DrupalEasy Tutorials, News, Quicktips, Video, and Podcasts.

DrupalEasy Podcast 183 - Higher Ed - Shawn DeArmond

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Sat, 30 Jul 2016 12:00:10 -0400

(Shawn DeArmond) is a web architect at UC Davis in Sacramento, California. Ryan and Anna interview Shawn about the Drupal Higher Ed summits at DrupalCon and BADCamp, and discuss news from the past week, including Dreamweaver, Drupal 7.50, the "boy who cried wolf" nature of a recent security advisory, picks of the week, and five questions.

Interview

DrupalEasy News

The Fall, 2016 session of Drupal Career Online begins September 26; applications are now open.
Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development workshop at DrupalCon Dublin - taught by Mike - Monday, September 26, 2016.

Three Stories

See How Dreamweaver is Transforming for the Future
Drupal 7.50 released
Drupal contrib - Highly Critical - was the "official" communication handled properly? How did the community react? See Not so highly critical?.

Sponsors

MyDropWizard.com - Long-term-support services for Drupal 6, 7, and 8 sites.
WebEnabled.com - devPanel.

Picks of the Week

Shawn - Probo.CI
Anna - Paragraphs
Ryan - 6 design alternatives to avoid slideshows

Upcoming Events

Design4Drupal - July 22-24.
Midwest Drupal Summit - Aug 19 - 22.
DrupalCamp LA
BADCamp 2016: October 20-23 - Higher Education Summit: October 21

Follow us on Twitter

Five Questions (answers only)

Brew Beer
1Blocker on iOS
Skydiving
Australian Fruit Bat
Ben Shell

Intro Music

Too Sexy for my Code by Larry Garfield (crell) from DrupalCon NOLA PreNote.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, call 321-396-2340. Please keep in mind that we might play your voicemail during one of our future podcasts. Feel free to call in with suggestions, rants, questions, or corrections. If you'd rather just send us an email, please use our contact page.

World-wide and World-class Drupal Training

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 06:52:42 -0400

DrupalEasy is proud to announce another cavalcade of training events in the coming months, both online and in-person. We have numerous opportunities for you to take advantage of our proven Drupal 8 module and theme development courses as well as our flagship technical education program for those seeking comprehensive training to become developers; the 12-week Drupal Career Online.

The primary instructor for all courses is Mike Anello (ultimike), an expert instructor and experienced, practicing Drupal developer. All DrupalEasy training is taught by only expert developers to ensure that lessons are taught accurately, reflect best practices, and draw on how real-world Drupal sites are built. Mike has been active in the Drupal community for over 10 years, is a core contributor, a Drupal Association member, and one of the leaders of the Florida Drupal Users' Group.

12-Weeks of Career Training
Drupal Career Online starts on September 26, and runs every Monday and Wednesday afternoon from 1-4:30pm EDT. In addition, there is a 4-hour co-working lab, which is scheduled by the students. Class is held online using GoToMeeting, and use of webcams and microphones keeps the classes highly interactive, with instructor and student-led demos and discussions. The live online classes are supplemented with reference and lesson-guide handouts, as well as screencasts that cover each and every lesson. Each student is assisted by a community mentor to help kickstart their personal Drupal network. Our goal is to provide the most holistic, sanely-paced, best-practice-focused, long-form Drupal course in the world.

Interested in learning more about 12-week Drupal Career Online course? We are offering two free Taste of Drupal webinars that outline the entire course, set expectations, and give potential students the opportunity to ask questions. Past students have included Drupal newbies, hobbyists, and content admins looking to learn how to become full-fledged Drupal developers.

5 Options for D8 Theme and Module Development

First, if you're headed to DrupalCon Dublin, we're excited to announce that we've been selected to be one of the official training providers! We'll be offering our Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development workshop live, and in-person. You'll learn through our stellar curriculum, and have follow-on access to all of the handouts and screencasts, with the added bonus of the synergy (yes, we just used that word) of a live classroom.

We're also offering the popular Introduction to D8 Module Development online, as well as our Introduction to D8 Theme Development workshops (https://www.drupaleasy.com/training/workshops/upcoming) multiple times in August and September. The module development workshop is 8 hours, split over two half-days, and teaches the fundamental concepts of Drupal 8 module development, including using Drupal Console as an aid for module development. Our theme development workshop is 12 hours long, split over three half-days. This super-sized workshop teaches the fundamental concepts of Drupal 8 theme development including building template files with Twig, creating custom subthemes (using Bootstrap as the base theme), and setting up a professional-level front-end development toolchain using Node.js and Gulp. Both of these courses include a live instructor, PDF handouts, and screencasts for all in-class examples.

We are committed to providing the highest quality Drupal talent development, from beginner to advanced programs; which is why our trainings work. We've taught the 12-week DCO ten times (including twice as part of Acquia U) and our 1 and 1.5 day workshops always get great reviews, just see what our graduates have to say!

DrupalEasy Podcast 182 - Almost Live From Drupal GovCon 2016

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Sun, 24 Jul 2016 09:51:38 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Mike interviews Gregg Marshall, Enzo Garcia, and Daniel Schiavone live from Drupal GovCon 2016! Gregg discusses his new book, Enzo talks about his upcoming community keynote and the upcoming DrupalCamp Costa Rica, and Daniel previews Baltimore DrupalCamp and discusses preparations for Baltimore DrupalCon 2017.

DrupalEasy News

The Fall, 2016 session of Drupal Career Online begins September 26; applications are now open.
Online and in-person workshops; introductions to both module and theme development for Drupal 8. See the complete schedule.

Sponsors

MyDropWizard.com - Long-term-support services for Drupal 6, 7, and 8 sites.
WebEnabled.com - devPanel.

Follow us on Twitter

Intro Music

There is a Con in New Orleans - from the DrupalCon New Orleans pre-note performed by Jeffrey Macguire and Campbell Vertesi.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

DrupalEasy Podcast 181 - Everybody used to live in Florida (Jon Pugh - Open Devshop)

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 09:07:22 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Jon Pugh Creator and president of Opendevshop inc and co-maintainer of Aegir talks to Ted (where's he been?) and Andrew (2 episodes in row?) about Devshop, Aegir, and life after Florida. All that and our picks of week and five questions!

Interview

Open Deveshop

DrupalEasy News

The Fall, 2016 session of Drupal Career Online begins September 26; applications are now open.

Three Stories

#AberdeenCloud - what happened? - A Drupal hosting company dies
Drupal is for ambitious digital experiences
Drupal Gardens and Examiner.com shutting down

Sponsors

MyDropWizard.com - Long-term-support services for Drupal 6, 7, and 8 sites.
WebEnabled.com - devPanel.

Picks of the Week

Ted - Place Block New experimental module in 8.2.
Andrew - Registry Rebuild Because fixing things is good.
Jon - Full UTF8 support in D7.50.

Upcoming Events

Drupal GovCon - July 20-22.
- Custom Content Migrations to Drupal 8 - Mike's session.
- The Complete DevShop Training - Jon’s Training.
Design4Drupal - July 22-24.

Follow us on Twitter

Five Questions (answers only)

Fixing/working with wood
Ansible Container
Rewriting all of Aegir and DevShop in all that modern OOP stuff
A black bear ate my garbage
Moving to NY and actually going to meetups.

Intro Music

Drupal Way by Marcia Buckingham (acmaintainer) (vocals, bass and mandolin) and Charlie Poplees (guitar). The lyrics by Marcia Buckingham, music by Kate Wolfe.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

Best Practices = Effective Government

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 08:52:31 -0400

When it comes to serving their constituents with effective online access, the Iowa Public Employees' Retirement System keeps getting it right.

