Software

Think back with me to the days of static websites. Those were easy! You just threw some html up on a server and that was it. No performance issues, no security issues, no worries about redundant failover if something goes wrong. No getting woken up in the middle of the night because something did happen. It was simple, fast and hard to break.

All that changed with more Dynamic websites like Drupal. We get a lot for using Drupal. We get a first class CMS, huge ecosystem of modules and the ability to change content live on the server. But we also get a lot of headaches along with it. We have to design a server system that can handle the load, be constantly monitoring it for failures, apply security updates and be vigilant of security breaches and be ready to be woken up when something doesn’t work.

We recently were challenged to find a way to use the power of Drupal as a CMS but serve the site as generated static pages. It was an interesting idea and we decided to see if we could make it work. We started out by building a proof of concept module that would take a Drupal site and render it as plain HTML pages with all the associated assets such as JS, CSS and images. This turned out not to be too hard once we used a little apache rewrite rule to fix url paths. We decided to call this module the Static module. It is available on Drupal.org (http://www.drupal.org/project/static)

By itself this module turns out to be really useful for two use cases. Static websites There is a class of website that is built in Drupal but is rarely if ever updated. There are no “community” bits to it like comments and webforms. For this type of website, you can use the static module to periodically export your entire Drupal site to static html that can be uploaded to a simple server without PHP, MySQL, memcache or anything other than a web server. If changes need to be made, they can be made on a laptop or staging server and then exported and uploaded again. This allows both viewing the full site for acceptance testing before it goes live and all of the performance and security gains of a static website. Archive websites A similar type of website is an archival site such as the various DrupalCon and DrupalCamp websites. While they no longer need to be live Drupal sites or be updated, they should still be accessible to see the content that was there. In the same way as simple Static websites, archived websites can be generated, uploaded and then left alone. Static websites are great and all but we can actually take it one step further. Turns out this module is also even better for building Hybrid websites. Hybrid websites A hybrid website is the primary reason we created the static module. We wanted a system where Drupal was installed behind a firewall and a static site was periodically generated and copied over to a public web server. This would allow content writers to create, update and delete content within Drupal which would track what is changing and within a short period of time it would be generated and transferred to the public facing site. Essentially it would have the power of content editing in Drupal but be hosted to the public as static HTML. We got this system working and I’m going to share more about it at my talk during CapitalCamp/Drupal4Gov. Be sure to check it out if you are coming.

In today’s web device climate, you never know if your site will be viewed on a laptop, a tablet, a phone, an 84-inch 4k monitor, a Blu-ray player, a gaming console, or a refrigerator. Most of us have probably experienced the frustration of using a website that displayed poorly because of its inbuilt assumptions about what the user’s screen would look like. The ability for your web content to adjust to its context---in particular, screen resolution---is critical to making sure you deliver the best web experience possible to every user.

The tools and techniques to do so are known as responsive web design (RWD). One of the first high-profile sites to implement RWD was The Boston Globe, which is a great example to take a look at. RWD in general is beyond the scope of this blog post. Today, we’ll focus on a specific bit of RWD that is a little tricky to handle in Drupal: responsive images.

If you just did what I first did and typed drupal.org/project/responsive_images into your browser to see what popped up, you’ll see a module that is no longer actively maintained. Many responsive image projects have come and gone over the last few years, with varying approaches and degrees of success; it’s a crowded space.

Luckily, Drupal 8 will feature a responsive image handling solution in core with the new Picture module, and it has already been backported to Drupal 7. It’s a bit tricky to set up with configurations spread across several different GUI menus, but once you have it running, it’s a fast, smooth solution to an important challenge, and it plays well with its neighbors.

The Gist Of It

We'll be dealing with a handful of new objects to get responsive image behaviors going smoothly.

