Software

Back in February at the Acquia Build Week hackathon, Team "Upgrade Roboto" (webchick, Wim Leers, Gábor Hojtsy, xjm, japerry, and estha) published the Drupal Module Upgrader project.

Earlier this year Zivtech received a Startup PHL "call for ideas grant" from the city of Philadelphia. The project’s goal was to help teach aspiring students or recent graduates today’s top web development technologies and help sculpt the technical landscape of the city. With help from Neomind Labs we have set out to help change the future for 24 students, or devcampers as I like to call them, at the first Philly Dev Camp. Philly Dev Camp is a web developer boot camp focusing on skills that local tech companies are looking for in today's workforce.   I have been an instructor with Zivtech for about a year now, and this is one of the larger--if not largest--classes I have taught. As the instructors, we did not get to learn much about the students before Philly Dev Camp started, but David Hamme, Neomind's Alex Kaplan, and Zivtech President/CTO Jody Hamilton, did great job of choosing the right devcampers for the inaugural 2014 camp. We have been collecting a ton of feedback about the camp so far, and things seem to be going really well from what we have gathered. We probably have a few things to work on, but it's a first for everyone this year. We are hoping with the outcome of this year’s camp we can continue working with the city to provide technical education to Greater Philly Area residents and keep the camp going.   Devcampers have already completed 4 weeks out of the 5 weeks of this year’s class. Students have learned a handful of crucial skills so far such as command line basics, the LAMP stack, git for version control, and SASS for front-end development. Many students came into this class just knowing some HTML and CSS, while others have already built their own sites using Wordpress, so the skill levels are varied throughout the class. The most notable characteristic to me about this class is that those that are more advanced are eager to help their less-experienced peers. This means that they are going to work well on teams with multiple developers in the future.   I am only one of the handful of instructors that Zivtech has brought to the table for Philly Dev Camp. Our other 2014 Philly Dev Camp instructors are Jody Hamilton, Sean Wolfe, and Howard Tyson. Each of us was tasked to cover our strongest skillsets. I covered git, MySQL, and Drupal Site Building. Jody has covered command line basics, vim, PHP basics, and advanced Drupal site building and Drupal development. Sean has covered CSS and SASS front end development, and Drupal theming. At the end of last week, Howard started taking the devcampers on a hike through hot new web technologies like Angular.js, Node.js, and newer database systems like MondoDB, redis, and memcache. This week students have been getting a full helping of Ruby on Rails training by Ryan Findley and John Parsons from Neomind Labs. Outside of our instructor team, we have also had some additional help from Zivtech team members Victor Lourng and James Jones.   I had always wanted to be a teacher, so being able to help the students of Philly Dev Camp learn something I enjoy doing, and is a very useful skillset for their future, is a very rewarding feeling. It will be interesting to see how things shape up for the remaining 3 weeks of Philly Dev Camp and where these new skills will take them after the class is over. I’m looking forward to this becoming a yearly thing that we can continue for a long time to help build up Philadephia as a major contributor to shaping tomorrow's web.   Follow Phillly Dev Camp on Twitter at @phillydevcamp. Terms: PhillyDevCampWeb Developer BootcampPDC14NeomindDrupal Planet

As part of our day-to-day maintenance of Drupal Commons, we often assist with Drupal contributed modules that are included as part of Commons but not specific to the application, whether that means fixing bugs by writing or reviewing patches, or coordinating with other module maintainers and the Drupal Security team to help reduce the time between reported issues and security advisories.

In the fall of 2012 while doing a talk at a local conference in Los Angeles I was approached by Oscar Menjivar, founder and CEO of Teens eXploring Technology (TxT), a non-profit organization teaching inner city teenagers from South Los Angeles about technology and leadership.  Oscar was looking into Drupal as a potential technology to include in the summer coding academy his organization holds every year.

With DrupalCon Amsterdam and The Prenote right around the corner, it seemed like a good time to revisit this recording from when I had the tables turned on me at DrupalCon Portland and got interviewed by Ray Saltini from Blink Reaction. He asked me some great questions about Drupal, and especially why you should come to Drupal community events like DrupalCon. See you in Amsterdam!

Topic: AcquiaDrupal

I'm happy to share news that Amazon has joined the Acquia family as our newest investor. This investment builds on the recent $50 million financing round that Acquia completed in May, which was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

Acquia is the largest provider of Drupal infrastructure in the world. We run on more than 8,000 AWS instances and serve more than 27 billion hits a month or 333 TB of bandwidth a month. Working with AWS has been an invaluable part of our success story, and today's investment will further solidify our collaboration.

We did not disclose the amount of the investment in today's news announcement.