From the time IPERS was first deciding to shed their Dreamweaver framework a few years ago for something more robust, to ensuring that they have well-trained internal Drupal talent; the IPERS Application Programming Services and Communication teams rocked the process and aced the outcome by sticking with best practices.

The IPERS APS and Communication teams chose Drupal through an extremely efficient process, focused on what other agencies had already put in place, how the transition went, and how the new framework was working out. The solution would of course have to be cost effective, ensure that the needs of the agency and their 700 daily users were met, be implemented in a timely way, and utilize the ability of their internal team to deliver and maintain high levels of service for years to come.

Carla Stoner

Carla Stoner, who has been with IPERS for 19 years, is the APS team member directly responsible for the technical function of the web site and coordination with the Office of the Chief Information Officer. APS and the Communication teams streamlined their selection process, using the experiences and examples of other Iowa agencies that had already upgraded their web sites. Once they narrowed down the field of potential frameworks, a final demo of DotNetNuke by a fellow state agency made Drupal the clear choice. They contracted and worked closely with an outside consulting company to develop the new IPERS site, which went live in the summer of 2015.

While the new build was going on, Carla was made aware of DrupalEasy’s Drupal Career Online program. “My supervisor was the one who found the DrupalEasy training course for me,” she explains, “He wanted a type of training that would have substance and not something that would last only a week and be crammed with spoon-fed work exercises.”

The DCO is long-form training with integrated instruction, an actively-engaged expert teacher (MIke Anello; ultimike on Drupal.org) focused on student learning, a built-in learning community, and comprehensive learning and resource materials. The program emphasizes Drupal best practices and community participation.

“My supervisor and I were both impressed with the length of the course, knowing that there would be a lot of material covered. We also liked the idea of all the ‘hands on’ experience…” she recalls. With this in mind, they decided to wait on formal training for Carla until her schedule allowed her to really engage. After the transition to the new site, she was encouraged to devote the 11+ hours per week to the 12-week session of the DCO that began that September.

“I had zero background in Drupal, but had used Dreamweaver, which gave me exposure to HTML and CSS,” she said. She continued, “...All of the topics covered in the DCO are very relevant to my work. Even though our test and production environments are setup a bit differently from the norm (Drush and Git aren’t used as prevalently), learning these basic tools of Drupal have increased my skills for when I do get to use them.”

She added, “The DrupalEasy course is laid out in such a way that it keeps building on each segment. You don’t just learn it once and forget it. Michael has you continually utilizing what you learned and then reapplying it... I also enjoyed the “community” we developed amongst ourselves, the classmates. We helped each other. Michael fostered an atmosphere that made learning fun... It helped build camaraderie. I still feel that same camaraderie to this day.”

Carla’s learning also continues. “My DrupalEasy class ended last November (2015) and even now as I come across a request to change our website, I remember back to when Michael taught us how to accomplish that. And if I don’t remember, I can always review the very handy screencasts he has done.” She is also among the DCO alumni who take advantage of Mike’s open office hours every Thursday afternoon.“We all try to help each other. Even though I am by no means an expert...there are times that I feel I’m making a helpful suggestion or can see as I’m watching Michael demonstrate how to solve a person’s issue…,” she concludes.

IPERS transition to their Drupal site, starting with the selection of the framework, into the site development and continuing on with internal staff development demonstrates the effectiveness of using tried and true best practices. They looked at their needs, found the most cost-effective solutions, and committed the time and effort to ensure the best possible outcomes. That’s effective government.

If you would like to learn more about Drupal Career Online, you can attend one of two Taste of Drupal informational workshops coming up in August and September.

A Taste of Drupal:The Dish on Crushing it as a Drupal Developer

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 07:12:46 -0400

Whether you are with an organization switching to Drupal, or you have chosen to make Drupal the focus of your web developer career, your future can be a lot of different things depending on your goals, your focus and your personality. It’s never easy shifting your career, and with Drupal, there are no official, defined developer career recipes to guide you.

The good news is, the ingredients are out there. Within the open-sourcey, especially welcoming, social melting pot that is the Drupal Community, there are a lot of career resources, organizations, individuals, advice and success stories that you can draw on to help you make good choices. Here are a few tips to add to the mix.

Learn early on to do things the right way

Drupal is to web development what snowboarding is to winter sports. They say that it takes a lot longer to learn to snowboard than to ski, but once you get the hang of it, you learn advanced things more quickly, and are able to do a lot more (and have a lot more fun) on a snowboard than you could on skis.

Investing a good amount of time and focus on learning the foundations of Drupal and developing habits based on best practices will really help you reach proficiency, and let you go farther, faster in the long run. The key is making sure you take the time to learn best practices, and don’t go for shortcuts before you’ve got the basics.

Another part of learning the right technical skills is to learn key elements of Drupal, not just in the right way, but in an order that will give you stackable skills. Getting key concepts down at the start will help to not only build your abilities, but feed your confidence. At DrupalEasy, we call them the Big 5:

Content types
Users/roles/permissions
Taxonomy
Blocks/regions
Menus

We feel that mastering these concepts is so important, that in our long-form career training program, the curriculum is designed with examples and excercises that specifically draw on the Big 5 as solutions over and over to ensure that they become second nature for every participant.

Don’t be shy, even if you are

The Drupal Community is unique. There is always an opportunity to help, and there always seems to be someone to provide a little guidance or an answer when you have a question. Make sure you become part of Drupal.org, find an IRC channel that you feel comfortable with, and go to local meetups.

We really can’t overstate how key getting involved in the Drupal community is to your technical and professional success. Once you register on Drupal.org, you can access myriad ways to get involved and help with the Drupal project. Helping to test, sorting out issues and contributing to documentation will not only help build your skills and confidence, it will build your reputation. Even before you are ready to contribute on the technical side, you can join your local Drupal Users’ Group and start by attending, meeting others, and eventually helping to organize events.

Drupal friends and mentors really come in handy as you progress along your career path, more so than in other industries because of the nature of Drupal. We all rely on each other to build, enhance, fix and grow the project, so the more we work together, the better the project, and the better we will be as Drupal professionals. We feel really strongly about this as well, which is why we require all of our Drupal Career program participants to get involved, and we provide everyone a community mentor to kick-start their community efforts from the start of the program.

Just do it, and do it again, and again

With anything, if you want to master it, you need to practice, and practice a lot. Build sites for fun and experience. Like snowboarding, it is especially hard when you first start out, but if you stick with it, and take the struggles as opportunities to learn and get better, you will surely succeed. You’ve also got a lot of potential help and guidance through the community (since you have already taken that advice to heart,) so take advantage of it early on and be prepared to give back when you can.

Our training programs stress this concept of practice, repetition of key skills as you learn more and more, as well as different methods to help you learn them. We are strong believers in building your skills and really understanding Drupal, and that means live instruction by practicing experts, lesson guides, examples, exercises and screencasts to help you soak in the material in different ways. However you learn, take advantage of resources, find different ways to absorb and engage, and practice, practice, practice.

If you would like to learn more about how to succeed in Drupal and our long-form training program, you can sign up for one of two, no-cost Taste of Drupal workshops coming up and explore the resources below.

Taste of Drupal free workshop

Drupal Career Resources

Drupal Career Online Program

Drupal Events Calendar

Drupal Groups

DrupalEasy Podcast 180 - Pimping GovCon (Sarah Thrasher - GovCon)

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 09:37:50 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Sarah Thrasher (sarahjean), front-end developer with Acquia, joins Andrew (remember him?), Kelley, and Mike to discuss the upcoming Drupal GovCon, what is means to be a junior developer, how the Drupal community is helping to make sure our community members stays healthy, and we bid farewell to Mike using the word "pimp". All that and our picks of week and five questions!

Interview

Drupal GovCon
- Trainings
- Sessions and Keynotes

DrupalEasy News

The Fall, 2016 session of Drupal Career Online begins September 26; applications are now open.