• Breakpoints
  • Breakpoints are ranges of screen sizes, described by conditional tests (i.e., minimum width = 640)
• Breakpoint Groups
  • EWISOTT (Exactly What It Says On The Tin)
• Image Styles
  • You may already know these from the Media module; they let you bundle dimensions, scaling modes, etc. into styles that can be reused across your site.
• Picture Mappings
  • Picture mappings pair up breakpoints with image styles

Once an image is associated with a responsive style, the Picture module will check the page dimensions, look at the breakpoint group, find the first breakpoint that applies to those dimensions (we'll come back to this point...), look at the picture mapping to find the associated image style, and apply that style to the image. This happens in real time, so a user resizing their window should see the image rescale to fit their new window size instantaneously.

Installation

We'll use Drush, a Drupal cli, to install the modules and their dependencies, and to enable them.

Picture has two important dependencies:

• The Breakpoints module, which will keep its eye on the browser window size
• The Chaos Tool Suite, which gives us lots of handy development tools and APIs

Drush will handle the dependencies for you; just navigate to your site root and type:

drush en picture -y

We'll also want the Media module:

drush en media -y

(In the above commands, -y just tells drush to assume "yes" for any requests for confirmation.)

Setting Up Breakpoints

Breakpoints can be found under Configuration > Media > Breakpoints. Each breakpoint needs a name and a media query. Optionally, you can enable Retina display handling for each breakpoint.

Note that the smallest breakpoint is set to a 0px minimum. This ensures that arbitrarily small screen sizes will be accommodated.

Ordering

The order in which the breakpoints appear is the order your breakpoint group will check their media queries. The example configuration uses minimums in decreasing order, which is preferable for responsive image design. If a breakpoint query fails (if the screen width is below the minimum), the next breakpoint down the line will be checked. Make sure you get this order right; once you pull these breakpoints into a group, their order cannot be edited; you'd need to delete the breakpoints and their group and start over.

Groups

Click 'Add a new group' to define a Breakpoint Group. The ordering on this screen will match the order defined by weights in the previous step.

Note that once a breakpoint has been added to a group, it cannot be edited.

Responsive Styles

This is an optional step provided by the Breakpoints module; it's essentially a wizard which makes copies of a preexisting image style, one for each selected breakpoint. If you have some image style effects you want to apply everywhere (desaturate, perhaps?), this can be a handy time saver. For general use, it's not really necessary.

Image Styles and Picture Mappings

Set up an image style for each breakpoint under Configuration > Media > Image Styles. For general use, these can be equal to or slightly less than the minimums of the associated breakpoints; for more complex layouts, id est columns, these might instead be set to match the behavior of the column widths.

Picture Mappings are found under Configuration > Media > Picture Mappings. First, associate the new Picture Mapping with our Breakpoint Group.

Now that the Picture Mapping has a Breakpoint Group, each breakpoint can be associated with an image style. Populate these with the image styles defined previously, and hit Finish.

File Type Display

Under Configuration > Media > File Types, select Images -> Manage File Display. Enable the Picture display mode, and select the Example Group.

Content Type

Now we're ready to create a node type with a responsive image field.

Make a content type and add a File field with the Media File Selector widget. Make sure that the field permits the image format file extensions you plan to use; by default it only allows *.txt.

Under Manage Display, make sure that the responsive image field is set to the Rendered File display formatter, which will connect the field to the file display mode we set earlier.

The End Product

We're done! Create a node with the example content type, add an image, and start dragging the corner of your window around. The image should resize as the window width passes between breakpoints.

The Benefits

There are several advantages to responsive web design, some of which are particular to image loading.

• Controlled, consistent user experience across devices
  • Without clear knowledge of how our sites will be viewed, we cannot effectively design them to meet user needs.
• Ease of navigation
  • Never let important elements render offscreen.
• Bandwidth conservation
  • Don't send a 4k image to a QVGA-screen phone that doesn't need it.
• Code it once
  • No need to build a secondary mobile site.
• SEO optimization
  • Every node has one canonical URL, so Google won't split its results between mobile and desktop versions (which could easily drop your site to the dreaded second page of search results)!
• Shareability
  • A bad example: Wikipedia. Take a look at how different its mobile version looks. If a mobile user posts an interesting article to Twitter, for example, both desktop and mobile users following the link will be hit with the mobile version, regardless of their device. With a single-URL responsive design, this is a nonissue.