This will be a quick tutorial on how to set up Disqus on a Drupal site for commenting. var switchTo5x = false;stLight.options({"publisher":"dr-75626d0b-d9b4-2fdb-6d29-1a20f61d683"});

What do you get when you bring together thousands of diverse open source developers in Portland, Oregon? Great parties with delicious craft beer! But you also get Linux kernel hackers mingling with Docker devops engineers who are talking with PHP and Perl developers. Great minds from across the world learn from each other to make open source even better at OSCON, the annual open source conference.

This year, 16 amazing volunteers helped represent Drupal to over 4,200 open source developers at the annual OSCON trade show. At the Drupal Association booth, volunteers handed out Drupal stickers, shared how Drupal can be the solution to a broad range of web needs, and talked about the extensive contrib project ecosystem and active Drupal community. Our helpful volunteers also answered a lot of questions ranging from "What is Drupal and how much does it cost?" to "When is Drupal 8 going to be released?"

OSCON will return next year, July 20-24, and we'd love to have you join us to spread the joy of Drupal. To get involved with spreading the word, get in touch the Drupal Association via their contact form or through Twitter.

 

Having a great time at the Drupal booth at #OSCON. Stop by, grab a sticker and say hello! pic.twitter.com/Iyla5RdyQk

— Drupal Association (@DrupalAssoc) July 23, 2014

Our web development army continues its reconnaissance operations on the best DrupalCamp events! August 7-10 we have taken one more strategic point — Hungarian Drupalaton!

A world-wide famous Balaton lake has become a location for one of the biggest Drupal venues in Hungary. InternetDevels company has supplied this event by becoming its silver sponsor!

The participants had no chance for boredom — workshops and code sprints were supported by wonderful launch-breaks and exciting leisure time activities!

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The Drupal community is hard at work delivering the next major release, Drupal 8. If you are already involved, your help is much appreciated. If not, but you would like to help with Drupal core development anre are looking for a way to start, take a look at core mentoring hours. It's a great way for people to get involved, and there are several time slots each week that suit many people's schedules.

• Drupal
• features
• Drupal 8
• CMI
• Configuration Management Initiative

Completed Drupal site or project URL: http://listart.mit.edu/

MIT's List Visual Arts Center is the contemporary art museum and visual art lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. After completing a comprehensive rebrand of the List, we set out to bring that brand to life online. TOKY — the team behind the site's design and development — is a full-service branding and design consultancy with offices in St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston.

Key modules/theme/distribution used: Advanced CSS/JS AggregationAutomatic NodetitlesConstant ContactDateEntity referenceField collectionGeolocation FieldGoogle Site SearchImageAPI Optimize (or Image Optimize)MediaMediaElementRemote stream wrapperSub-pathauto (Sub-path URL Aliases)TypogrifyOrganizations involved: TOKY Branding + DesignTeam members: Daniel Korte

When i found that exposing the Views filters as a block, to use as a search block for a Search API page, would show the sort options together, i thought: "Oh sh**". I instantly thought that it would be painful to get a "specific use case" like this one working quick. But i'm working with Drupal, right? hehe In 3 steps, the solution was simple, by the community:

Today we are excited to announce the latest release of our Drupal 8 theme Prius. The last build support the freshly baked (Drupal 8 Alpha 14). The migration from alpha13 to alpha14 was pretty smooth. We just run into some weird issues that we've traced down to the libraries implementation. We'll explain how we fixed it to prevent you from some Drupal headaches.

Check out the code on drupal.org or read our dedicated blog entry if you want to find out more about our first Drupal 8 theme.

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A lot of Drupal companies have started adopting virtual development environments. This has a lot of benefits for unifying the way people collaborate on projects. The main idea behind it is to have everyone working on the same environment, following the same production set up. Using a virtual environment, you can standardize what versions of PHP, MySQL, Apache, Nginx, Memcache, Varnish, Solr, Sass/Compass libraries, etc. are used. This way, you do not have to worry about things like setting up your front-end developer on their Mac, Windows, or Linux machine with a bunch of software for a particular project. In this article I would like to share some thoughts on how we at Propeople utilize Vagrant, an open-source software that we use to create virtual development environments.

 

Starting point

When we start a Drupal project, we do not just keep the Drupal codebase in the repo. We also keep configuration files of Vagrant and the Drupal repo. We use configurations from puphpet.com as a starting point but add some customizations on top. Based on our production set up (version of operating system, web server, PHP versions) we generate configs and then adjust them to our needs. One example of such a code structure can be seen at https://github.com/podarok/ppdorg. Here is the basic structure:

 

IP address and tools

We use a virtual host for the project. For example, after bringing up the virtual machine, we can use the URL http://ppdorg.192.168.56.112.xip.io  to access our development site. We use the xip.io service for building host names. In some projects, we also put a custom index.html so when you open http://192.168.56.112.xip.io you will see the list of tools available for the site builder.