Three Stories

Let's be human at DrupalCon - track description for DrupalCon Dublin.
10 Things Every Jr. Drupal Web Developer Should Know - blog post by Jonathan Westman.
DrupalNorth wrapup.

Sponsors

MyDropWizard.com - Long-term-support services for Drupal 6, 7, and 8 sites.
WebEnabled.com - devPanel.

Picks of the Week

Mike - Textio.com - helps HR folks write better job descriptions (via YesCT).
Andrew - Become a Certified Drupal Association Member.
Kelley - Typogrify.
Sarah - Liberty.

Upcoming Events

NYC Camp - July 8-11.
Drupal4Gov - July 20-22, Custom Content Migrations to Drupal 8 (Mike's session).
Design4Drupal - July 22-24.

Follow us on Twitter

Five Questions (answers only)

Learning Japanese
DrupalVM
Speaking at Drupalcon
Chicken
Before 2008 was a print designer. They had an internal site that needed update so hey, Drupal. Read "Using Drupal" from cover to cover and created the site.

Disclaimer

Sorry about the audio quality in this episode. We had to go to our emergency recording of the call which is only two channels (our regular recording is one channel per participant) and heavily compressed.

Intro Music

Glory Glory: The Battle Hymn of the Association - from the DrupalCon New Orleans pre-note performed by Adam Juran, Campbell Vertesi and Jeremy Macguire.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

A Deep Dive into Views in a Unique Fashion (Book Review: Mastering Drupal 8 Views)

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 13:52:29 -0400

Gregg Marshall's Mastering Drupal 8 Views is one of the (I can only assume) many Drupal 8-focused books that will be released in the coming months. It is a very good deep dive into many of the hidden corners of the Views module, albeit with an interesting format. Not completely structured like a typical how-to software book, Gregg takes a bit more of a novel approach (pun intended) - he takes the reader on a journey through the Views module through the eyes of Lynn, a small business owner (Lynn's cat and Drupal consultant also have prominent roles). While some readers might find the story-ish elements distracting, they add a certain degree of warmth to the book - something I can only assume a subset of readers will more than appreciate.

The author does a nice job of setting the stage, identifying the intended audience for the book, and speaking directly to them (through the book's characters). There are sections of the book that may cause confusion with this structure, on several occasions I found myself reading long, multi-paragraph sections that I didn't immediately realize that a character was speaking, and not the author. It seems that the use of quotations to indicate when characters were speaking was not consistently applied.

While the technical content of the book is often well-written and clear, there are some places in the book where things seem out-of-order - none more so than the first lesson diving into the Views "settings" page - something that most people new to the subject don't need to consider until they need to modify the (very sane) default values. Another example early in the book has the author creating a new view "display" prior to a full explanation of what Views display are.

There are, however, many areas of great explanation on topics that I don't recall ever seeing in other Drupal-related books. Sections on the new "entity reference" and "REST export" display types stood out in the first few chapters, as well as some of the best explanations (and details) on the "table" format, and field rewrites (more on this in a bit).

There are several lessons that have starting points that aren't necessarily considered "best practice", including one that has the reader cloning the admin/content view as a starting point for a public facing view. In my opinion, the reader would be better served by starting a brand new view using the Views "wizard" interface. As a stickler for best practices, there were several things in the book that made me cringe a bit, including the use of the (outdated?) GMap and Location modules (instead of Geofield-related modules) and (even more so) the use of the admin area's "Install new module" functionality.

I found the discussion and lessons around contextual filters to be extremely effective. The story-ish nature of the book allowed the author to almost naturally introduce a problem that is elegantly solved with contextual filters. Along with relationships, contextual filters are often one of the major stumbling blocks in learning Views, and this book does as good a job as anything else I've read and taking the reader down in the deep, dark recesses of it ("Default value" options included!) The chapter on Views relationships is similarly structured and just as effective.

This is perhaps one of the only Drupal books I've read that purposely sends the reader (in this case, the main character as well) down a dead-end in order to introduce a new topic. I think that many readers will find this comforting, in that it allows the author to introduce a new topic in order to direct the reader to a solution.

As a big fan of display modes, combined with the fact that they are much more visible in Drupal 8, I hoped that the author would utilize them more often in the various lessons (instead of relying on adding fields to most views).

The book really shines in chapters that normally are only a small section in other Drupal resources. There is an entire chapter on field rewrites, and it is wonderful. The author takes Lynn and the reader through various examples, each exposing a new aspect of field rewrites. For anyone who doesn't dare dive into this section of Views field configuration, this chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

The chapter on all the settings in the "Advanced" fieldset is also something that the author covers extremely well. In most Views references, many of these settings are glossed over, but this book provides an almost ("aggregation" isn't covered as deeply as I hoped) complete reference to all the various available settings.

While the vast majority of the examples in the book are well structured, many of them depend on content types and other information architecture that exists on "Lynn's" site. While details of the information architecture are provided in an appendix, it would be very helpful for the author to provide them via GitHub or some other electronic mechanism to readers. Otherwise, it seems like a tedious and error-prone process for readers to recreate the information architecture on their own in order to follow the examples in the book.

The author does a nice job of walking the reader through the use of several Views-related contributed modules as well. For my taste, I think there should have been just a little more explanation about how various contributed modules fit together with Views. As an example, the fact that Views Slideshow provides a new display plugin is glossed over. I think it would serve the readers well to specifically mention that many Views related modules are simply plugins for various parts of the Views infrastructure. This would provide readers with a higher-level view of the Views ecosystem. That's a bit of a nitpick though, as this section is really, really solid.

One of the last chapters in the book covers theming views, and I think it doesn't go into enough details and/or examples. The section on adding CSS classes to various parts of a view is very useful, but the section on overriding template files feels incomplete.

Overall, this is a welcome addition to the Drupal family of books, and one that I can honestly recommend for users that feel like there are aspects of the Views module that are still a mystery to them. The novel-like structure of the book normally doesn't get in the way of the lesson, but for readers who normally don't read technical books front-to-back (instead cherry picking only chapters of interest), it might be a bit distracting. While this is properly identified as a Drupal 8 book, much of the content is also valid for Drupal 7, including some of (in my opinion) the strongest chapters.

DrupalEasy Podcast 179 - Need to Pee (Michael Schmid, amazee.io, Drupal Community Keynote)

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 09:58:28 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Michael Schmid (Schnitzel), Group CTO of Amazee Group, CTO of amazee.io and super-active Drupal community contributor joins Kelley, Anna, and Mike to discuss amazee.io and Michael's recent DrupalCon New Orleans Community Keynote. This episode also touches on the new (also Swiss!) king of the hill in Drupal code contributions as well as the recent changes at the Drupal Association.

Interview

DrupalEasy News

Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development live training at DrupalNorth, on Thursday, June 16.
Online Introduction to Drupal 8 Theme Development - Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, June 20, 21, and 22, 3-7pm EDT each day.

Three (Two) Stories

Drupal's number 1 is from Switzerland blog post by Jerome Zech.
Changes at the Drupal Association - Saying Goodbye, Reorganizing for a changing Drupal, Changes with the Drupal Association.

Sponsors

MyDropWizard.com - Long-term-support services for Drupal 6, 7, and 8 sites.
WebEnabled.com - devPanel.

Picks of the Week

Mike - Rules module again, because it is so freakin' awesome.
Anna - Teleport.org uses “Big Data” to compare different places to live. Focused on start-ups and other knowledge workers. Fun to look at (and scope out places where I might need to move after November!).
Kelley - Headspace mindfulness app to reduce stress, improve focus, relax.
Michael - Drop Guard - Updates your Core and Modules automatically.