Resources

• Picture module project page
• Breakpoints module project page
• Live demo of Picture module on Drupal 7
• The Picture element proposal document

Tweet Widget Facebook Like Google Plus One Linkedin Share Button What is Dashing

Dashing is a Sinatra (think ruby but not rails) based framework that lets you build dashboards. It was originally made by the guys at Shopify for displaying custom dashboards on TVs around the office.

Why use Dashing

Dashing makes your life easier, freeing you up to focus on more inportant things - like what data you are looking to display, and what time of widget you want to use.

Features of dashing:

• Opensource (MIT license)
• Widgets are tiny and encapsulated, made with SASS, HTML and coffeescript
• The dashboard itself is simply HTML and SASS, meaning you can theme and style it to suit your needs
• Comes bundled with several powerful widgets
• Widgets are powered by simply data bindings (powered by batman.js)
• Push and pull methods available to each widget
• Pull jobs can be configured to run in the background on a set interval (e.g. every 30 seconds, poll Chartbeat for new data)
• Layout is drag & drop interface for re-arranging widgets

Why not make a dashboard in Drupal

There are several dashboard modules in Drupal, and yes you can go to a bit lot of trouble and re-create the power of Dashing in Drupal, but there is no need.

Dashing is great at what it does, and it only does one thing.

Another advantage is that you can query other sources of data - e.g. Google Analytics or MailChimp and display metrics from those applications on your dashboard.

A really great example (including code) and can found over at http://derekweitzel.blogspot.co.nz/2014/03/a-hcc-dashboard-with-osg-accounting.html

Installation of Dashing on Ubuntu 14.04

The only real requirement is ruby 1.9+ (this comes by default in Ubunty 14.04, in Ubuntu 12.04 you need to install ruby-1.9 explicitly)

sudo apt-get install ruby ruby-dev nodejs g++ bundler sudo gem install dashing

you can create a new dashboard with

dashing new awesome_dashboard cd awesome_dashboard bundle

You start the application by

sudo dashing start

You now have a dashboard on http://localhost:3030 ready to go

Creating a new Dashing widget

There are already a few tutorials online, the best of which is probably just the existing suite of widgets available.

Here we will go through a simple example where we want to graph the of pieces of content in the "Needs review" state (provided by Workbench moderation) in Drupal. This serves as a mini-todo list for content authors, as ideally this number should be as low as possible.

In this example, we are re-cycling the "List" widget.

Place an instance of the "List" widget on a dashboard - e.g. sample.erb

<li data-row="1" data-col="1" data-sizex="1" data-sizey="1"> <div data-id="newsarticlesreview" data-view="List" data-unordered="true" data-title="News articles in 'Needs review'"></div> <i class="icon-check-sign icon-background"></i> </li>

Create a new job to poll for data

Create a new file in jobs/newsarticlesreview.rb, and place:

#!/bin/env ruby # encoding: utf-8 require 'net/http' require 'uri' require 'json' # TODO replace with a real production host server = "https://localhost" SCHEDULER.every '30s', :first_in => 0 do |job| url = URI.parse("#{server}/api/content/dashboard?token=FawTP0fJgSagS1aYcM2a5Bx-MaJI8Y975NwYWP12B0E") http = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port) http.use_ssl = (url.scheme == 'https') http.verify_mode = OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE response = http.request(Net::HTTP::Get.new(url.request_uri)) # Convert to JSON j = JSON[response.body] # Send the joke to the text widget review_content = {} review_content['en'] = { label: 'English', value: j['en']['news_article']['needs_review'] } review_content['mi'] = { label: 'Māori', value: j['mi']['news_article']['needs_review'] } send_event("newsarticlesreview", { items: review_content.values }) end Create a Drupal data source

Now we need to feed the Dashing request with a Drupal API. I have chosen to do all of these custom, as they are straight forward. In theory you could also craft these with the services module as well.

