Software

Column

The Drupal community's commitment to cooperation and sharing is one of its defining characteristics, and the Drupal Extension to Behat and Mink is a powerful example of that cooperation in action. It is not a Drupal module. Rather, it extends the functional testing framework of Behat and Mink in order to provide Drupal-specific functionality. You'll find its detailed documentation at Read the Docs.

The extension helps site builders automate tests for Drupal 6, 7, and 8 without having to write custom code for common Drupal features. It currently provides support in three major areas: setting up test data, mapping page regions, and auto-discovery of Behat tests provided by modules and themes.

Setting Up Test Data

To test any Drupal site, at some point you'll need to set up test data. You can do this in a blackbox fashion, using pre-built steps to create a user – and log in via the interface – then fill out the appropriate form. This approach takes time to write, time to run, and becomes tedious to read. Adding data in this detailed way is warranted at times, but you're typically better off inserting data as a single step in the Given section of your scenario. The Drupal extension provides a driver system to help you.

Blackbox

The default driver assumes you have no privileged access to the Drupal site. All your data setup has to take place through the normal user interface. The blackbox driver exists so you can benefit from other Drupal Extension features.

Drupal API

When your tests run on the same machine as your Drupal installation, you can use the Drupal API directly to create users, nodes, taxonomy vocabularies, and taxonomy terms, without writing any supporting PHP code and without the tedium of blackbox steps. To do so, you configure your testing instance to point at the local path to the Drupal site, tag the scenario with @api, and then use pre-built steps.

@api Scenario: Given I am viewing “article” node with the title “Drupal API”

This will:

Looking for a HTML range field in Drupal 8 core I did not found one. First I tried to alter Number Widget but that was wrong. Just extend a suitable widget. The code is very short. But the display is not as good as one needs. Where is the min and max value? And the current value? The specs @ w3c html5 forms input range has some user agent rendering which does not give min, max or current value hints.

number field.

With the 2014 European Drupal conference fast approaching, the Ixis team members attending this year have scoured the schedule for their must see see sessions this year, and why.

For the Developers

Content Staging in Drupal 8 (Wednesday 10:45) - moving content about from dev to production has always been a huge pain in Drupal, so hopefully we'll get a chance to see how this might work in Drupal 8 and finally put an end to the question of when and where the client should start adding their conent during the development phase.

read more

DrupalCon Amsterdam is less than one month away! I'm excited to meet up with all the Frontend developers who are coming to learn new things from each other.

Ruben and I have worked really hard as chairs of the Frontend track. We defined the track theme Futuristic Tools and Techniques. We aimed to select the right sessions with the best variety and balance that also flow together into one cohesive track.

The State of Frontend

We wanted to kick off the track with a big keynote-style history lesson and insight into the future of Frontend development. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the ever-changing evolution of front-end development? Me to. After David and Brian's excellent session at DrupalCon Austin, My brain is Full, we really wanted them to continue that theme and aim for something bigger.

David and Brian are also working really hard to create an introduction to the entire track, pointing signposts towards other sessions in that track that can fill in more in-depth knowledge about particular subjects. I would encourage everyone with an interest in Frontend development to attend the session if only to better understand which sessions in the Frontend track are right for them.

We also have a few session that compliment and feed in to each other. Here are a few sessions we think work really well together.

Managing Complex Projects with Design Components & Layout Design Patterns & GSS - The CSS Layout System that's 2 Generations Ahead

John Albin led the initiative to bring OOCSS-style CSS standards into Drupal 8, so I'm inclined to say he knows a thing or two in this area. Managing Complex Projects With Design Components, is a great introduction to to whys, hows, and gotchas of writing better CSS.

After you know your component variants from your component modifiers (spoilers!), you can take a really deep dive into another color of the SMACSS rainbow with Layout Design Patterns. I really like the structure of this walk, that covers the foundations of CSS layouts, grid systems, and implementation in Drupal.

You think you know layouts? Maybe you think flexbox is cool? Prepare to get your *mind blown* by Alan Burke in GSS - The CSS Layout System that's 2 Generations Ahead. A grid system that is unlike any other.