Upcoming Events

Drupal North - June 16-19.
Drupal Dev Days - June 21-26.
Twin Cities Drupal Camp - June 23-26.
NYC Camp - July 8-11.
Drupal4Gov - July 20-22, Learning to Love Blocks Again (Ryan's session), Custom Content Migrations to Drupal 8 (Mike's session).
Design4Drupal - July 22-24. Still accepting session proposals until at least June 15.

Follow us on Twitter

Five Questions (answers only)

Drones! FPV and Video/Photo Drones.
Alexa and Wink (Home Automation).
Life.
An Elephant.
At DrupalCon Copenhagen's closing ceremony - the Kitten Killers performance.

Intro Music

I'm Too Sexy For My Code - from the DrupalCon New Orleans pre-note performed by Larry Garfield.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

DrupalEasy Podcast 178 - Rifftrax - Erik Peterson

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 22:40:39 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Rifftrax is the movie commentary web product from former members of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (powered by Drupal). Erik Peterson (torgospizza) is the Lead web architect, art “director”, sometimes-writer (marketing and social media copy) for the site. Mike and Ryan interview Erik about the cultural phenomenon which is also a verb (to "MiSTy" a film is to watch it while riffing).

Interview

Erik is a Contributor to Drupal Commerce and Ubercart before it. He is also a Co-maintainer of Commerce Stripe and creator of Commerce Cart Link.

DrupalEasy News

Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development live training at DrupalNorth, on Thursday, June 16.
Online Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development - Monday and Tuesday, June 13 and 14, 3-7pm EDT each day.
Online Introduction to Drupal 8 Theme Development - Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, June 20, 21, and 22, 3-7pm EDT each day.

Three Stories

Holly Ross leaves DA - blog post.
Megan Sanicki takes the wheel at DA - blog post.
The Drupal.org Complexity - blog post from Josh from the DA.

Sponsors

Picks of the Week

Ryan P - Empty your XDebug cache! http://bobbis.com/blog/cachegrindout-filled-my-drive
Erik P - PushCrew.com - Cloud-based push notifs

Upcoming Events

Drupal North - June 16-19.
Twin Cities - June 23-26.
Drupal4Gov - July 20-22.
D4D Boston - July 22-24.

Follow us on Twitter

Five Questions (answers only)

Photography such as this Raven photo
PHPStorm 10 (EAP)
Giraffe @ SD Zoo
Manage a team, teach for passion. Play music in my spare time. (What’s that?)
Matt Glaman He’s well-versed in pretty much everything, and wrote a D8 cookbook.

Intro Music

MST3K Theme Song, California Lady (Gravy)

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

Drupal 8 Debugging: Kareful Klicking in Kint

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Sat, 04 Jun 2016 11:14:22 -0400

Drupal 8's new theming system is a thing of beauty. As part of the massive changes to the Drupal 8 (front- and back-end) developer experience, the Devel module for Drupal 8 comes with a new variable inspector. Say goodbye to Krumo, and say hello to Kint. Like its predecessor, when you install the Devel project on a Drupal 8 local environment, you automatically get the Kint module as well (like Krumo, there are no additional downloads). Using Kint is similar to using Krumo, where in Drupal 7, any dsm($variable_name) or dpm($variable_name) call automatically used Krumo to display variables on the page in a way that made it easy(ier?) to dive into the many Drupal PHP arrays and objects. In Drupal 8, kint($variable_name) can be used to output any variable - this works in template files as well via {{ kint(variable_name) }}.

It took me a few weeks to get comfortable with Kint, mainly due to one small interface thing; clicking on the "+" icon in a Kint output recursively opens all the arrays and objects. Depending on the variable you're Kint-ing, this could result in a lot of output to sort through (and, depending on your machine, browser, and site configuration, it could take more than a few seconds to fully render).

After a few weeks of instinctively (and incorrectly) clicking on the "+ button every time I used Kint, I've now retrained myself to utilize it in a much more efficient manner.

I almost never click on the "+" anymore. Rather, I click output anywhere other than the "+" to open just that portion of the output.
I download and install the Search Kint module whenever I download and install the Devel module for a local environment. This provides an almost-too-convenient-to-believe search box with each Kint output that makes finding things almost trivial.

Using Kint efficiently is one of the skills that every Drupal 8 developer should have. Combined with an interactive debugger, there's virtually nothing that can't be easily discovered when a developer can wield both of these tools.

Learn more about Drupal 8 module and theme development debugging by attending a DrupalEasy workshop!

We're getting workshoppy

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Fri, 27 May 2016 17:48:14 -0400

We’ve really been busy here at DrupalEasy updating our curriculum and adding some training programs that we think will help get people leveraging the new awesomeness of Drupal 8. After a few times out at Drupal events, and our upcoming gig at Drupal North in Montreal with Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development on June 15, we’ve decided to go broader. We’re going new school, with online sessions of these D8 workshops in June to extend the reach beyond camps and 'cons.

If you are looking to get up to speed with Drupal 8 module development and/or theme development, two online afternoon sessions live, at your desktop are coming up:

Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development

2 Afternoons, Live, Online
Monday & Tuesday June 13 & 14;
3:00 pm - 7:00 pm EDT each day
Early Bird: $199. After June 6; $249
Register now

The Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development workshop is designed for anyone with either knowledge of PHP or knowledge of Drupal 7 module development. The workshop takes users through the development of three custom modules demonstrating the basic principles and concepts of Drupal 8 module development. Students will be hands-on for the majority of the day, and will leave with confidence to start writing their own custom Drupal 8 modules.

Introduction to Drupal 8 Theme Development

3 Afternoons, Live, Online
Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday June 20 - 23
3:00 pm - 7:00 pm EDT each day
Early Bird: $199. After June 13; $249
Register now

The Introduction to Drupal 8 Theme Development workshop is our newest curriculum and it's super-sized! Through three half-days of training, you will learn about Drupal 8 core's new built-in base themes, Twig templates, theme anatomy, and a full-on front-end development toolchain that utilizes Node.js and Gulp. The workshop uses the Bootstrap base theme for two of its three main units, giving students plenty of hands-on time developing custom themes. Anyone with knowledge of Drupal 7 theming or a working knowledge of HTML and CSS will leave the workshop with skills to allow them to start theming Drupal 8 sites.

DrupalEasy Podcast 177: New Orleans Day 3

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Thu, 19 May 2016 17:02:44 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Hosts Ryan Price, Mike Anello, Kelley Curry and Anna Kalata are joined by guests Jason Pamental, David Hwang and sometimes co-host Steve Edwards for a DrupalCon New Orleans wrap-up. We also reinvigorate our meetership with David Snopek of our sponsor MyDropWizard.com and hear about the Drupal 6 funeral parade.

Check in to DrupalEasy.com/podcast for more episodes from DrupalCon New Orleans 2016.

Follow us on Twitter

Intro Music

Jaywalkers Second Line Jazz Band from the Drupal 6 Mourning Party Parade

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

DrupalEasy Podcast 176: New Orleans Day 2

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Thu, 19 May 2016 13:35:08 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Hosts Ryan Price, Mike Anello, Kelley Curry and Anna Kalata are joined by guests Suzanne Dergacheva (of Evolving Web) Dave Hall (of the newly anointed Drupal 8 Workflow Initiative) and Steve Edwards to discuss Day 2 of DrupalCon. Ryan also breaks into interviews with Symfony's creator, Fabien Potencier, and the local New Orleans Drupal community representative, Eric Schmidt. Finally we hear some fun non-Drupal things each panelist did in the week.

Check in later this week for more episodes from DrupalCon New Orleans 2016.