Create hook_menu() entry

/** * Implements hook_menu(). */ function CUSTOM_menu() { // Dashboard API requests. Protected using a token. // e.g. api/content/dashboard?token=FawTP0fJgSagS1aYcM2a5Bx-MaJI8Y975NwYWP12B0E $items['api/content/dashboard'] = array( 'title' => 'Content types broken down by workflow status', 'page callback' => 'CUSTOM_content_dashboard', 'access callback' => 'CUSTOM_dashboard_api_access', 'access arguments' => array('api/content/dashboard'), 'type' => MENU_CALLBACK, 'file' => 'CUSTOM.dashboard.inc', ); return $items; }

Here we define a custom route, and declare the access callback. The access callback is special as it needs to ensure that access is restricted to only requests with a special token. The token being created from a hash of the Drupal salt combined with the current path and private key, and base64 encoded (much like drupal_get_token() without the session ID check).

/** * Access callback to the dashboard API endpoints. These are protected by a * token. * * @param String $path * The path that is being requested. * * @return Boolean * Whether or not the use has access to the callback. */ function CUSTOM_dashboard_api_access($path) { global $is_https; // HTTPS only. $only_allow_https = (bool) variable_get('api_https_only', 1); if ($only_allow_https && !$is_https) { return FALSE; } // Only allow get requests. if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] !== 'GET') { return FALSE; } // Check token is correct. $params = drupal_get_query_parameters(); if (!isset($params['token']) || empty($params['token'])) { return FALSE; } $valid_token = CUSTOM_token_validation($path); if ($params['token'] !== $valid_token) { return FALSE; } return TRUE; }

And finally the data for the callback.

/** * Gathers current content statistics from Drupal, including the amount of * content broken down by a) content type, b) workflow state, c) status. * * @return JSON */ function CUSTOM_content_dashboard() { $output = array(); $languages = language_list('enabled'); $types = node_type_get_types(); // Workbench states. foreach ($languages[1] as $langcode => $language) { foreach ($types as $machine_name => $type) { // Workbench moderation in use (remove this if you do not have the module). if (workbench_moderation_node_type_moderated($machine_name)) { $results = db_query("SELECT COUNT(n.vid) AS total, w.state FROM {node} n JOIN {workbench_moderation_node_history} w ON w.vid = n.vid WHERE n.type = :type AND n.language = :lang AND w.current = 1 GROUP BY w.state", array(':type' => $machine_name, ':lang' => $langcode))->fetchAllAssoc('state'); foreach ($results as $state => $result) { $output[$langcode][$machine_name][$state] = (int) $result->total; } } // No workbench moderation for this content type, use the status column. else { $results = db_query("SELECT COUNT(n.nid) AS total, n.status FROM {node} n WHERE n.type = :type AND n.language = :lang GROUP BY n.status", array(':type' => $machine_name, ':lang' => $langcode))->fetchAllAssoc('status'); foreach ($results as $status => $result) { if ($status == NODE_PUBLISHED) { $status = 'published'; } else { $status = 'unpublished'; } $output[$langcode][$machine_name][$status] = (int) $result->total; } } } } drupal_json_output($output); drupal_exit(); }

And there you have it. Note the above code relies on workbench moderation being present, if you do not have it, simply remove the section of the code that is relevant. Note that the API response is considerably more complex and complete than the example calls for, but this just means you can display more data in more ways on your dashboard.

Here is the finished product:

Extra for experts

Create a init.d script for dashing, here is a good starter.

Comments

Let me know if you have completed (or started) a recent project to visual data from Drupal (or related third party applications) and your experiences there. Pictures are always welcome.

Tags drupal dashing dashboards data visualisation drupalplanet Source Dashing Category Tutorial

The first official Drupal 8 release is coming. Ok, so it might seem like it's approaching at a snails pace rather than a speeding juggernaut... but it is on its way. So what does this mean if you're still supporting Drupal 6 sites? This post should help you identify the issues.What Drupal 6 support will be provided?

There's quite a lot of discussion in the Drupal community at the moment about what will happen to support for Drupal 6 sites once Drupal 8 is officially released.

Currently Drupal core only supports one version behind the current stable release. That means that when Drupal 8 has its first stable release (8.0.0) all Drupal 6 sites will no longer have any core support - more specifically security updates.