 

Tools

We usually set up tools like Adminer.php, phpinfo.php and some others for developers. One of the regularly used scripts we include is a reinstall of the site (we build our sites as installation profiles) and pull_stage.sh – a script to pull the database and files from the staging or live environments.

 

Pull from staging

On Vagrant Box we install Drush and use it for syncing of the database and files from the remote environment. In order to have SSH login to that environment, we also copy the SSH keys to vagrant box. This can be done by adjusting the puphpet/shell/ssh-keyget.sh script by adding the following to the end of the script:

echo "Copy box ssh keys to ${VAGRANT_SSH_FOLDER}"
cp ${VAGRANT_CORE_FOLDER}/files/dot/ssh/box_keys/* ${VAGRANT_SSH_FOLDER}/
chown "${VAGRANT_SSH_USERNAME}" "${VAGRANT_SSH_FOLDER}/id_rsa"
chown "${VAGRANT_SSH_USERNAME}" "${VAGRANT_SSH_FOLDER}/id_rsa.pub"
chgrp "${VAGRANT_SSH_USERNAME}" "${VAGRANT_SSH_FOLDER}/id_rsa"
chgrp "${VAGRANT_SSH_USERNAME}" "${VAGRANT_SSH_FOLDER}/id_rsa.pub"
chmod 600 ${VAGRANT_SSH_FOLDER}/*

We generate keys, placing them in puphpet/files/dot/ssh/box_keys. Then we add the public key to our staging server and that is it. It is possible to “Vagrant SSH” to the box and then run the script to keep your database and files up to date.

When we pull a database from staging we, of course, sanitize email addresses and adjust settings (for example, switching to Sandbox environments of third party systems that we integrate with, etc.).

 

Drupal's settings.php file

On the Drupal side, we also create a sites/default/dev_settings.php file with all the settings for the database, memcache and any other parameters needed for development. So the only thing developers need to do is to copy this file to settings.php and run the reinstall.sh script to set the site up.

 

Configuration changes

Let’s say we have added memcache to the project, or Apache Solr. The only thing that we need to do is to commit the Vagrant configuration changes to the repo and ask everyone to run “vagrant provision”. Doing this will set everyone's environment to the current state. This is why we love Vagrant and see the benefits of using it every day.

 

Downsides of Using Vagrant

We need to have enough RAM. Usually we assign 1Gb for each box. Preferably, a development machine should have 8Gb of RAM because some of our projects have multiple boxes. Another preferable thing is having SSD. What this means is that if you have pretty decent laptop, you should have everything in place to try Vagrant out.

 

Conclusion

We find using Vagrant to be extremely effective. It allows our teams to work together more efficiently to deliver some of the biggest, most complex Drupal projects in the industry. Adopting a virtual development environment has had a positive effect on our development workflow, getting rid of past pressure points in our process. To learn more about how we can help your Drupal project succeed, please contact us.

Tags: VagrantDrupalDevelopmentService category: TechnologyCheck this option to include this post in Planet Drupal aggregator: planetTopics: Tech & Development

Drupal is (in)famous for providing an egregious amount of class selectors to target every layer imaginable in its rendered HTML. Some superstar culprits are Field Collections, Field Groups, and complex Views. When we see so many handy, available selector classes, it's so tempting just to target them directly in your CSS. But today, I want to share a lesson I learned the hard way about why you've just gotta resist that temptation, and instead create reusable classes.

If you are doing a lot of theming in Drupal with Sass and Compass, there's a good chance your stylesheets rely on specific versions of gems to compile properly. Mixins and functions can change, and sometimes gems rely on specific versions of other gems to work properly.

• Drupal
• Sass
• css
• Ruby
• Gemfiles

As a developer, one of the first new concepts you're going to need to understand for Drupal 8 is PSR-4. Or, the PHP Framework Interoperability Groups (php-fig), Proposal for Standard Request number 4 (PSR-4). A lot of fancy naming, abbreviations and numbers for a pretty simple idea. Allow your PHP classes to be automatically discovered and loaded by following a convention for class namespace and file/directory naming.

Upcoming deployments

This week we are planning to deploy a solution for multiple values for listings of current companies and organizations, a fix for wrong 'open issues' count on user project page, an upgrade Fasttoggle to 7.x-1.5, and a few smaller patches.

To stay up-to-date with bigger Drupal.org changes and deployments you can subscribe to Drupal.org change notification emails. You will receive an update from us every Thursday.

Introducing Drupal.org Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Several days ago we published drafts of the Drupal.org Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. The drafts will become official documents on September 4th, 2014. The next three weeks is your opportunity to review the drafts and give us your feedback.