Follow us on Twitter

Intro Music

Glory Glory Code of Conduct from #Prenote

By Adam Juran, Campbell Vertesi and Jeremy "JAM" Macguire

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

DrupalEasy Podcast 175: New Orleans Day 1

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Thu, 12 May 2016 10:50:01 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Hosts Ryan Price, Mike Anello, Ted Bowman and Kelley Curry are joined by guests Mike Herchel (of the Lullabot Podcast) and Steve Edwards (formerly of the Acquia Podcast) to discuss the events on Day 1 of DrupalCon. We start with the Prenote and Driesnote, and then discuss sessions each person was interested in throughout the day.

Check in later this week for more episodes from DrupalCon New Orleans 2016.

Follow us on Twitter

Intro Music

House of Drupalcon from #Prenote

By Adam Juran, Campbell Vertesi and Jeremy "JAM" Macguire

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast onStitcher.

Summertime, and the hiring is (Drupal)Easy

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Sat, 07 May 2016 18:18:15 -0400

It’s almost summer, and at DrupalEasy, that means it is almost Intern Season! Our Spring Drupal Career Online class is three-fourths of the way to graduation, and we have just three budding Drupalists who are looking for work experience through internships (the others are already spoken for!) If you’ve got too much to do, and not enough capacity to do it, an intern might be just the ticket through our (Work Experience) WE Drupal Program.

We love sowing the Drupal Community with well-trained new talent, all of whom have already devoted hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars, and more than three months of their lives to learning, practicing, engaging and developing their passions for Drupal in their quest to become professionals. We’ve found that they have a lot to offer organizations who can use their eager new Drupal passion and help them build really great first Drupal Experience entries on their resumes. If you need some extra bandwidth, or have some tasks or projects suited to a new site-builder type, why not engage an intern?

Hosting an intern is also a great way to test out talent and take some of the lower-level workload off of senior developers (like taking care of your own site, or those simpler tasks you need to get done for your clients.) Here’s the deal: you bring on a graduate of our Drupal Career training program, either paid or unpaid in mid-June. They devote their new Drupal enthusiasm and best-practice foundational skills to your projects for 2 to 3 months while you give them some guidance and experience. You and the intern then decide if they move on, or continue on as an (already indoctrinated) contractor or employee.

If you’d like to learn more, you can check out how we approach WE Drupal, fill out a Host Application (no commitment, just a way for us to learn what you are looking for) or email me.

Summer is just around the corner, so WE hope you don’t delay.

DrupalEasy Podcast 174 - Floss Belt (Ryan Szrama - Drupal Commerce)

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Mon, 02 May 2016 08:02:52 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Ryan Szrama (rszrama), President and CEO of Commerce Guys, project leader of Drupal Commerce, and proud ex-Best Buy Geek Squad member joins Ryan, Ted, and Mike for a comprehensive discussion Commerce Guys' recent relaunch as a standalone company, and the current development progress of Drupal Commerce for Drupal 8. We also discussed Drupal 8.1, a potential future for the theme layer, the absolute correct pronunciation of "Szrama", and a big announcement from Ted.

Interview

Commerce Guys Refocusing on Drupal Commerce as Platform.sh Becomes an Independent Company blog post.
https://drupalcommerce.org, especially the blog for updates on 8.x-2.0.
http://docs.drupalcommerce.org
Meta for checkout issues (base form to be inlcuded in alpha4): https://www.drupal.org/node/2710973
Payment roadmap issue (target for beta1 at DrupalCon): https://www.drupal.org/node/2711013

DrupalEasy News

DrupalEasy and SixMileTech team up for Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development at DrupalCon New Orleans.
DrupalEasy Podcast now on Google Play.
DrupalEasyPodcast on Reddit - upvote stories you'd like us to cover.

Three Stories

Sponsors

Picks of the Week

Mike - Bootstrap base theme.
Ted - Is size just a number? Reflecting on community growth, mentoring, and where we spend our efforts DrupalCon session by David Hernandez and Kalpana Goel.
Ryan P - Registry Rebuild and --fire-bazooka for when you move between environments.
Ryan S - Cloudflare.

Upcoming Events

DrupalCon New Orleans - May 9-13, 2016.

Follow us on Twitter

Five Questions (answers only)

Kayaking
Clash Royale
Become a beverage professional
Llamas
DrupalCon Barcelona 2007

Intro Music

The Dean Scream.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

Drupal 6 to Drupal 8(.1.x) Custom Content Migration

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 08:45:21 -0400

Note: This blog post is based on Drupal 8.1.x. It is an updated version of a previous tutorial based on Drupal 8.0.x. While the concepts are largely the same as 8.0.x, a refactoring of the core migrate modules took place in Drupal 8.1.x (migrations will become plugins in 8.1.x). This updated tutorial updates the previous example to work with Drupal 8.1.x, as well as demonstrates how to specify a migration group and run the migration with Drush. If you're familiar with the previous tutorial, you may want to skip to the "Rolling up our sleeves" section below.

Even if you're only casually acquainted with Drupal 8, you probably know that the core upgrade path to Drupal 8 has been completely rewritten from the ground-up, using many of the concepts of the Migrate and Drupal-to-Drupal migration modules. Using the Migrate upgrade module, it is possible to migrate much of a Drupal 6 (or Drupal 7) site to Drupal 8 with a minimum of fuss (DrupalEasy.com is a prime example of this). "Migrate upgrade" is similar to previous Drupal core upgrade paths - there are no options to pick-and-choose what is to be migrated - it's all-or-nothing. This blog post provides an example of how to migrate content from only a single, simple content type in a Drupal 6 site to a Drupal 8.1.x site, without writing any PHP code at all.

Setting the table

First, some background information on how the Drupal 8 Migrate module is architected. The Migrate module revolves around three main concepts:

Source plugins - these are plugins that know how to get the particular data to be migrated. Drupal's core "Migrate" module only contains base-level source plugins, often extended by other modules. Most Drupal core modules provide their own source plugins that know how to query Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 databases for data they're responsible for. For example, the Drupal 8 core "Node" module contains source plugins for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 nodes, node revisions, node types, etc… Additionally, contributed and custom modules can provide additional source plugins for other CMSes (WordPress, Joomla, etc…), database types (Oracle, MSSQL, etc…), and data formats (CSV, XML, JSON, etc.)
Process plugins - these are plugins designed to receive data from source plugins, then massage it into the proper form for the destination on a per-field basis. Multiple process plugins can be applied to a single piece of data. Drupal core provides various useful process plugins, but custom and contributed modules can easily implement their own.
Destination plugins - these are plugins that know how to receive data from the process plugins and create the appropriate Drupal 8 "thing". The Drupal 8 core "Migrate" module contains general-purpose destination plugins for configuration and content entities, while individual modules can extend that support where their data requires specialized processing.

Together, the Source -> Process -> Destination structure is often called the "pipeline".

It is important to understand that for basic Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 migrations (like this example), all of the code is already present - all the developer needs to do it to configure the migration. It is much like preparing a meal where you already have a kitchen full of tools and food - the chef only needs to assemble what is already there.

The configuration of the migration for this example will take place completely in two custom .yml files that will live inside of a custom module. In the end, the custom module will be quite simple - just a .info.yml file for the module itself, and two .yml files for configuring the migration.

Reviewing the recipe

For this example, the source Drupal 6 site is a large site, with more than 10 different content types, thousands of nodes, and many associated vocabularies, users, profiles, views, and everything else that goes along with an average Drupal site that has been around for 5+ years. The client has decided to rewrite the entire site in Drupal 8, rebuilding virtually the entire site from the ground-up - but they wanted to migrate a few thousand nodes from two particular content types. This example will demonstrate how to write a custom migration for the simpler of the two content types.

The "external article" content type to be migrated contains several fields, but only a few of consequence:

Title - the node's title
Publication source - a single line, unformatted text field
Location - a single line, unformatted text field
External link - a field of type "link"

Some additional notes:

The "Body" field is unused, and does not need to be migrated.
The existing data in the "Author" field is unimportant, and can be populated with UID=1 on the Drupal 8 site.
The node will be migrated from type "ext_article" to "article".