There was an issue on the D6 queue around this as well as discussions at DrupalCon Austin, which suggested that this support period should be extended to 12 months.  

Although there was quite mixed feelings about this, ultimately the security team (along with key module maintainers, and representatives of the Drupal security team’s) responded by suggesting that Drupal 6 will be supported for three months after the first release of Drupal 8. 

What does this mean for all our current Drupal 6 sites?

Currently there are only three options available for any current Drupal 6 sites:

1. Migrate any existing Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 7 (this will still be supported until Drupal 9 is released)
2. Wait until Drupal 8 is released and migrate your Drupal 6 site using ‘Migrate in Core: Drupal 6 to Drupal 8'
3. Cross your fingers and hope for the best once Drupal 8 is released!

Option 1 is the obvious choice out of these, as Drupal 7 is stable and has been around for several years now and will be supported until Drupal 9 is released.

Option 2 will come with its own problems due to the infancy of Drupal 8 as well as contrib modules that you are currently using that haven’t got a Drupal 8 version yet. 

Due to the contrib modules not currently supporting a Drupal 8 version, this could delay you migrating and having to wait beyond the three months for a module to have a Drupal 8 version.

Option 3 is at your own risk, and there are still Drupal 5 sites out there but ultimately this will depend upon what your customers are happy to spend their money on.

According to the usage stats, there are still around 3,800 Drupal 5 sites and just under 198,000 Drupal 6 sites, so there are still many sites which will need to be migrated.

Why are customers resistant to migrating?

Our customers are guided (by agencies like us) to keep their sites up-to-date with security releases for core as well as contrib modules etc.  

In situations where a core version is due to have support dropped we would normally recommend our clients to start considering planning a rebuild of their site. This rebuild would be on the latest stable release (currently Drupal 7) so that they can continue to maintain the security support. 

This also makes it easier (and ultimately cheaper) for them as the community will continue supporting and maintaining contrib modules for the currently supported versions.

Often customers can be resistant to this due to the cost of needing to rebuild their site and migrate their data. This can be understandable, as “if it aint broke, don’t fix it”, or they simply just don’t have the available money to spend on building a new site.

At Deeson Group we currently have several sites that are still on Drupal 6, and even one on Drupal 5.

As an agency we will continue to support Drupal 6 once the official release of Drupal 8 comes out, but this will probably become more painful as time goes on: less people have experience with this version and problems arise with contrib modules which are no longer supported.

Our advice?

Get prepared: Make sure that your site is running on Drupal 7 and if not, start thinking about it and planning the migration to Drupal 7 now.

 

Read moreDrupal 6 Support after Drupal 8 Official Release - what affect will it have on you?By Mike Davis | 31st July 2014

On any project, whether you’re a themer, site builder or developer you will need a local development environment to work in. Even if everyone on a project works on the same OS, chances are people will have different versions of Apache MySQL and PHP, different server configuration and not to mention that the local environment will differ from staging and production environments.

This is where Vagrant can help. Vagrant is an open source setup and configuration tool for virtual machines such as VirtualBox or VMWare (and now with Docker support).

In this post, I give a quick overview of how Vagrant and VM's can improve your developer workflow and consistency.

I've been involved with Drupalcamp Colorado since 2007. Sometimes I've had a significant role, other times I've taken a bit more of a back seat. I was also pretty heavily involved in Drupalcon when it was in Denver. Over the last 8 months or so, I've had quite a bit more insight into the Cons themselves through my interaction with the Drupal Association. This last year I've been the project manager for Drupalcamp Colorado 2014. This has left me with with some personal insights that might help others wanting to run a camp.

drupaldrupalcamp coloradohow to do a camp

Agile has become a big buzz word recently in the project management world. In this post, I'll try to clarify where some of the lines are being blurred between terms like Agile and Scrum, and what some of these terms actually mean.

Keep in mind while reading this that I am primarly trained in Scrum, so my descriptions of other Agile methodologies are only decently informed. :)

What is Agile Project Management?

From the ever-present wikipedia:

REST Export for Drupal 8 View Swiss knife of Drupal 8’s REST api

Hi! Drupal Community.