Previous deployments

A lot of big and small changes went live since our last update. Most noticeably, we deployed:

• infrastructure and software changes to support semantic versioning of Drupal core releases and successfully created an 8.0.x branch,
• RESTful web services (RESTws module) for Drupal.org. This is an important first step towards making Drupal.org more easily integrated with other systems and services. We are actively working to document how the community should begin using these web services to improve how systems like Testbots and Dreditor interact with Drupal.org.

Other deployments include:

• Highlight active tab on /supporters page
• Update Organization supporters view to display all items
• Implement badges: add Hosting Supporters
• Update DrupalorgVersioncontrolLabelVersionMapperGit for semantic versioning in Drupal 8
• Packaging error: drupalorg_drush.drush.inc file access denied
• [Performance] Implement render_cache module for comments
• Comment render caching breaks comments with patches attached
• Implement hook_node_delete() to clear forum block cache when forum topic is being deleted
• Clean up /search page
• Add a hover state for all green buttons
• Need visual deliniation between post and signatures
• Navigation links in https://www.drupal.org/drupal-7.0 are not clickable
• Add distinctive color to css a:visited on D.o
• Create (or increase usage of) forum descriptions
• Add a reference to supporting organizations on projects
• Move field cache to memcache
• Project information project pages showing at the top of the page

Thanks to ergonlogic, FabianX, Steven Jones, DyanneNova and Jaypan for working with us on the issues listed above and making those deployments possible.

Drupal.org infrastructure news

The Drupal.org CDN roll out is complete. There has been minimal issue with the EdgeCast CDN deployment on Drupal.org, however, we have successfully mitigated an issue which involved caching White Screen of Death (WSOD) pages in Varnish and the EdgeCast CDN.

The load balancer rebuilds are in progress and should be deployed sometime this month. The initial deployment of the updated load balancer failed. This prompted us to build out a load balancer staging environment to assist with testing and architecting a safer load balancer build. Once we finish testing this environment, we will push the changes to production.

Testing and configuration of the new Git servers also continues to progress. SELinux rules and a copy of cgit are now successfully running on the Git staging environment.

Two full time staff have started at the Drupal Association during the month of July. With new staff on board we have had time to brainstorm and talk through the bigger projects and goals for Drupal.org infrastructure. Our current focus is on our deployment process, with Archie Brentano leading development environment improvements, and Ryan Aslett leading the workflow and QA process (BDD testing) improvements.

Drupal.org User Research

At the end of July Whitney Hess visited the Drupal Association office in Portland (Oregon) and we started to summarize the information we collected during almost 30 user interviews we conducted previously. We already can say that some of the findings are unexpected and pretty interesting. We are looking forward to sharing those with the community once we have initial user personas developed.

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As always, we’d like to say thanks to all volunteers who are working with us, and thanks to the Drupal Association Supporters who make it possible for us to work on these projects.

Cross-posting from g.d.o/drupalorg.

Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra

Personal blog tags: week notes

About a year ago, the Drupal Association switched Drupal.org and all of its associated properties from HTTP to HTTPS secure. We did this to better protect our users and their data, but it had the unfortunate consequence of making it much more difficult, if not impossible, to trace outbound referral traffic from Drupal.org.

I have a Marketplace listing. What does this mean for me?

For companies with marketplace listings or any links pointing to their websites from Drupal.org, this means that, while you may be getting plenty of visitors to your website from Drupal.org or its associated properties, this will not show up in Google Analytics.

Unless you’ve tagged your links with campaign data, you’ll have no way of knowing who comes to your website from Drupal.org— though you will receive the SEO benefits from having that link in place.

How do I fix this? I want referral information!

Fortunately, getting referral traffic data from Drupal.org can actually be really easy! All you have to do is tag the URLs on your organization page to include campaign information, and you can use this handy tool from Google to do it. If you’re not using Google Analytics, most analytics platforms have a URL builder that will let you add campaign tags.

That’s all there is to it. It’s an easy fix to the problem, and everybody wins: you’ll still get your referral information, and our users stay safe thanks to HTTPS!

Image courtesy of kongsky on freedigitalphotos.com

Download Podcast 137

Dries Buytaert (Dries), founder and lead of the Drupal project and co-founder and CTO of Acquia joins Mike, Andrew, Ryan, and Ted for a very special episode of the podcast. We peppered Dries with questions on wide array of topics including Drupal 8 pace, semantic versioning, and initiatives, funding core development, Drupal 6 support, Acquia Lift, Acquia Engage, Dries’ score on the Acquia Certification Exam, the founding of Acquia, and not-exactly-why Taylor Swift was cut from one of his keynotes (phew!).

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