Several factors make this a particularly straight-forward migration:

There are no reference fields at all (not even the author!)
All of the field types to be migrated are included with Drupal 8 core.
The Drupal 6 source plugin for nodes allows a "type" parameter, which is super-handy for only migrated nodes of a certain type from the source site.

Rolling up our sleeves

With all of this knowledge, it's time to write our custom migration. First, create a custom module with only an .info.yml file (Drupal Console's generate:module command can do this in a flash.) List the Migrate Drupal (migrate_drupal) and Migrate Plus modules as dependencies. The Migrate Drupal module dependency is necessary for some of its classes that contain functionality to query Drupal 6 databases, while the Migrate Plus module dependency is required because custom migrations are now plugins that utilize the MigrationConfigEntityPluginManager provided by Migrate Plus (full details in a blog post by Mike Ryan).

Next, create a "migration group" by creating a migrate_plus.migration_group.mygroup.yml file. The purpose of a migration group is to be able to group related migrations together, for the benefit of running them all at once as well as providing information common to all the group migrations (like the source database credentials) in one place.

The "shared_configuration -> source -> key" value of "legacy" corresponds to a database specified in the Drupal 8 site's settings.php file. For example:

Next, create a new "migrate_plus.migration.external_articles.yml" file in /config/install/. Copy/paste the contents of Drupal core's /core/modules/node/migration_templates/d6_node.yml file into it. This "migration template" is what all node migrations are based on when running the Drupal core upgrade path. So, it's a great place to start for our custom migration. Note that the file name begins with "migrate_plus.migration" - this is what allows our custom migration to utilize the Migrate Plus module's MigrationConfigEntityPluginManager.

There's a few customizations that need to be made in order to meet our requirements:

Change the "id" and "label" of the migration to something unique for the project.
Add the "migration_group: mygroup" to add this migration to the group we created above. This allows this migration access to the Drupal 6 source database credentials.
For the "source" plugin, the "d6_node" migration is fine - this source knows how to query a Drupal 6 database for nodes. But, by itself, it will query the database for nodes, regardless of their type. Luckily, the "d6_node" plugin takes an (optional) "node_type" parameter. So, we add "ext_article" as the "node_type".
We can remove the "nid" and "vid" field mappings in the "process" section. The Drupal core upgrade path preserves source entity ids, but as long as we're careful with reference fields (in our case, we have none), we can remove the field mappings and let Drupal 8 assign new node and version ids for incoming nodes. Note that we're not migrating previous node revisions, only the current revision.
Change the "type" field mapping from a straight mapping to a static value using the "default_value" process plugin. This is what allows us to change the type of the incoming nodes from "ext_article" to just "article".
Similarly, change the "uid" field mapping from a straight mapping to a static_value of "1", which assigns the author of all incoming nodes to the UID=1 user on the Drupal 8 site.
Since we don't have any "body" field data to migrate, we can remove all the "body" field mappings.
Add a mapping for the "Publication source". On the Drupal 6 site, this field's machine name is "field_source", on the Drupal 8 site, the field's machine name is field_publication_source. Since it is a simple text field, we can use a direct mapping.
Add a direct mapping for "field_location". This one is even easier than the previous because the field name is the same on both the source and destination site.
Add a mapping for the source "External link" field. On the Drupal 6 site, the machine name is "field_externallinktarget", while on the Drupal 8 site, it has been changed to "field_external_link". Because this is a field of type "link", we must use the "d6_cck_link" process plugin (provided by the Drupal 8 core "Link" module). This process plugin knows how to take Drupal 6 link field data and massage it into the proper form for Drupal 8 link field data.
Finally, we can remove all the migration dependencies, as none of them are necessary for this simple migration.

The resulting file is:

Note that .yml files are super-sensitive to indentation. Each indentation must be two spaces (no tab characters).

Serving the meal

To run the migration, first enable the custom module. The act of enabling the module and Drupal core's reading in of the migration configuration could trigger an error if the configuration isn't formatted properly. For example, if you misspelled the "d6_node" source plugin as "db_node", you'll see the following error:

[Error] The "db_node" plugin does not exist.

If the module installs properly, the Drush commands provided by the Migrate Tools (8.x-2.x-dev - 2016-Apr-12 or later) module can be used to manage the migration. First, use the Drush "migrate-status" command (alias: ms) can be run to confirm that the migration configuration exists. This is similar to functionality in Drupal 7's Migrate module.

~/Sites/drupal8migrate $ drush ms
 Group: mygroup          Status  Total  Imported  Unprocessed  Last imported       
 enternal_articles       Idle    602    602       0            2016-04-29 16:35:53

Finally, using Drush, the migration can be run using the "migrate-import" (alias: mi) command:

~/Sites/drupal8migrate $ drush mi external_articles
Processed 602 items (602 created, 0 updated, 0 failed, 0 ignored) - done with 'external_articles'

Similarly, the migration can be rolled back using the drush "migrate-rollback" (alias: rm) command:

~/Sites/drupal8migrate $ drush migrate-rollback external_articles
Rolled back 602 items - done with 'external_articles'

Once the migration is complete, navigate over to your Drupal 8 site, confirm that all the content has been migrated properly, then uninstall the custom module as well as the other migrate-related modules.

Note that the Migrate module doesn't properly dispose of its tables (yet) when it is uninstalled, so you may have to manually remove the "migrate_map" and "migrate_message" tables from your destination database.

Odds and ends

One of the trickier aspects about writing custom migrations is updating the migration configuration on an installed module. There are several options:
- The Configuration development module provides a config-devel-import-one (cdi1) drush command that will read a configuration file directly into the active store. For example: drush cdi1 modules/custom/mymodule/config/install/migrate_plus.migration.external_articles.yml
- Drush core provides a config-edit command that allows a developer to directly edit an active configuration.
- Finally, if you're a bit old-school, you can uninstall the module, then use the "drush php" command to run Drupal::configFactory()->getEditable('migrate_plus.migration.external_articles)->delete();, then reinstall the module.
Sometimes, while developing a custom migration, if things on the destination get really "dirty", I've found that starting with a fresh DB helps immensely (be sure to remove those "migrate_" tables as well!)

Additional resources

Drupal GovCon 2016 presentation "Custom Content Migrations to Drupal 8".
Migrations are now plugins change record
Migration Update for Drupal 8.1 - blog post by Mike Ryan.
Migrate a custom JSON feed in Drupal 8 with Migrate Source JSON blog post by Jeff Geerling.
Custom Drupal-to-Drupal Migrations with Migrate Tools - blog post by William Hetherington.

Thanks to Mike Ryan and Jeffrey Phillips for reviewing this post prior to publication.

Just in case - Drupal 8's /core/rebuild.php

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 14:59:29 -0400

Drupal 8 has lots of things that Drupal 7 doesn't have - a modern object-oriented foundation, the Twig templating system, and WYSIWYG out-of-the-box - just to name a few. There's also a good number of less flashy additions that are designed to improve the developer experience. One of these additions is the /core/rebuild.php file.

While it is common knowledge that clearing rebuilding Drupal's caches is good practice during development, Drupal 8 brings a new tool to the table to get it done. Previous to Drupal 8, most developers utilized Drush to clear caches, some less-efficient folks cleared caches from the user interface (usually from the Admin Menu, but sometimes - gasp! - from the admin/config/development/performance page).

Drupal 8 comes with a new /core/rebuild.php file that doesn't require the Drupal 8 site to be functioning (fatal errors, anyone?) nor does it require Drush or Drupal Console. Instead, as long as your site's configuration allows it, all you have to do is navigate to /core/rebuild.php in your browser. As Drupal's documentation states, this "Rebuilds all Drupal caches even when Drupal itself does not work."

