Software

As has been the pattern of many recent DrupalCons and Camps, DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014 was all about Drupal 8 and the changes that it’s bringing to the platform and community.

This has coincided with an increase in attendance at Drupal events (2300 in Amsterdam) and an increasing professionalism to DrupalCons. Drupal 8 has pulled us (sometimes forcibly) from out of our comfort zone and into the wider PHP and developer community. This has resulted in more talks covering a variety of non-Drupal topics, which, in my opinion, is a great thing.

The big news of the conference came on day 2, with Drupal 8 finally making it into beta. You can now effectively build basic sites in Drupal 8. In fact, a few brave souls already have, and I intend to do so too with my next site.

Dries Keynote

The regular ‘Driesnote’ was a thought provoking academic discussion on a current hot topic in the Open Source world, sustainability of projects and funding models. He started by stating that there are actually few good Open Source examples we could be following. In Dries’ opinion, the prevalent model of one company funding development is not a good one. Instead he suggested we look to other models, especially the concept of how Open Source software could be treated as a public good, or to coin a British term, ‘The Commons’. He used the example of public roads to show how community desire and amateur implementation can grow. Firstly via business investment (and sometimes privatization) and often resulting in Government control and management. To summarize:

Continue reading %DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014 Report%

A little background.

Established in 1972, we are a non-profit human services organization that serves many diverse populations in the Greater Pittsburgh area.

A large part of our focus is on homeless services, but we also do some mental and physical health programming, early childhood development, community integration and host a large food pantry near the University of Pittsburgh campus. 

Because of our disparate clientele and locations, we have been using multiple Access databases to track participant information.  For many years we wanted to move it online so staff in people's homes, could enter updates from the field.  However, the cost to implement was prohibitive to say the least.

Our Drupal and CiviCRM experience

When we rebuilt our website using Drupal, I stumbled upon CiviCRM as an alternate to Constant Contact.  For two years, we have used Civi on the backend of our site to register for events, make online contributions and send out bulk mails.

Civi has helped us raise a lot of dough.

After working in Civi and Drupal, we realized the combination could effectively be used to consolidate our program and human resources data as well as make it available online.

So we set off on the challenge of implementing a database to track all of our program's data, but repeatedly were having to reinvent the wheel to avoid staff seeing information that had nothing to do with their program.  Since the site was not for the public, we wanted to limit all work in Drupal (i.e: creating views and webforms), and instead focus on streamlining the database.  In essence, Drupal became the backend and Civi the front.

However, the Drupal permissions for CiviCRM were too general to control access to Activities and Cases and while the ACLs in Civi do provide more granular security, they don't cover Activities and Cases.

Make it Happen

We began rolling out our shiny new database in July 2014.

During the roll-out, I began investigating the cost of adding security to Activities and Cases and stumbled upon some threads discussing it.

This one that started in 2009 got me going and we haven't looked back since.

With these changes, it becomes dramatically easier for non-profits like us to implement CiviCRM as a total solution.

Thanks to Donald Lobo and Michael McAndrew for their guidance.

Please share your thoughts.

• CiviCRM
• CiviCase
• Drupal
• Make it happen

DrupalCamp LA: Manage the Gap

Usually when I travel anywhere outside of the Northeast, I tell people I am from Massachusetts or “outside of Boston” and people smile and nod. In rare instances granularity increases in the conversation and I eventually reveal that it’s actually  “a hip little town in the western part of the state called Northampton”.  Well, at DCLA, ~3000 miles from home, before 8:30am, I was 5 for 5 with people from California that not only know where Northampton is, but had visited before and had a favorite hotspot to share. Way to go Noho, you have officially been nationally recognized as geographically relevant.