*I've been informed that the Drupal Association™ does not encourage nor condone the projection or discharge of any grey matter. Goggles are not provided and any stain susceptible clothing is worn at the attendees own risk.

Getting a Clue at the Command Line & Automated Frontend Testing

As a designer/front-end dev, I've never had a formal education on the command line, it's always been something I've picked up as I've needed it. It used to scare me. I'm so happy Emma Jane is talking on the command line in Getting a CLUE at the Command Line in the same vein as her introduction to Git at DrupalCon Prague last year. The command line is an immensely powerful and productive tool and I'm looking forward to picking up a few tips.

Now that you no longer fear the command line, you'll definitely be better equipped to take in Chris's session Automated Frontend Testing. He's already told me that he won't hold back, and I know he has little fear for live demos. This session is going to be jam packed with useful information on how to keep your Frontend looking good and loading fast, using some automated scripts.

We also have some great sessions on some really focused areas. I can't imagine walking out of any of these sessions without my brain sparkling with new knowledge and ideas.

Getting Content to a Phone in less than 1000ms

1000ms. The holy grail of performance. Can it be done? Or is it just fantasy?

I'm really glad Ian submitted this talk. It's great to have a performance talk with a focused goal. Performance is still as important as ever.

The future of Drupal and CSS

HTML5 and CSS3 is so last decade. No one wants your border radius any more. If you hate the idea of trawling through W3C specifications then this is a good talk for you. Preston presents another forward facing talk that we can also make use of today, a nice roundup of where browser technology is heading.

If you love the idea of trawling through W3C specifications then I can't help you.

Building Modern Web Applications with Ember.js and Headless Drupal

Ember.js is an excellent framework with a vibrant community. There are many frameworks out there and Ember.js is only one of them, but we felt it's important for DrupalCon to be introducing new perspectives and ideas. I'm really glad Mikkel is covering both sides of an Ember.js project using Drupal 7 or 8.

--
Lewis Nyman (LewisNyman)
DrupalCon Amsterdam Frontend Track Chair

Plugins play an important role in Drupal 8, and understanding how the entire plugin system works will help us better understand how, when, where, and why we use plugins.

This is the second post in my Making A Drupalcamp Happen series. I've been involved in camps for about 7 years and recently was the main project manager for Colorado. The first post was around tools, coordination and management. This post is really focused on tasks and when they need to be done to not go crazy.

There are certain things that need to happen every year. The earlier you can sort them out, the easier things will be as you approach the deadline of your event. So, I've listed some tasks below along with some rough timing and notes on some of the items. This is by no means an exhaustive list and the timing might be a little off on tasks, but I think it does give a sense of task, scope, and order.

drupaldrupalcampevent planningtasks

This week: Meet Adam "phenaproxima" Hoenich! Learn what the Drupal Module Upgrader can do for you! And what you can do for it! Come to Webchick's BoF at DrupalCon Amsterdam! Contribute!

Calling all Drupal Devs: Write better code with EntityMetadataWrapper! Have you ever...

Mobile Friendly Navigation Toolbar, shortly known as navbar, is a back-port of toolbar in Drupal 8. The problem it tries to solve is pretty obvious from it's name.

Navbar is an often used module in our Drupal projects. In our recent project we were asked to develop a bunch of menus to quickly access admin pages as and when needed. Unlike Shortcuts, we want this appear dynamically like notification.

For instance, if there are any new comments awaiting approval, the menu should show up and a few more items similar to this. Thought, Navbar could be leveraged for this requirements.

This mighty developer friendly module makes this possible for any module by implementing hook_navbar(). Similar to hook_menu(), an array of menu items to be returned but in renderable array format. If you need an example, function navbar_navbar() is a good place to get started.

The menu it offers can be seen as,

1. The navbar tab by its name acting as menu item (e.g. Home)
2. The navbar tab on click expands to show menu item(s) it has got underneath (e.g. Shortcuts) depends on the way navbar item defined in the hook_navbar().

Example code for #1,

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.