Software

The fifth class of our Drupal career training program is just about at the halfway mark, and our students are eager to put their new skills to work. The six Drupal Career Online students will be ready for junior-developer-level work in mid-November, and we're looking for forward-thinking organizations willing to help our graduates on the next leg of their Drupal career journey.

As we've done for the past five classes, (we've had more than 60 graduates so far) we're looking to make introductions between our upcoming graduates and organizations looking for people with Drupal site-building and development skills. Our Work Experience Drupal (WE Drupal) program is designed to provide students with valuble experience in internship-type settings. WE Drupal host companies are asked to make a 6-10 week commitment to one or more of our students, provide them with guidance, mentoring, and the professional experience that is so difficult to come by for new Drupal site builders and developers. In return, you get the efforts of a well-prepared, super-eager Drupal novice to help you lighten the task-load for your staff.

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When we launch a site at Stanford Web Services, we open the doors and roll out the red carpet for the search engines to index the site. However, before launch we like to keep the content under wraps and ask the search engines not to index the site. To do this, we use a module called Stanford MetaTag NoBots.

DrupalCon Amsterdam Keynote by Dries was interesting and different.

This how-to guide describes how to set up automatic machine-based translations for content on a Drupal site. Whenever a node is created, translation jobs will be created for every language specified, and depending on how you set up your translator, you should be able to completely automate the translation process. For this project we are using SDL, but you should be able to use other translators.

1. Download and enable the translation management modules. This can be done through Drush or through the modules interface in drupal.

Where on this planet as a pedestrian you can be hit by bicycle and… be guilty for it? Amsterdam, you are just awesome! :)

DrupalCon is over and its attendees are in the relaxed process of event reminiscence. True drupallers are never tired of sessions, code-sprints, workshops and just fuss between these events; and yes, this year’s Con has provided all of these! But you know what? You can read about this stuff in dozens of other materials. And here we have gathered those moments and snapshots, which made our days at DrupalCon!

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Dozens of useful contributed modules for building Drupal 7 sites.

There are many really useful contributed modules to take your site beyond the basics of Drupal core. There are modules to improve, allow, and/or help with everything from accessibility to workflow, from images to input formats, and beyond.

This session will be of interest to beginner and intermediate Drupallers, as well as those who manage or hire Drupallers or who are just trying to decide whether to use Drupal.

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This screen share walks you through why you might want a more powerful way of making blocks and why Codit: Blocks is a good candidate if you need lots of custom blocks.

• Read more about Codit: Blocks a video introduction to making custom blocks

Now that Drupal 8.0.0-beta1 is out, and the headless Drupal craze is in full-swing, the Drupal St. Louis meetup this month will focus on using Drupal 8 with AngularJS to build a demo pizza ordering app. (The meetup is on Thurs. Oct. 23, starting at 6:30 p.m.; see even more info in this Zero to Drupal post).

We'll be hacking away and seeing how far we can get, and hopefully we'll be able to leave with at least an MVP-quality product! I'll be at the event, mostly helping people get a Drupal 8 development environment up and running. For some, this alone will hopefully be a huge help, and maybe motivation to adopt Drupal 8 more quickly!

If you're in or around the St. Louis area, consider joining us; especially if you would like to learn something about either Drupal 8 or AngularJS!

What do you get

When you cross Drupal, AngularJS, and a room full of folks eager to learn more about Drupal 8, api's, rest services, and front-end frameworks? You get St. Louis' first Headless Drupal Hackathon...that's what!

When

Thursday, October 23rd - 6:30p - 9:00p

Where

The Journey - Reber Place 4900 Reber Place St. Louis, MO

Details

For the first time in our beloved history as a Drupal User's Group, we will be hosting our first interactive meetup. Our goal is to collectively build a faux pizza ordering app using Drupal 8 as a backend, and AngularJS as the front end.

For more information, see our Meetup event page for more info.

Hope to see you there!

Tags

• drupal-planet
• angularjs
• front-end framework
• javascript

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

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

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

Dries Keynote

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

Continue reading %DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014 Report%

A little background.

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

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

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

Our Drupal and CiviCRM experience

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

Civi has helped us raise a lot of dough.

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

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

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

Make it Happen

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Donald Lobo and Michael McAndrew for their guidance.

Please share your thoughts.

• CiviCRM
• CiviCase
• Drupal
• Make it happen

DrupalCamp LA: Manage the Gap

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

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

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

Development & Profit in Project Management - James Smith, ImageX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode Number: 172

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

Tags: DrupalEntity ReferenceViewsDrupal 7Site BuildingDrupal Planet

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

Why does Drupal need mentors?

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

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

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

How do you get involved?

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

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

What did I do as a mentor?

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

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

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

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

Drupal 8 presentation

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

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

Critical issues

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

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

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

Après sprint

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

Give it a try!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags Drupal Planet Web Development SASS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DrupalCon Amsterdam Closing Session from DrupalAssociation

Image credit to Pedro Lozano on Flickr.