Everyone was so friendly, and greeted us by name as we walked through the Campus Center. It was incredible that in the land of Hollywood, two folks from Massachusetts, could feel like celebrities. I am not sure it was only because we were the cool kids that had traveled the longest distance, this stardom and warm welcome may have been derived from the early recognition we received for IT mastery.  I basically spent the first morning of the camp traveling from table to table, helping all the sponsors connect to the wifi. I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, but considering the internet prowess in the room, the fact that this marketing manager type found a way to be technically useful and wave a magic connectivity wand to save the people, was pure bliss. People were genuinely super grateful and relieved to have access to the magical interwebs, I realized for techies, having internet was as important to them as my morning coffee is to me.

I learned a ton at the conference, and attended one session in particular that really resonated with me.  James Smith from Image X not only brought his Project Management A-game to the podium, but did so while sporting a sweet mustache.

Development & Profit in Project Management - James Smith, ImageX

The project manager is at the service of the team, not the other way around. James suggested that a daily check in with the team should sound like this:  “Have I met your expectations today? Did you get what you need from me? Did that do what you needed it to do? What do you want or think you need next? When do you need it by?"  

We all know that in the end, a happy team = a happy client. This is very much in line with one piece of our implementation of the Maker's Schedule within our Task-Driven Teamwork model whereby a dynamic hierarchy works, appropriately and effectively, to treat each the client, the project, and team members as the top priority. This DCLA presentation was very fitting: as we are growing our team at every position, we are especially looking for people to join our Project Management team.

If you have excellent communication skills and really advocate for both your clients and team, please consider joining us!

I'm Andy, a developer at Ixis and having just settled back in after my first DrupalCon I thought I’d wrap up my thoughts after attending the annual European conference for the first time.

Initially - wow - DrupalCon is big! I’ve only been to some smaller PHP conferences so to see over 2000 people in one place was quite something. What struck me was how well it was organised - everything was on time with very few technical hiccups. I found the number of sessions quite overwhelming - there was so much to choose from, so having the videos of the sessions online with in an hour or so after it finished was really helpful. I’m still ploughing through the ones I’m interested in.

read more

Start:  2014-10-15 (All day) America/New_York Sprint Organizers:  David_Rothstein

There will be a security release of Drupal 7 core on Wednesday, October 15.

Although we normally only announce security release windows (rather than definite plans for a release), this month we are confident that a release will happen, so please be prepared to update your Drupal 7 sites on Wednesday.

A security release window for Drupal 6 core will be on the same date; this does not mean that a Drupal 6 core security release will necessarily take place on that date, only that you should prepare to look out for one (and be ready to update your Drupal 6 sites in the event that the Drupal security team decides to make a release).

There will be no bug fix release on this date; the next window for a Drupal core bug fix release is Wednesday, November 5.

For more information on Drupal core release windows, see the documentation on release timing and security releases, and the discussion that led to this policy being implemented.

Episode Number: 172

The Entity Reference module not only allows you to reference entities within your Drupal site, it also allows you to do so using a custom created entity reference view. This allows you to leverage the power of the views module to control how the entity reference selection field is displayed.

Tags: DrupalEntity ReferenceViewsDrupal 7Site BuildingDrupal Planet

Last week was my first time as a Drupal Core mentor at a DrupalCon event. 

Why does Drupal need mentors?

At DrupalCon Amsterdam, Dries mentioned in his key note that Drupal needs more people pitching in and contributing to Drupal Core. 

The Drupal community is growing, but the ratio of contributors to free loaders is getting worse. This is probably because people are struggling to get involved or don't understand which skills are needed.

To help overcome these barriers, DrupalCon events ask for people involved in Drupal Core to act as mentors.

How do you get involved?

First of all, you need to attend a mentor orientation session where you meet other mentors who share their experiences. At my orientation session, seasoned mentor Cathy Theys (YesCT) gave an excellent talk about what mentoring involves and what to expect.

Our introductions to each other were very amusing as we shared our Drupal.org usernames. Most of us felt it necessary to defend our choice of usernames with a full entomology and my personal favourite was eojthebrave (you'll have to ask him!).

What did I do as a mentor?

Last Wednesday I spent two hours triaging the issue queue, which contains issues with possible tasks suitable for novice contributors.