As we all are working very hard for upcoming major release I am feeling excited to write this. This blog is all about REST Export feature of Drupal 8’ view. Let me first brief you about what is the REST api and than I will explain you how REST Export is important for building custom REST api for your Drupal 8.

REST (Representational State Transfer) is a web service architecture to expose your resources to outer world. It follows http architecture to expose the resources of your web site i.e you have GET, POST, PATCH,DELETE etc methods to manipulate resources with out web interface. In context to Drupal , a node will have GET method that will require node id and it will return you details related to that node in XML, JSON or HAL + JSON format. If you have ever used REST api for some famous web services like twitter, facebook then you will find those API very well defined for example  GET on /status will give you current status details and GET on /status/comments will give you comments posted on your current status. In context to Drupal we should get node details with GET on  /node/{id} and comments on particular node with GET on /node/{id}/comments. In Drupal 8 we have first REST endpoint but we don’t have second. Drupal has opt for different approach. In Drupal you can use contextual filters on view to filter content as per your parameters passed in URL . The same concept we can applies to REST Export . We can attach a REST Export to a view that only show comments with contextual filter with nodeID as parameter. So the rest export will return XML or JSON for comments related to particular node.

Here is a screenshot for it.

 

We can use REST Export with taxonomy_terms for particular vocabulary as parameter. This concept will make Drupal 8 REST api robust and it also provides good example where view modules and REST module works to gather to provide developer flexibility to develop custom REST api for their Drupal site.

Tags:

• Drupal Planet

The next alpha for Drupal 8 will be alpha 14! Here is the schedule for the alpha release.

August 3rd-5th Only critical and major patches committed August 6th, 2014 Drupal 8.0.0-alpha14 released. Emergency commits only.

(Note that there are two concurrent Drupal 8 sprints Aug. 7-10, so we aren't planning to have the usual "disruptive patch window" following this alpha.)

"Enterprise Content Management" or ECM minimally encompasses Document Management, Collaboration, Records Management and Web Content Management. An enterprise online portal is a specially designed website that acts as an entry point for bringing information together from all these diverse sources in a uniform way. Building an enterprise online portal presents a unique set of challenges, including integrated authentication, governance of content added by multiple content contributors, migration of legacy data, and hosting within an enterprise infrastructure among others. var switchTo5x = false;stLight.options({"publisher":"dr-75626d0b-d9b4-2fdb-6d29-1a20f61d683"});

I had this checklist documented internally, but I keep referring back to it so I'll make it available here in case anyone else needs it. The idea here is to document a minimum (not an ideal) set of modules and tasks which I do for almost all projects.

Questions to ask of a client at the project launch

• Is your site bilingual? If so is there more than one domain?
• What type of compatibility do you need: tablet, mobile, which versions of IE?
• How do you see your post-launch support and core/module update contract?
• Do you need SSL support?
• What is your hosting arrangement?
• Do you have a contact form?
• What is your anti-spam method? Note that CAPTCHA is no longer useful; I like Mollom, but it's giving me more and more false positives with time.
• Is WYSIWYG required? I strongly suggest using Markdown instead.
• Confirm that all emails are sent in plain text, not HTML. If you're sending out HTML mail, do it right.
• Do you need an on-site search utility? If so, some thought, and resources, need to go into it or it will be frustrating.
• What kind of load do you expect on your site (anonymous and admin users)? This information can be used for load testing.
• If you already have a site, should old paths of critical content map to paths on the new site?
• Should users be allowed to create accounts (with spam considerations, and see if an admin should approve them).