How do you know if your site's configuration supports this functionality? Well, if you're working locally (and if you're developing, you should be working locally), then just make sure that $settings['rebuild_access'] = TRUE; in your settings.php (or, better yet, settings.local.php). The other method involves running the /core/scripts/rebuild_token_calculator.sh script from the commandline, and using the results as query parameters for /core/rebuild.php (see "Method II" on https://www.drupal.org/node/2153725).

Granted, most developers have Drush and/or Drupal Console installed everywhere they're working, but it's always good to have a backup method for rebuilding Drupal's caches - just in case.

Demystifying Drupal 8's breakpoints.yml file

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Mon, 25 Apr 2016 11:14:22 -0400

While working through a couple of Drupal 8 projects involving a custom theme, I've been curious about the themename.breakpoints.yml file. I've dutifully updated it with the proper breakpoint values, but I've been a bit mystified with its actual purpose. There's nothing in either of the base themes I've used (Neato and Bootstrap) that actually appears to utilize the data in the breakpoints.yml files. While the breakpoints are defined in this file, they are also defined in the theme's source Sass and LESS files, for use in the processed CSS.

I decided to dig into the issue a bit more over the past few days in an effort to figure out exactly what the purpose of the breakpoints.yml file is. It turns out that the any module or theme can create a themename.breakpoints.yml or modulename.breakpoints.yml file. The Breakpoint module (included as part of Drupal 8 core) then reads these files and adds them to the site's configuration. At this point, other installed modules and themes can access this configuration and utilize it in their own functionality. This is exactly how the Responsive Image module (also part of Drupal 8 core) works. It accesses the installed theme's breakpoints configuration (via the themename.breakpoints.yml file) and serves up proper responsive images based on that configuration.

But, at this time, there is nothing in Drupal core that automatically allows breakpoints defined in the themename.breakpoints.yml file to be easily used in the theme's CSS. So, when a theme's breakpoints.yml file is modified, nothing will change on the site until the site's CSS is also modified. In effect, most theme's breakpoints will need to be defined in two places - the themename.breakpoints.yml file and the theme's CSS.

There are methods available (and still being developed) to "link" breakpoints defined in the breakpoints.yml file with the theme's CSS - usually as part of a pre-processing task when working with LESS or Sass.

Resources

DrupalEasy Podcast 173 - Secret Bunker (Peter Wolanin, Cathy Theys - Drupal Security Team)

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Fri, 08 Apr 2016 12:25:35 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Cathy Theys (yesct) and Peter Wolanin (pwolanin) from the Drupal Security Team join Anna Kalata and Mike Anello to discuss the origins, evolution, and efforts of the team. Peter and Cathy discuss how to report potential security issues, how issues are handled within the team, and how they prioritize potential contributed module security issues. In addition, we discuss Drupal from the outside-in, Cathy's travel schedule, secret bunkers, the need for us to keep Peter busy in the Drupal community (seriously), Mike's slow loss of control, customers who contribute, and how Drupal might be related to the Panama Papers. As if that wasn't enough, we give Cathy control of the five questions - let the fun begin!

Interview

Drupal Security Team home.
How to report a security issue.
Drupal 8 Security Bounty Bug Program.
Links related to ad-hoc pre-security team activity: https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2005-1921, http://www.securiteam.com/exploits/5BP0O20GBS.html, https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/1078/, https://www.drupal.org/node/1341738.
Best practice to block xml rpc in htaccess?.
Current Security Team members.
Join the Security Team.

DrupalEasy News

DrupalEasy and SixMileTech team up for Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development at DrupalCon New Orleans.

Four Stories

Top 10 contributing customers Drupal Association blog post by Joshua Mitchell. Information for organizations who want their people to start recording attribution.
Examples of how to make Drupal outside-in - blog post by Dries Buytaert.
Drupal 8.1 RC1 is available.
DrupalCon New Orleans schedule is available.

Sponsors

Picks of the Week

Cathy - Yes, Drupal 8 is slower than Drupal 7 - here's why blog post by Jeff Geerling.
Mike - Group module for Drupal 8. See Mike's screencast demonstrating its use.
Peter - From Encrypted Drives To Amazon's Cloud -- The Amazing Flight Of The Panama Papers.
Anna - Counterpoint to Forbes pointing at Drupal: WordPress slider implicated Mossack Fonseca Breach – WordPress Revolution Slider Plugin Possible Cause.
Anna - State of Drupal 2016 Survey.

Upcoming Events

DrupalDelphia - April 8, 2016.
Drupal Camp Spain - Granada - Apr 22-24, 2016 - Cathy will be there.
DrupalCon New Orleans - May 9-13, 2016 - Cathy is core conversation track chair, Peter's session.
DrupalNorth Montreal - June 16-19, 2016 - Cathy will be keynoting.

Follow us on Twitter

Cathy's Five Questions (answers only)

Python library for reading shape files (pyshp).
Retirement.
Go back to DIY microbiology/genetic engineering.
Chx asking him to do “something easy” for Drupal 6.
Brian Osborne, working on CAS module (bkosborne).

Intro Music

R.T.B.C. - from the DrupalCon Los Angeles pre-note performed by Larry Garfield.

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

Checking for the existence of a field value in Twig

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 07:02:24 -0400

Twig syntax is new for most Drupalists, and learning how to check for the existence of a field value is a valuble skill for anyone building a Drupal 8 theme. For example, consider the case where there is an optional text field called "Photo caption" on a content type. If the content author populates the "Photo caption" field, then it should be output as follows:

<figcaption>{{ content.field_photo_caption }}</figcaption>

But what if the content author chooses not to populate the "Photo caption" field? Using the above code, an empty <figcaption> tag will still be rendered on the page.

There are many code snippets available about checking for the existence of the entire {{ content }} like this:

{% if content %} {{ content }} {% endif %}

Unfortunately, this does not work exactly the same way for fields within the {{ content }}. The solution is to check for the existence of the rendered field.

{% if content.field_photo_caption|render %} <figcaption>{{ content.field_photo_caption }}</figcaption> {% endif %}

Using this method, the <figcaption> tag and value will only be rendered if the "Photo caption" field has been populated.

An alternate way of writing this code using the same concept is:

{% set field_photo_caption = content.field_photo_caption|render %} {% if field_photo_caption %} <figcaption>{{ field_photo_caption }}</figcaption> {% endif %}

Resources:

DrupalEasy Podcast 172 - The Coup (Jeff Geerling - Drupal VM)

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 14:34:07 -0400

Direct .mp3 file download.

Jeff Geerling (geerlingguy), lead maintainer of the Drupal VM project joins Ted, Kelley, and Andrew for a lesson on Drupal VM, and how it can be leveraged by Drupal developers. Additional topics discussed include recent community voting results, Drupal 8.1, Peco, and renting chickens.

Interview

DrupalEasy News

DrupalEasy and SixMileTech team up for Introduction to Drupal 8 Module Development at DrupalCon New Orleans.

Three Stories

2016 Drupal Association at-large election winner announced - Shyamala Rajaram - blog post from the Drupal Association.
What's Coming in Drupal 8.1? - blog post from OSTraining.
Community Keynote Votes Are In - blog post from DrupalCon New Orleans. Your brain health is more important than your standing desk by Michael Schmid (Schnitzel).

Sponsors

Picks of the Week

Andrew - Peco A visual grep and piping tool.
Ted - DrupalDeploy
Kelley - Noun Project, Chewbacca.
Jeff - RefreshLess - a neat experimental Drupal 8 module by Wim Leers for making a more app-like browsing experience.

Upcoming Events

TexasCamp - April 1-2, 2016.
DrupalDelphia - April 8, 2016.
DrupalCon New Orleans - May 9-13, 2016.