A novice is unlikely to complete a whole issue on their own, but there may be components of the issue, called tasks, that they can do. Tasks could include providing steps to reproduce a problem, feeding back on UX or design, taking screen shots or writing documentation. You do not always need to be a developer to contribute.

On Thursday I manned the mentor desk for a few hours. The DrupalCon events have a mentor desk manned by mentors who can advocate to delegates about contributing to Drupal Core and explain how to get involved. A key priority is to encourage delegates to attend a mentored sprint on the last day of DrupalCon, their first steps into the world of the Drupal Core community.

During the mentored sprints, more than 100 people got together to listen to a community tools presentation which covered the installation of everything you need to contribute, how to use the issue queue and comment and IRC etiquette.

Drupal 8 presentation

As a mentor, I gave a presentation to a small group of new contributors which helped them configure the tools and install Drupal 8 for the first time. For some, this was quite an achievement in itself.

Once set up with the tools, the new contributors broke up into smaller groups and selected issues to work on together with the aid of a mentor.

Critical issues

Some of the contributors I worked with looked at an issue to provide more user-friendly text on the 'Extend' section of the site. This was called 'Modules' on Drupal 7 and is where site administrators searched for modules to enable or disable them.

If the patch the contributors provided is committed, then the text they chose may appear on thousands of websites throughout the world - not bad for a short period of collaborative working!

The contributors also uncovered an issue in Drupal Core which we decided to mark as critical. Some of the new contributors were selected to have their finished patches committed directly into Drupal 8 by Drupal Core maintainer Angie Byron (webchick). Angie showed how the process of patch review and committing a patch to core works.

Après sprint

After a tiring, yet satisfying day, the mentors went to dinner together, where we discussed Drupal, development and PHPStorm.

Give it a try!

Being a mentor was a fantastic experience and I recommend it highly. I met some pretty incredible mentors and new contributors.

The Drupal community is made of a wide and varied skill base and everyone can get involved to make a difference to Drupal Core's quality.

If you've not contributed before, come along to the mentored sprint at the next DrupalCon.

If you can't wait that long, there is the Drupal Ladder which describes the small steps you can take to become a regular and useful contributor to Drupal Core.

It's been a while since my last post and with DrupalCon Amsterdam behind us it seems a good timing for another update.

I had some issues installing Compass on Ubuntu 14.04 this is what I did and the errors I came up against that gave me a large headache. I hope others can benefit from what I learnt. This assumes that you have already created a sub-theme in Omega4. I installed the following packages initially:

Tags Drupal Planet Web Development SASS

DrupalCon Amsterdam has wrapped up, and now that we’re over the jet lag, it’s time to look back on one of the most successful DrupalCons to date. DrupalCon Amsterdam was the largest European DrupalCon yet, by far. Just to knock your socks off, here are some numbers:

• More than 2,300 attendees showed up to 120 sessions and nearly 100 BoFs
• 115 attendees showed up to the community summit and the business summit
• 146 training attendees, 400 trivia night attendees, and 400 Friday sprinters made the week a success
• …and through it all, we ate 1,200 stroopwafels.

The fun extended to more than just the conference — with 211 transit passes and 56 bike rentals, attendees from over 64 countries were able to enjoy all the city of Amsterdam had to offer. What a success!

As with any DrupalCon, DrupalCon Amsterdam wouldn’t have been a success without lots and lots of help from our passionate volunteers. We’d like to take a moment to send out a big THANK YOU to all of our track chairs and summit organizers:

• Pedro Cambra - Coding and Development
• Théodore Biadala - Core Conversations
• Steve Parks - Drupal Business
• Lewis Nyman and Ruben Teijeiro - Frontend
• Michael Schmid - Site Building
• Bastian Widmer - DevOps
• Cathy Theys, Ruben Teijeiro, Gábor Hojtsy and the Core Mentors - Sprints
• Adam Hill and Ieva Uzule - Onsite Volunteer Coordinators
• Social Media - Baris Wanschers
• Emma Jane Westby - Business Summit
• Morten Birch and Addison Berry - Community Summit

We also appreciate everything our core mentors did to make DrupalCon Amsterdam a hit — and it’s thanks to lots of hard work from our passionate community members that Drupal 8 is in Beta!