Sprint Zero: starting the project

Here is what should get done in the first Agile sprint, aka Sprint Zero:

• If you are using continuous integration, a Jenkins job for tracking the master branch: this job should fail if any test fails on the codebase, or if quality metrics (code review, for example, or pdepend metrics) reach predefined thresholds.
• A Jenkins job for pushing to dev. This is triggered by the first job if tests pass. It pushed the new code to the dev environment, and updates the dev environment's database. The database is never cloned; rather, a site deployment module is used.
• An issue queue is set up and the client is given access to it, and training on how to use it.
• A wiki is set up.
• A dev environment is set up. This is where the code gets pushed automatically if all tests pass.
• A prod environment is set up. This environment is normally updated manually after each end of sprint demo.
• A git repo is set up with a basic Drupal site.
• A custom module is set up in sites/*/modules/custom: this is where custom function go.
• A site deployment module in sites/all/modules/custom. All deployment-related code and dependencies go here. A .test file and an .install should be included.
• A site development module is set up in sites/*/modules/custom, which is meant to contain all modules required or useful for development, as dependencies.
• A custom theme is created.
• An initial feature is created in sites/*/modules/features. This is where all your features will be added.
• A "sites/*/modules/patches" folder is created (with a README.txt file, to make sure it goes into git). This is where core and contrib patches should go. Your site's maintainers should apply these patches when core or contrib modules are updated. Patch names here should include the node id and comment number on Drupal.org.

Basic module list (always used)

• views
• context
• strongarm
• admin_menu
• markdown
• transliteration
• globalredirect
• redirect
• config_builder, almost always useful to create a single form allowing clients to change site variables.
• context
• features
• logintoboggan

Development modules (not enabled on production)

I normally create a custom development module with these as dependencies:

• diff
• devel
• realistic_dummy_content_api (part of realistic_dummy_content)
• coder
• context_ui (part of context)
• views_ui (part of views)
• devel
• devel_themer
• masquerade
• search_krumo
• simpletest_turbo
• devel_generate (part of devel)
• config_builder_ui (part of config_builder)

Multilingual modules

• i18n
• potx
• l10n_update

Launch checklist

• Design a custom 404, error and maintenance page.
• Path, alias and permalink strategy. (Might require pathauto.)
• Think of adding revisions to content types to avoid clients losing their data.
• Don't display errors on production.
• Optimize CSS, JS and page caching.
• Views should be cached.
• System messages are properly themed.
• Prevent very simple passwords.
• Using syslog instead of dblog on prod

In conclusion

Most shops, and most developers, have some sort of checklist like this. Mine is not any better or worse than most, but can be a good starting point. Another note: I've seen at least three Drupal teams try, and fail, to implement a "Drupal Starter kit for Company XYZ" and keep it under version control. The problem with that approach, as opposed to a checklist, is that it's not lightweight enough: it is a software product which needs maintenance, and after a while no one maintains it.

Tags: blogplanet

Published: Wed, 07/30/14Download this episodeWalkhub

• You’ve been on the show before to talk about walkthrough.it, but some things have changed since then. So, can you give us an overview of what Walkhub is?
• What are walkthroughs?
• What is your pricing model on Walkhub?
• You’re in the process of a second Indiegogo campaign, but what was the first one for?
  • How did your first Indiegogo campaign go?
• What is the current Indiegogo camaipn for?
  • What’s the status on that?
• Why are you doing another campaign? Why aren’t you out of BETA yet? What’s the story there?

AMA

• You just did an AMA on Reddit yesterday. How did that go?
• What were some common questions? Or ones that stuck out to you?

Episode Links: Kristof on drupal.orgKristof on TwitterIndiegogo CampaignWalkhub.netReddit AMAWalkhub Demo on YouTubeTags: 

• documentation
• Walkhub
• planet-drupal

What can web designers learn from design of a timepiece for the blind?

 

The difference between a good product and an amazing one boils down to one thing: Empathy. Developing an understanding of your users that is so deep that you can feel what they feel enables you to design products and experiences that will truly resonate with your users.

Through illustrative and entertaining examples, I will take you on a tour of the the highs that are achievable through empathic design, and some of the depths that designers sink to when they design without empathy. You’ll learn how to activate the empathy that is already within you, and how you can use that power to improve all aspects of your product design, from requirements gathering to user research, and everything in between.