Follow us on Twitter

Five Questions (answers only)

Collect raspberry Pi computers. Has 13 Pis on his desk.
Peco (Andrew rocks!) - Debian on an O-Droid.
Getting heating and cooling system to auto control zones of the house.
Rented Chicken
Going from 56 Joomla sites to one Drupal site with Organic Groups (OG)

Intro Music

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Florida DrupalCamp 2016 Wins and Losses

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 13:45:46 -0400

A few weeks ago, the Florida Drupal community (and more than a few honored out-of-town guests) gathered together for our annual event. This was the 8th Florida DrupalCamp, so the camp definitely had a familiar feel. As we normally do, we like to take a close look back and discuss what worked, what didn't, and how we can improve future events.

This year's event was smaller than previous years - we had approximately 40 fewer attendees (216 total) that last year. The general feeling is that this was due to a few factors, including our own laziness (we didn't get the camp site up until after the new year), our lack to marketing outside of the Drupal community, and (most worrisome) perhaps the fact that Drupal 8 has the perception of being more for larger organizations than for sites of all sizes.

After the conclusion of the event, we sent out an email to our entire email list - not just those that attended, asking them to complete a post-camp survey. We did this so that we could find out why people didn't attend, as well as get feedback from those that did attend. We had about a 25% response rate on the survey.

For those that didn't attend, we were relieved to find out that no one who completed a survey indicated that the cost of the camp ($35) was a deciding factor.

For those that did attend, curiously, the vast majority who completed the survey were already established in the Drupal community (more than 2 years experience, had attended a previous Drupal event, used Drupal daily, did not attend the beginner track) - very few beginners completed the survey, and we're not exactly sure why, considering that our beginner track was overflowing.

Timeline

Getting back to our laziness, for the most part, it was the same set of organizers (minus a few) who organized this year's edition of the camp. It was the same venue, the same caterer, the same web site; most everything was a carbon copy of our (highly regarded) 2015 camp. Perhaps a bit of overconfidence set in, and we didn't really get things rolling until after the new year. We learned our lesson, and have set a goal of a having next year's site ready to accept registrations four months prior to the event.

Additionally, we've already begun the process of securing a venue for next year's event. By locking it in early, some of the pressure will be off the organizers as we get closer to next year's event.

Wins

Overall, the survey and anecdotal evidence indicate that the camp was a success. Sessions were strong, lunch was (again) a hit, the price was right, and our swag is second to none. It wasn't perfect (see the next section below), but our focus on the fundamentals (good people, good sessions, good food) has served us well.

We do things a little differently than most camps when it comes to a keynote speaker. We have three. Rather than call them keynote speakers, we call them "featured speakers" and ask them to give double-length sessions so that our attendees can dive deep. This year's featured speakers were clearly well-received, as the top two "most favorite" sessions (according to the survey) were both featured speakers. Even more encouraging was that fact that no single session received more than one "least favorite" session vote on the survey. Overall 90% of the survey respondents rated the sessions "very good" or "excellent".

Losses

With all the love for the sessions, swag, and food, we definitely have some things to work on for next year.

While we made a mention of our Code of Conduct in the opening session, we had feedback that we didn't provide enough information on the process. We were a little too informal with how we mentioned it - in the future, we will be much more proactive and process-oriented in letting everyone know what to do if they see inappropriate behavior.

As mentioned above, we didn't do a very good job this year marketing the camp outside of the Drupal community. With fewer organizers this year, everyone was stretched a little farther, and this task fell through the cracks. We discussed finding a new volunteer dedicated to helping us focus on reaching folks outside of our community.

It took us more than a week to get our survey out. That is too long, and may be a contributing factor as to why our results are skewed towards experienced Drupalists. Next year, our goal is to have the survey ready to be announced at the closing session.

We are extremely lucky to have such a great venue partner in Florida Technical College. They make it very easy for us to have our event there, but unfortunately, there are also some challenges. We only have access to two rooms that hold more than 25 people, and those rooms have, in the past, been used by featured speakers and our (very popular) beginner track. That means that some popular sessions end up being packed (overflowing), which leads to some complaints. We're working on a plan to mitigate this in future camps.

Perhaps nothing has been communicated to us more in the past few years that the need to record and post session videos. Unfortunately, we have been unable to find a volunteer to help organize and lead this effort. We are dedicated to making this happen. We have a plan to use Google Hangouts to minimize the process overhead, but we still need volunteers to help make it happen.

Finally, while the number of sponsors was roughly the same as the 2015 camp, we were unable to secure a top-level sponsor. This resulted in us having our first-ever budget shortfall. Luckily, we've built up a nice nest egg, so it wasn't an issue, but we're curious if this is the start of a trend that we need to account for in future events. I'd love to hear some feedback from other camp organizers on this topic.

Things to consider for next year

So, with all this knowledge, how is it affecting our thinking/planning for our 2017 event? Each year, we ask ourselves if we should find a new venue. As I mentioned previously, our venue partner couldn't be easier to work with. They open up their facility to us, give us the run of the building, and attempt to meet our every request. The cost for this is virtually nothing other than paying for some extra security and custodial services. But, the facility has some inherent challenges for us, specifically in the size of the classrooms. Each year we discuss finding a new location, and each year it comes down to the same thing - all of the organizers are too busy to do the legwork of finding and securing a new venue that provides what we need without an outrageous increase in cost and/or hassle. So, until we find someone willing to do the legwork, or one of the existing organizers creates a time machine, it doesn't look like we're going anywhere.

That doesn't mean that we're not looking to address some of the issues. For starters, we're looking at the possibility of moving to a two-day camp format. This will allow us to spread sessions out more, make better use of the available space, and provide flexible session lengths for presenters. These facts, combined with session recordings will hopefully move things in the right direction.

Want to help?

Interested in getting involved in next year's event? Feel free to contact me directly, or check out our "lessons learned" wiki page and leave a comment there. We're committed to making this the best DrupalCamp anywhere, so join us for the ride!

Enabling "development mode" on a local Drupal 8 site

drupaleasy@gmail.com (Michael Anello) — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 13:55:29 -0400

Drupal 8 includes some great debugging tools built-in, but it isn't always super-obvious how to access them. Luckily, the Drupal Console "site:mode" command helps out quite a bit, but it also requires the site to be configured properly before it can be successfully used. I find that having access to the Twig template name suggestions is invaluable when theming a Drupal 8 site:

Enabling development mode on a Drupal 8 site gives site builders access to debugging functionality including:

Enables Twig debugging - template override filename suggestions right in the HTML source.
Enables Twig auto-reload - Twig templates are automatically recompiled when they are changed (instead of having to wait for a cache rebuild).
Disables Twig caching and Drupal's render cache - because caching is annoying when you're developing, right?

Using Drupal 8's development "mode" simply involves tweaking your local site's settings.php and services.yml files. Drupal Console's "site:mode" command will do most of the work for you.

Here's the steps I normally take to enable Drupal 8's development mode:

Ensure the local copy is using a sites/default/settings.local.php, and that it is being included by the sites/default/settings.php file.
Copy /sites/development.services.yml to sites/default/services.yml. The services.yml file is ignored by Git by default, and contains environment-specific services settings.
Ensure the permissions of the sites/default/services.yml file allow you to read/write, as when you run Drupal Console's "site:mode" command, the file will be modified. This is a common issue when first setting this stuff up.
Run Drupal Console's "site:mode" command to put the site in development mode: drupal site:mode dev.

If all goes well, then Drupal Console will output a summary of the changes it made, with no errors.

You can then flip-flop between development mode and production mode using:

drupal site:mode dev drupal site:mode prod

Keep in mind that Drupal will try to protect the /sites/default/services.yml file, so you may have to update its permissions prior to each time you change the site mode.