We hope you had as fun and exiting a time in Amsterdam as we did. For those of us who weren’t able to make it, and even for those who were, you can relive the fun on the flickr stream, or catch any number of great sessions on the Drupal Association YouTube channel.  And remember to mark your calendar for DrupalCon Barcelona in September 2015. See you there! Below is Holly Ross' set of slides from the Amsterdam closing session. 

DrupalCon Amsterdam Closing Session from DrupalAssociation

Image credit to Pedro Lozano on Flickr.

We all know the importance of backing up the database for each Drupal site we build and maintain. But it is not uncommon for this to be put on the back burner and never actually implemented. Fortunately, it is really easy to setup with a combination of Amazon S3 and Backup and Migrate. In this tutorial, you will be shown how to set this up so that it runs on auto pilot.

Tags: Drupal Site buildingPlanet Drupal

When creating an order as an admin in Drupal Commerce, we can specify the user that owns the order if we know their user name. This works well in most cases, but to be able to search by the user's e-mail address would be helpful too. I've had a few requests from clients for this feature. So without further ado, let's ado it!

/** * Implements hook_menu(). */ function my_module_menu() { $items = array(); $items['my_module/commerce/order-owner/autocomplete'] = array( 'page callback' => 'my_module_commerce_order_owner_autocomplete', 'access arguments' => array('configure order settings'), 'type' => MENU_CALLBACK ); return $items; } /** * Implements hook_form_FORM_ID_alter(). */ function my_module_form_commerce_order_ui_order_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) { // Attach our custom autocomplete to the order owner name input so we can // search by e-mail address. $form['user']['name']['#autocomplete_path'] = 'my_module/commerce/order-owner/autocomplete'; } /** * Queries results for the commerce order owner autocomplete. */ function my_module_commerce_order_owner_autocomplete($string) { $matches = array(); $query = db_select('users', 'u'); $query ->fields('u', array('uid', 'name', 'mail')) ->condition(db_or() ->condition("u.mail", '%' . db_like($string) . '%', 'LIKE') ->condition("u.name", '%' . db_like($string) . '%', 'LIKE') ) ->condition('u.uid', 0, '<>') ->range(0, 10); $results = $query->execute(); foreach ($results as $row) { $key = "$row->name"; $matches[$key] = "$row->name - $row->mail ($row->uid)"; } drupal_json_output($matches); }

"Hey, since the upgrade, I can't use the power edit feature anymore!" came the request. Ok. There have been several different upgrades over the past few months. The menu editor module has been updated. The server has been upgraded. The site is in heavy use, so there are lots of content changes.

EstimatingProject ManagementDrupal Planet

We have faced with the problem. We use Ajax Login/Register module but put site in Maintenance mode.

But we need to have Sign up ability. Ajax Register module show Sign up form in popup, content is requested from "ajax_register/register". But in maintenance mode we can see Maintenance page response...

But fortunately we have hook_menu_site_status_alter. Thus we can turn off Maintenance mode in our module on separate path:

<?php
function ajax_register_fix_menu_site_status_alter(&$menu_site_status, $path) {
  if ($menu_site_status == MENU_SITE_OFFLINE && user_is_anonymous() && $path == 'ajax_register/register') {
    $menu_site_status = MENU_SITE_ONLINE;
  }
}
?>

This is content of ajax_register_fix.module custom module.

Blog tags:

• Drupal FAQ
• Planet Drupal

We know people get really frustrated when images viewed on desktop look great but are hard to see on a mobile device.

In this blog, I’ll show you how to use the Picture and Image Field Focus modules to crop images for display on desktop, tablet and mobile and make the lives of content creators easier.

It means goodbye to preparing several images for optimum display across all devices and hello to just one image upload and smart image crop control.

