one characteristic I constantly underestimate is the team dynamic. I tend to pigeon-hole my mind into thinking that the solution to a problem is the most important goal.

Hey look! There’s a problem! I must find a solution for it.

• What if complex problems can’t be solved by me?
• What if, when I suggest a tool or a programming philosophy, it masks the need to dive deeply into other factors?

The more I researched my approach, I came across a concept that is vital to team effectiveness when solving complex problems: emotional intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence, sometimes referred to as EQ (emotional intelligence quotient) to complement IQ (intelligence quotient), is the ability to be aware of, express, control, reason, and interpret emotions appropriately.

Within a team, many, many, many studies have shown that EQ, more than IQ, is the key to solving complex problems.

The team dynamic is engrained with the DNA of open-source projects. Any Drupal issue queue or Packagist library commit log supports that.

The better question I ask myself, however, is:

• Are the teams I work on the most emotionally intelligent?
• If not, what am I doing to improve that metric?

Peeling back this onion revealed the societal constructs that affected how I view an effective team.

Typically, I look to the most technical people I know for answers. In some cases, I follow the stereotypical engineer playbook of positing a hypothesis, demanding evidence, and playfully browbeating a decision.

Put another way, how many times have I jokingly used the phrase ” Are You  doing it wrong?” and is that the most effective solution?

As the research suggested, this emotionally oblivious approach was philosophically incongruent with proven science!

• How could I call myself an engineer?!?!
• How could I obsess about the pursuit of efficiency and solution, when my own attitude was blunting my team’s effectiveness?

I needed to do better.

I needed to find something, rooted in math and science, that helped me understand how to refactor my way of thinking.

I then learned about perspective and heuristic techniques. Perspective is how one looks at a problem. Heuristic is the mental shortcut one uses to arrive at a solution. Both are shaped by experience and knowledge, but the nuance in process from a variety of individuals is key.

Dr. Scott Page elaborates :

The diversity of an agent’s problem-solving approach, as embedded in her perspective-heuristic pair, relative to the other problem solvers is an important predictor of her value and may be more relevant than her ability to solve the problem on her own. Thus, even if we were to accept the claim that IQ tests, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, and college grades predict individual problem-solving ability, they may not be as important in determining a person’s potential contribution as a problem solver as would be measures of how differently that person thinks.

It opened my eyes to how I’ve been going about solving complex problems all wrong.

In the context of a complicated problem, there is a higher likelihood of finding a global optimum (the best solution) when you have a diverse set of team members with local optimum (their best solution). Put simply, I needed to engage more (not less) with people who were different than me.

In essence, given the right conditions, diversity trumps ability!

What’s interesting about this research, however, is the fact that communication among members with different perspectives is very difficult.

In fact, as Dr. Page continues:

Problem solvers with nearly identical perspectives but diverse heuristics should communicate with one another easily. But problem solvers with diverse perspectives may have trouble understanding solutions identified by other agents.

Thus, we’ve come full circle to why EQ is so important.

If team members are not in-tune with each other, the benefits gained from their diversity can be lost. It is vital, therefore, in my unabashed obsession to being an engineer, that I not only need to improve my EQ, but surround myself with colleagues who have a high EQ and learn from them.

So what are the characteristics of high EQ individuals? Statistically, who has high EQ?

Some of our thought leaders here at Phase2 have answered that question.

If you’re interested in learning more, find me as I share my ideas on a building a more inclusive community at various conferences and camps!

By Michael Ross

This article was published in the print magazine Drupal Watchdog, Volume 4 Issue 1, 2014-05, on page 21, by Tag1 Publishing. The magazine was distributed at Drupalcon Austin, 2014-06-02.

Prior to Drupal 8, the core directories (includes, misc, modules, profiles, scripts, and themes) were located in the installation's root directory. Drupal 8 consolidates them into a new "core" subdirectory, which tidies up the root directory and should make it easier to track changes to core versus contrib or custom files. There are still three root subdirectories for modules, profiles, and themes, which can be used for custom and contrib projects. Each directory initially contains only a README.txt file explaining the repurposing and how developers can still use the pre-D8 "sites/all" scheme.

Figure 1. Drupal 8 root directories and files

Copyright © 2014 Michael J. Ross. All rights reserved.

By Michael Ross

This article was published in the print magazine Drupal Watchdog, Volume 4 Issue 1, 2014-05, on page 21, by Tag1 Publishing. The magazine was distributed at Drupalcon Austin, 2014-06-02.

When custom and contributed themes are added to a fresh Drupal installation, the core themes often fade into the background, even though they are valuable, particularly for learning theming. In Drupal 7, those core themes are: Bartik (enabled by default), Garland (Drupal 6's default), Seven (optimized for site administration), and Stark (minimalist and thus useful for module output debugging). The sole template engine is the venerable PHPTemplate. Drupal 8 adds Twig as the canonical template engine. Garland is gone, while Bartik, Seven, and Stark have been HTML5-ified and Twig-ified.