Join me for my presentations on this topic this week:

 

Drupal Capital Camp & Gov’t Days

Wednesday, July 30 from 11:15AM – Noon in room F1/F2

Design4Drupal Boston 2014

Saturday, August 2 from 3:30 – 4:30pm in room 141

 

Episode Number: 160

The Drupal 7 Panelizer Module allows you to panelize (or use panels) for any entity type on your Drupal 7 site. This allows you to change the layout of a node page, user page, or any other type of entity that you can think of. Although it's a little more complicated to set up, the Panelizer module allows you to set up a slimmed down panels interface for other site managers to use.

Tags: DrupalPanelsDrupal 7Site BuildingDrupal Planet

What could be more fun than summer camp? A Drupal summer camp, of course. And what could be more fun than a Drupal summer camp? Why, two Drupal summer camps, of course – merged into one!

This week we’re witnessing the unity of two long-awaited DC Drupal events with the joining of CapitalCamp and Drupal 4 Gov into a single event – CapitalCamp and Gov Days – and we’re enthused by all the possibilities that will come from having our local Drupal friends all in one place!

On Your Mark, Get Set…

This year we’re doing something brand new at CapitalCamp – we’re sprinting! That’s right, Forum One is hosting a Coder Lounge and Code Sprint room (Rooms C1 & C2) for fellow Drupalists to collaborate and bang out code together. This dedicated room will be available throughout CapitalCamp and Gov Days for developers to meet, greet, and collaborate on Drupal 8 code sprints. Developers will be convening in the mornings and afternoons to introduce sprints, identify issues, and get each other up and running…er, sprinting. Whether you’re new to code sprints or a seasoned veteran, come join us and contribute to the future of Drupal!

Expert Sessions

Our all-star team is proud to be presenting five sessions to the DC Drupal community this year!

On Wednesday, Dan Mouyard presents on Advanced Theming Tactics, covering how to follow the Drupal 8 CSS Architecture Guidelines while theming a Drupal 7 site, including:

• Controlling Drupal’s markup
• Creating custom layouts
• Organizing your Sass partial structure
• Using SMACSS to write maintainable CSS

Later in the day, William Hurley will be demystifying acronyms and bureaucratese with his session on Deploying Secure Drupal Sites, providing a roadmap for developers and IT managers to meet government security obligations while laying out specific issues that might be encountered, and how to overcome them.

On Thursday afternoon, Michael Rader, Sarah LeNguyen, and John Schneider are excited to present Hot Planet, Cool Site: Relaunching GlobalChange.gov – the inside story of the design and relaunch of this major website under the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) that focuses on assessing the impacts of climate change in the United States. Relaunching GlobalChange.gov was a big project that garnered big praise from the national press (and even the White House!), so we’re thrilled to be presenting on the site with our client at USGCRP for the first time.

And also on Thursday, Kalpana Goel will join with William Hurley to present a session on Routing in Drupal 8 to explain the many parts of routing, how to convert from the Drupal 7 menu system to the Drupal 8 routing system, as well as defining local tasks, local actions, and contextual links in Drupal 8.

But that’s not all, because on Friday, William returns for a CapitalCamp threepeat to present his final session of the conference: Automate All The Things – addressing why you need to be using automation, the tools you can use to make your development faster, easier and less error-prone, and common pitfalls that you might encounter along the way.

Seeing Red

As at DrupalCon last month, you’ll find Forum One staff in the hallways, sessions, and BoFs wearing our red shirts. Among our other attendees this week:

• Cindy Lopez-Yusuf and Ned Baker will be mingling with Drupal job hunters at Wednesday’s noontime networking mixer.
• Kerry Thell, Andrew Cohen, Riccardo de Marchi Trevisan and Eric Davis will be representing our Business Development team throughout the week.
• Keenan Holloway and Martin Franzini will round out our tech and UX folks on site.

Once again, we’re excited as always to be actively participating in our hometown Drupal camps and are looking forward to sharing our knowledge, meeting new Drupal friends, and learning about new projects for us to explore.

Will you be at CapitalCamp and Gov Days this week? Stop by the Forum One Coder Lounge to say hi, or drop us a line at marketing@forumone.com – we’d love to meet up with you at Camp this year!

For more info about the project and it's progress see the post on groups.drupal.org.

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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