Software

From volunteering your time at events to making a donation, there are plenty of ways to give back to the Drupal project - but by and large, one of the most important things individual Drupalers can do is donate their expertise and become a mentor.

Currently, we have only 24 mentors signed up, and we need 40 mentors to make DrupalCon Amsterdam a success. We’re anticipating several hundred individuals sign up for to join the sprint on Friday and mentorship is a great way to help people new to contributing learn Drupal and, eventually, contribute back valuable time, resources, and code to the project.

To become a mentor, click here to sign up. We need mentors for all levels of Drupal expertise, from teaching absolute Drupal beginners to assisting advanced users how to navigate the Drupal.org issue queue.

Need a ticket to attend?

There are a limited number of free DrupalCon ticket coupons available for people who sign up to mentor, and the deadline to sign up and request a ticket is Friday, 1 August. Don't miss out on an opportunity to help others and get your ticket sponsored!

We’re looking forward to the Amsterdam Mentored Code Sprint and the First-Time Sprinter Workshop. We hope that you’ll join us there!

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Cathy Theys (YesCT)
Brian Gillbert (realityloop)
Ruben Teijeiro (rteijeiro)
DrupalCon Amsterdam Sprint Leads

We’re thrilled to announce the addition of four new staff members to the Drupal Association team. Please help us give a warm welcome to Oliver Davies, Archie Brentano, Phillip Bulebar, and Ryan Aslett!

Oliver (opdavies) started with the Drupal Association in May of this year as a Drupal.org Developer. He has been active in the Drupal community for several years, has contributed numerous patches and modules, and prior to working with the Drupal Association, he contributed to the accessibility of the project. Since joining several months ago, Oliver has already made tremendous contributions to the Association and has seized the opportunity to give back to the community in any way he can.

Archie Brentano (isntall) is the Association’s new DevOps Engineer. Previously, Archie worked as a Multnomah County System Administrator, focusing on enterprise Drupal sites on Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Archie will be concentrating on the infrastructure side of Drupal.org, and has joined the organization because he was impressed by the Drupal community and saw a perfect opportunity to learn more about Drupal and become better involved.

Phillip Bulebar (pbulebar) comes to the Drupal Association with a long and successful track record in marketing and web content management. As the Association’s new Content Manager, Phillip will be creating and optimizing content on Drupal.org to help ensure it meets the needs of visitors. Prior to joining the Association, Phillip held management roles for companies including Nike, Nautilus and other specialty retailers, with much of his focus on creating, delivering, analyzing and optimizing digital content.

Ryan Aslett (mixologic) is joining the Drupal Association as the organization’s first QA Engineer. Previously, Ryan worked as a freelance full stack Drupal developer in the Portland, Oregon area; he has a wide variety of experience in everything from working with Perl to engineering composting toilets in Ecuador and Colombia. At the Association, Ryan will be improving BDD tests for Drupal.org websites, and we’re thrilled to welcome him on board.

Please help us give a warm welcome to our four newest staff members. We’re thrilled to have them on board and know they’ll do great things for the Drupal community.

This is final installment of our four-part blog post series that encapsulates the advice, tips and must-do elements of career building in the Drupal Community from the panel of experts collected for DrupalEasy’s DrupalCon Austin session; Drupal Career Trailhead; Embark on a Path to Success. It will be listed with other career resources for reference at the DrupalEasy Academy Career Center.

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Download Podcast 136

Jason Smith (Silcon.Valet), Solutions Architect for Mediacurrent, joins Mike, and Ryan to talk about one of the highest-trafficked sites in the world re-launching on Drupal: weather.com. Other topics discussed include the Acquia CEO’s recent Reddit AMA, sprint nutrition, and Damien McKenna.

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A month or so ago, this question came up in a LinkedIn Drupal group:

Open SourceDrupalDrupal Planet

I wanted to post this here, since this is more of my sounding board for the Drupal community, but the details are on my personal blog: starting October 6, I will be working for Acquia as a Technical Architect in their Professional Services group!

What does this mean for this site/blog, Hosted Apache Solr, and Server Check.in? Not much, actually—they will continue on, likely at the same pace of development they've been for the past year or so (I'll work on them when I get an odd hour or two...). I am still working on completing Ansible for DevOps, and will actually be accelerating my writing schedule prior to starting the new job, since I'll have a little wedge of free time (a.k.a. unemployment!) between Mercy (my current full-time employer) and Acquia.

When Google Tag Manager and Drupal work together, great things can happen. Both from a web developer's perspective and from a marketer's perspective. We'll take a look at how it all comes together.

I'll be heading out to Denver to give a Sunday keynote at DrupalCamp Colorado.

The theme of the event is "Enterprise Drupal," so we'll be diving in to what that phrase actually means for development firms.

If you're in Denver, please come on down and say hello.