The new Drupal Picture element

Picture is a new(ish) HTML5 element which allows different images to be displayed for different devices and also for retina displays. Handy.

This means mobile users no longer have to download images optimised for desktop display when the image is displayed on a much smaller screen. 

How Picture works

Picture considers the way images are served and the needs of content creators, including:

• Size: Images are often served optimised for desktop and then mobile devices reduce them to size. This means that mobiles are often downloading more data than they need to.
• Art direction: For some images it would be better if the image was cropped for mobile display. This is called the ‘art direction’ use case, and I recommend reading this article over here. 
• Image quality: Using <picture> images can be served at a higher pixel density, which means higher quality images can be served for retina devices.

Picture's HTML and browser support

The picture element at its most basic looks like this:

<picture>  <source media="(max-width: 480px)" srcset="mobile.jpg"> <source media="(max-width: 768px)" srcset="tablet.jpg">  <img src="fallback.jpg" alt=""> </picture>

You can see it's been spec'd out by the responsive images community group http://responsiveimages.org/.  It's supported in Chrome 38, implemented in Firefox 33, and can be tested by tweaking FireFox’s settings.  Microsoft is considering supporting it, and Safari hasn’t confirmed their status yet.

If a browser doesn’t support the Picture element, the HTML degrades gracefully and the fallback <img> is displayed. There is also a well-supported, and tested, polyfill - picture fill - on GitHub.

The Picture module

The good news is that Drupal already has a Picture module which includes the picture fill js library. It has a dependency on the breakpoints module.

To set up Picture, you need to setup your breakpoints first (/admin/config/media/breakpoints).  Each breakpoint needs a name and a media query. I've set up my breakpoints to match the Bootstrap breakpoints. For example, I've got a Mobile breakpoint with a media query '(max-width: 480px)' - see image to the left.

Once that's all sorted, you need to setup images styles for each breakpoint.

To setup Picture, install the module and go to /admin/config/media/picture/list. This page lists all the picture displays you have setup. Click 'Add', select the breakpoints you want this picture display to use, and select an image style for each breakpoint - see left.

Once you have a picture display set up, you'll be able to select picture as a display field formatter for an image field. You can then display different images for mobile, tablet and desktop!

Image Field Focus

Some people worry that the art direction use case places a large administrative burden on content editors, as it means preparing several images instead of just one.

You can avoid this if you use Image Field Focus - content admins select a focus area and a crop area for each image and image field focus does the rest, which is a lot less hassle all round.

In the example I've cropped out the person stood on the right, which is represented in the outer selected area. The inner selected area has become the focus area. 

Essentially, any image created will be from within the crop area and will always contain the focus area. The focus area will be, where possible, in the middle of the picture.

In our example, the paragliders in the air might be to small to see if the full image was scaled down to be displayed on mobile. I’ve added a focus area around one of the paragliders so when a mobile optimised image is created it will be a close up image of this area.

To setup image field focus you'll need to enable it for each field you want to use it on.

Defining images styles

When you define your images styles, you need to add the Focus Scale And Crop style - see left. I've set up three distinct image styles, one for each breakpoint, see image below. If you want to more detail on setting up images styles, read this.

What do you think?

Hopefully you can see that the Picture and Image Field Focus modules work together as a great combination!  

We asked our marketing and content team what they thought and they said, “This is literally the best thing since sliced bread.” 

One of the Drupal 8 initiatives was to make "headless" Drupal core work out of the box. Drupal now has a ReST API.

This allows you to use all the Drupal 8 features to edit your content but present the content not only on a Drupal frontend but also on mobile apps or anything else that can work with JSON data.

Field collections is a nice contributed module that extends the default Drupal entity functionality by creating a new entity field that can be composed by other fields. With this module we solve problems like creating complex entities where we want to store multiple different values into one single field.

read more

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

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

Panels and layers

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

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

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

Help is at hand

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

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

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

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

My Panels page

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

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

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

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

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

Let me know what you think!

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