Figure 1. Drupal 8 core themes

Copyright © 2014 Michael J. Ross. All rights reserved.

By Michael Ross

This article was published in the print magazine Drupal Watchdog, Volume 4 Issue 1, 2014-05, on page 20, by Tag1 Publishing. The magazine was distributed at Drupalcon Austin, 2014-06-02.

Compared to its predecessor, Drupal 8 offers website builders far more capabilities without the use of contributed modules, because it incorporates many of the most popular ones into core (e.g., Actions, CKEditor, Configuration Manager, Entity, and Views), as well as useful field types (e.g., Datetime, E-mail, Entity reference, Link, Options, and Telephone). Conversely, less popular core modules (e.g., Dashboard, OpenID, Overlay, PHP, and Poll) have been dropped. These improvements greatly increase the range of websites that can be built with vanilla Drupal, and reduce the time spent downloading commonly-used modules and scrolling past rarely-used ones.

Figure 1. Drupal 8 core modules sample

Copyright © 2014 Michael J. Ross. All rights reserved.

By Michael Ross

This article was published in the print magazine Drupal Watchdog, Volume 4 Issue 1, 2014-05, on page 20, by Tag1 Publishing. The magazine was distributed at Drupalcon Austin, 2014-06-02.

In Drupal 7, site administrators can utilize its core Toolbar module for speeding navigation. Drupal 8's equivalent improves upon it, sporting a more readable interface, with clear icons. Admin menu items are grouped into: "Manage" (encompassing the menu items of its predecessor, with "Modules" renamed to "Extend"), "Shortcuts", and a user menu for profile management and logging out. The toolbar is responsive to the device's screen width, switching to a vertical orientation for narrow displays — which can be forced by clicking the arrow button on the far right of the toolbar's (white) second level.

Figure 1. Drupal 8 admin toolbar vertical

Copyright © 2014 Michael J. Ross. All rights reserved.

Drupal users who want to build or customize displays or layouts, or simply build their own administrative areas will love Views from the Ground Up and now is your chance to attend this training at DrupalCon Amsterdam!

Views from the Ground Up consists of 8 real world (and useful) views that are created with an increasing level of complexity. By the end of this class, students will be able to take almost any views display currently being used in Drupal, and override it, to fit better to their particular admin style and needs.

Meet the Trainer from the NorthCross Group

Chris Porter (netw3rker) has spoken at DrupalCon Barcelona, Munich, and San Francisco and has provided this training for the past four years to a variety of global clients, including Fortune 500 companies.

Attend this Drupal Training

This training will be held on Monday, 29 September from 09:00-17:00 at the Amsterdam RAI during DrupalCon Amsterdam. The cost of attending this training is €400 and includes training materials, meals and coffee breaks. A DrupalCon ticket is not required to register to attend this event.

Our training courses are designed to be small enough to provide attendees plenty of one-on-one time with the instructor, but large enough that they are a good use of the instructor's time. Each training course must meet its minimum sign-up number by 5 September in order for the course to take place. You can help to ensure your training course takes place by registering before this date and reminding friends and colleagues to attend.

Register today

Published: Wed, 09/03/14Download this episodeProject

It’s easier than you think to publish your module on Drupal.org. This is my experience going through the entire process. Sharing this experience I hope to convince you and others to do the same. Contributing back to the community that gives all of us so much, to many of us our livelihood.

• When Doug first recommended that I talk to you about this, I wasn’t really thrilled. But, I took a look at your slides, and thought that it actually looked like really good information. So, what made you decide to put together a presentation on the project application process in the first place?
  My “Why”
  Finally published a module to help solve my own problem
  My project that took me through this process is Display Suite Extra Layouts
  https://www.drupal.org/project/ds_extra_layouts
  Projects don’t have to be the 100% perfect solve for everyone, everywhere
  It’s more about: Giving back, centralizing code, helping others make great projects too.

• So what are the steps to getting a project reviewed and accepted?
  Where to start and basically the entire guide to submitting a module
  “Apply for permissions to create full projects” https://www.drupal.org/node/1011698
  Some things to know
  One time process
  Reviews are primarily by your peers
  Learns/reiterates code standards and best practices
  Do your Research First
  Check if your idea exists already
  Combine efforts where you can
  Volunteer as a co-maintainer where needed