One of the neat new things in Drupal 8 is something called the Tour module. It is built on the Joyride jQuery plugin, which provides a clickable tour of HTML elements on your website. It gives you a way to walk a new user through your site or a particular interface with text instructions and next buttons. If you're not sure what this all means or looks like, have a look at the video below to see it in action in Drupal 8.   I was drawn to investigating the Tour module because I love ways of helping people through documentation. The Drupal core help system is an old system, and there have been many discussions and attempts to update it in the past. Tour certainly doesn't replace the help pages at this point, but it is an interesting new tool. So what exactly is going on with it in Drupal 8? Will we have a fancy new tours all over a default installation? Well, no. As it stands right now, there is only one tour in Drupal 8, which is for the Views building interface. It was submitted as a proof of concept with the Views module in core. So what's the deal?  

It sounds simples, but while Drupal has the awesome Voting API, with Fiverstar, Vote Up/Down and many other voting like modules, we didn't have a "ready to use" solution for a "Like" widget, as we see on Facebook and many other social networks. Another issue is that many people avoid, but sometimes we do need the "Dislike" widget too. Until Like & Dislike module!

Drupal has a block called "Language Switcher", which displays links to different language versions of the current page/node. If the node does not have translated version on the specified language, the block will not display a link for it. This can cause some confusion, since the user always expects to see links to all of the site's languages. This can be fixed by modifying the block so that the all of the links link to the corresponding language's frontpage. It is easy to do by editing the site's theme.

NEWMEDIA's Site Development Process (SDP)At NEWMEDIA we have spent a great deal of time perfecting our site development process. Through many trials and errors we have converged on a SDP that works for us.

When working in a team or in an environment where your code and systems are going to be used by people other than yourself, it is especially important that your site development process is clear, simple, and easy to understand. This, of course, is easier said than done when developing a complex Drupal site. However, when our developers, site-builders and themers are all on the "same page" with code organization and philosophy we are a more effective and efficient team.

After speaking with members of the Drupal community, we believe it is time to start a discussion on how to have a process in place so as to minimize the friction when developing in a team/cooperative environment. In an effort to deep dive into our process this article will be the first in a series of articles discussing our SDP.

A lot of our SDP revolves around how to organize your code so that a developer or site-builder can quickly on-board to a project and larger teams can work together with minimal down-time. The broad pieces of our SDP are:

1. Everything is in code.
2. Sites are built using install profiles and the install profiles have a specific directory structure.
3. Install profiles use Drush Make to capture dependencies on external modules, themes, and libraries.
4. Drupal migrate is used to populate test content during the development phase. (optional)
5. Features are used to capture site configuration. (optional)
6. While a site is in development all functionality must be present after a fresh site install.
7. After a site goes live update hooks can be used to enable new functionality on the production site.
8. Use a virtualized environment which mirrors production. (recommended)

 

What do you think?

Do you have an process expressed or implied? Leave comments below and lets keep this conversation going.

Introducing Commerce Authorize.Net Card Present for Drupal 7

Commerce Authorize.Net Card Present is a new Drupal 7 module sponsored by Last Call Media that allows a Drupal website to accept payments by swiping a credit card through a USB credit card reader.

This module implements Authorize.Net's Card Present API to add a new card present payment method, and is based on the Commerce Authorize.Net module's widely used card not present implementation. 

Developed to accompany Commerce Point of Sale (POS), another module sponsored by Last Call Media, Commerce Authorize.Net Card Present can be used in conjunction with Commerce POS to set up a fully functional Point of Sale system in Drupal 7.

For more information on how to install and configure this module, please visit Commerce Authorize.Net Card Present's project page.

On the weekend of July 12-13, 2014 the Central NJ Drupal Group held a core sprint focusing on the upcoming release of Drupal 8. The sprint was attended a great group of Drupal enthusiasts from Chicago, Montreal, New York, Virginia, and of course New Jersey. We took over the Cowerks coworking space in Asbury Park, NJ for the two days and it provided us a fun space to work the day and night away on a variety of issues.

With only seven beta blockers remaining at the time of our sprint, two were on the top of our list of items to work on. Fifteen people participated in person, and the group made progress on two beta blockers (leading to core commits) as well as many other issues.

See the full recap for more details on participants, issues worked on and completed, and a photo gallery.

Have you ever wanted to show only selected information on a content type to anonymous users and more information to authenticated users? It turns out that you can use Display Suite to provide field-level permissions for an entity.

On Thursday, July 24th, we had a live webinar where we introduced Open Enterprise Intel. If you missed it, don't worry, we have the video right here as well as on YouTube available in HD.

 

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Apart from having a friendly user interface, Drupal also serves as a front-end for many of the technologies, frameworks and APIs. Besides the numerous advantages Drupal has, it also allows developers to make use of other technologies outside of the Drupal platform: MuleSoft, Alfresco, Ruby on Rails, AngularJS, and Python are among the technologies that can easily be integrated with Drupal. var switchTo5x = false;stLight.options({"publisher":"dr-75626d0b-d9b4-2fdb-6d29-1a20f61d683"});

Acquia is constantly working to improve our service offerings, and that means cleaning up existing features and adding new ones that we know will make a big difference in people’s workflow for the better. Despite the scale of some of these improvements, they’re not always immediately visible at first glance, so I’ve taken a bit of time to highlight three recent ones.

