Kevin Quillen - Still coding. Still rocking. Still ranting.

Using Drush Automatically with Grunt

2015-02-04T14:00:00+00:00

Ever find yourself working on a Drupal theme and unable to figure out why templates aren't recognized, CSS isn't changing, or JS is still acting funky only to realize you haven't done something as simple as clear cache? We all have. Fortunately, we can do this automatically via Grunt.

Using the Migrate Framework with a remote database on Pantheon

2014-08-02T14:00:00+00:00

If you host your Drupal site on the Pantheon platform, you may already know that you do not need to include a settings.php file because they provide the connection information for you automatically. However, you _can_ provide one if you are setting up database connections. What was unclear, at least to me, is that you can only define connections for local development. Fortunately, there is a way around this.

Media Migration Tip in Drupal

2014-07-08T18:00:00+00:00

If you’re doing a migration of media files, you most likely will be working with a list of URLs. Other times, you will have a local file system from which to pull in media. When working with just a list of URLs though, you’re somewhat working with a ‘blind’ import.

Add 301 Redirects to a Drupal Migration

2014-07-02T08:02:00+00:00

Migrating content from one platform to another saves lots of time from doing grunt work and gets data moved fast. However, simply moving the content doesn’t mean the job is done. There are other considerations too, such as 301 redirects for example. Since we are moving content, our aliases are likely changing too. We can create 301s while migrating content in all at once.

Using Live Templates in PHPStorm

2014-07-01T10:10:00+00:00

PHPStorm and the JetBrains suite of products are without a doubt, the best IDEs on the market for their respective applications. If you do a lot of custom development, you owe it to yourself to learn and use every tool this IDE can afford you.

Web scraping magic with Ruby and Nokogiri

2014-06-23T14:00:00+00:00

Every now and then you're going to have one of those projects that will need to be migrated from one platform to another. Occasionally you will have to migrate a static site into a dynamic site. Don't panic. Don't hire a dozen interns to do the grunt work. With Ruby, we can quickly create intelligent scripts to scrape the static files and generate a CSV datasource for us to use.

Basic behavior testing with Behat in Drupal

2014-06-08T14:00:00+00:00

We have all at some point or another faced projects where wasted minutes and/or hours on regressions or redo work not only eat into the current project budget, but hurt long term numbers too on the books. Fortunately, we can crush this leveraging Behat and covering our bases with tests, and everyone goes home happy.

Up and Running with Behat, Drupal, & Vagrant

2014-06-06T14:00:00+00:00

Behat is a PHP implementation of the Gherkin language, which powered Cucumber for Ruby. It provides a way to tell the system in plain English how to go about testing your feature points as if it were the user doing it. Not only is this a great way to automate tests, it cuts down hours of tedious clicking by a human to say that something is working or not.

Spiff up your Drupal AJAX interactions.

2014-06-04T14:00:00+00:00

There are things I love about Drupal. There are also things I flat out hate about Drupal, too. One of them is the throbber.gif activity indicator. Guys, we can do better. Let's add some shine.