• Okay, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. What are the technical steps you need to follow to get your project approved?
  Setup Git Access
  Learn some Git basics
  Google is your friend
  Github & Code School’s tutorial http://try.github.io
  Setup your Git Access in your D.o profile
  Basically just need to add an SSH key
  Instructions here: https://www.drupal.org/node/1047190
  Sandboxes
  With Git access setup you can now create sandboxes or “experimental” projects
  Instructions here: https://www.drupal.org/node/1011196
  Take advantage of these, having a commit history of changes is a good thing.
  Use sandboxes to get your code “production ready”
  The Checklist (Pre-Application)
  Before starting the application make sure you run through the checklist
  Setup Readme, Git Branches, well commented, etc...
  Link to checklist: https://www.drupal.org/node/1587704
  The process goes much much faster, many people skip it
  PA Review Bonus
  Part of the checklist asks you to run your sandbox through a bot.
  Catches the majority of problems.
  You can setup your own Review Bot
  https://www.drupal.org/project/pareviewsh
  http://pareview.sh/
  “Full Stop” - Took me a while to figure that out.
  You get a review bonus when everything is fixed.
  The Application
  https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/projectapplications
  READ THE DIRECTIONS!
  In the title include core version: [D7]
  Write a Clear Descriptions… can be the same as your project/sandbox page
  Clear descriptions help people understand better the purpose of your project
  Provide links to your Sandbox, the Git clone command, and PA Review
  When you are ready set the status to “Needs Review”

• I noticed when I looked through your slides that you mentioned reviewing other projects as a part of this. Why is that needed?
  Reviewing other projects
  You must review at least 3 other people’s projects
  Post a link to your reviews in your own project application
  It’s just like trying a new module.
  Download it, enable it, try it
  Report back your findings… good, bad, and suggestions
  I learned a lot from doing this
  Now you wait.
  Others will review your project and post feedback.
  be prompt to fix issues
  Once all is well someone should mark your project “Reviewed and Tested by the Community”
  Then you wait for someone with the “Power” to grant you full project status

• Once someone has approved your project, what’s involved with getting the official project page setup?
  Into the Wild!
  You can now create your project page
  be mindful of your project URL, you can’t change it
  Create a new release on your project page and in Git
  Creating a release: https://www.drupal.org/node/1068944
  Tag Nameing Convention: https://www.drupal.org/node/1015226
  FIN.

Questions from Twitter

• timani.co.zw
  Will this cover D.O vs github for projects? Pros & cons of staying with current design vs migrating to github?
• Joshua Turton

MUP117 When are we going to see movement on the project application issue queue?

• Joshua Turton

MUP117 process seems broken - have to apply... but once past "quality control" you can release any junk u want.

• Joshua Turton

MUP117 Also: encouraged to review others to boost your app's priority, but why would we trust reviews from users who haven't passed through process? (speaking of high priority list/review bonuses) Episode Links: Jeremy on drupal.orgJeremy on TwitterJeremy on Google PlusDrupalCamp Utah Session PageSession SlidesCreating a SandboxApplication ChecklistPareview.shProject ApplicationTags: drupal.orgProjectsplanet-drupal

What do you get when you combine a state-of-the-art open source content management system with a seemingly endless need for developers, an instructor passionate about developing Drupal talent with solid fundamentals and best practices (yours truly), six eager, geographically diverse students (pictured above - more on them in future blog posts), and a modern online classroom environment (the topic of this post)? If the content management system is Drupal, then the only answer is the online version of the Drupal Career Starter Program: Drupal Career Online.

This week marks the start of the first session of Drupal Career Online, an immersive 12-week online training program designed to take people passionate about technology and turn them into Drupal professionals. The curriculum is the result of continuous development and improvement over the past three years, and now features a dedicated web site, PDF handouts and reference documents for every lesson, weekly self-assessment quizzes, screencasts covering important concepts and a healthy dose of Drupal community involvement.

-->

read more

How many hours for multithreading the server? Or: dealing with overly detailed project planning Many developers, me included, dread that moment. Someone sits down with you and wants to know how many “hours” each step of the project will take. And of course the thing is, if you are doing something that has been done many times before, you might be able to provide a detailed estimate. People that build houses work like this, but they still often get it wrong.

Feature

Drupal has long had a strong collaborative culture. We share modules, we share development tasks on core and modules, and we share infrastructure on Drupal.org. That's a critical part of the health of our community: Sharing is how Open Source works.

The broader PHP world, however, has long sucked at sharing. Every project is its own island; sharing code between projects has been difficult, and managing third party libraries a pain. Just about the only option was PEAR, but unless you had root access on every server you needed, and were running only a single application per server, it wasn't really useful.

That was then, this is now. Enter Composer, a PHP dependency management tool that works. Composer began life in late 2011 in the Symfony community but was deliberately built to be project-agnostic, and today is being used by thousands of projects large and small, including Drupal.

Composer Basics

Composer consists of two parts. One is Packagist.org, which is a central clearinghouse of Composer-compatible packages. As of July 2013, Packagist offers over 13,000 packages, ranging from simple libraries to complete frameworks. The other part is Composer itself, a command line PHP application that is dead simple to install. By default, Composer will download packages from Packagist.org but you can also set up your own package server, or even just one-off Git repositories, to host Composer-capable code. All you need to make it work is a simple JSON file.

Let's start off with a trivial example. We’ll write a super-simple script that uses the Guzzle HTTP client (now bundled with Drupal 8). To start off, create your project folder. Inside it, create a directory called src. That's where we'll put all of our code. Now create a file called composer.json with the following contents:

Over the last eight months, I have been a developer at Appnovation.  During my time here, I have learned plenty new things and worked on a lot of different projects.

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