Grant and scholarship recipients have been selected for DrupalCon Amsterdam. We had a huge number of wonderful applicants, and selecting our grant and scholarship recipients was a challenge.

For applicants seeking grants, we focused on the importance of each candidate to the Drupal project and code as a whole. Scholarships, meanwhile, were awarded based on the impact or influence on the Drupal community and Drupal adoption that the person would have at their home region— though these were just a few of the many factors taken into account during the selection process.

We’re please to announce the following grant and scholarship recipients below:

Grant Recipients

• Nathaniel (catch) Catchpole - United Kingdom
• Larry (Crell) Garfield - United States
• Dave (Dave Reid) Reid - United States
• David (David Hernández) Hernández Ruiz - Spain
• Dan (dcmul) Mulindwa - Uganda
• J Branson (j.branson) Skinner - United States
• Joël (joelpittet) Pittet - Canada
• Jose (Jose Reyero) Reyero - Spain
• Jeremy (jthorson) Thorson - Canada
• Kalpana (kgoel) Goel - United States
• Patrick (patrickd) Drotleff - Germany
• Brian (realityloop) Gilbert - Australia
• Ricardo (ricardoamaro) Amaro - Portugal
• Sébastien (SebCorbin) Corbin - France
• Shyamala (Shyamala) Rajaram - India
• Janez (slashrsm) Urevc - Slovenia
• Evgeniy (Spleshka) Maslovskiy - Belarus
• Tim (stpaultim) Erickson - United States
• Kristof (swentel) De Jaeger - Belgium
• Yves (yched) Chedemois - France
• Zsófi (zsofi.major) Major - Hungary

Scholarship Recipients

• Aldibier (aldibier) Morales - Colombia
• Alvaro (alvar0hurtad0) Hurtado - Spain
• Andrey (andypost) Postnikov - Russian Federation
• Carlos (camoa) Ospina - United States
• Luis Eduardo (edutrul) Yelaya Escobedo - Peru
• Grzegorz (grzegorz.bartman) Bartman - Poland
• Konstantin (konstantin.komelin) Komelin - Russian Federation
• Weber (Mac_Weber) Macedo - Brazil
• Ivan (rootwork) Boothe - United States
• Tanay (saitanay) Sai - India
• Shabana (Shabana Blackborder) Navas - India
• Tarek (tarekdj) Djebali - Tunisia

Congratulations to all of our grant and scholarship recipients! We'd also like to extend a big thanks to our selection team: Emma Karayiannis (UK) Bart Feenstra (NL) Mike Anello (US).

We’re excited to see all these great people at DrupalCon Amsterdam, and can’t wait to learn from them and make the project even better. When you see our grant and scholarship recipients around volunteering at the event or mentoring new sprinters, give them a high five for being amazing! And regardless of whether you’re receiving financial assistance or not, if you’re coming to DrupalCon, you can share you knowledge and help make Drupal even better too by signing up to become a mentor.

Growing the Drupal project can’t happen if our community doesn’t grow, too— and there’s no better way to help grow the community at DrupalCon Amsterdam than to give back by teaching new skills and ideas to basic, intermediate, and advanced Drupalers.

Now running Drupal 8, in the most hipster way imagined.

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It has been a weekend in the spirit of headless Drupal, front-end optimizations and server side hacks. The result is I updated my blog to Drupal 8. Since you are reading this, it must mean it is live.

First let's start with the cold facts (almost chronologically ordered by request lifetime):

• Varnish
• Nginx
• HHVM
• Drupal 8
• Mihtril.js
• Core REST module for all resources

Other front-end technologies used that does not directly relate to the request itself:

• Gulp.js
• Browserify

So, HHVM, huh?

Yeah, that's mostly just a novelty act. There is no real gain there. Quite the opposite, I have added some hacks to get around some limitations.

HHVM does not work very well with logged in users right now, but works alright for serving anonymous content.

When I reload and look at the source code, there is no css loading. WAT?

Yeah, I am just assuming you remember the styles from last page load. Also, I have made it an image to have a 1 HTTP request CMS, right?

No, really. How does that work?

The real magic is happening by checking if you as a user already have downloaded my page earlier. If you have, I don't need to serve you css, as far as I am concerned. You should have saved that last time, so I just take care of that.

OK, so you use a cookie and save css in localstorage. Does that not screw with the varnish cache

Good question. I have some logic to internally rewrite the cached pages with a key to the same varnish hash. This way, all users trying to look at a css-less page with the css stored in localstorage will be served the same page, and php will not get touched.

What a great idea!

Really? Are you really sure you have thought of all the limitations? Because they are many. But seeing as this is my personal tech blog, and I like to experiment, it went live anyway.

Give us the code!

Sure. The theme is at github. The stupid cache module is at github. Please be aware that it is a very bad idea to use it if you have not read the code and understand what it does.

And since I am feeling pretty bad ass right now, let's end with Clint Eastwood as an animated gif.

Tags:

• planet drupal
• drupal 8
• varnish
• front-end performace
• javascript