Drupal Planet

Last Friday the annual one-day DrupalJam conference was held in the Rotterdam Feyenoord soccer stadium. The conference, which saw its eighth edition - if I recall correctly - is shifting to be more business focused with its new motto Drupal beyond the code, and was a great success with over a 100 participants. This blog post serves as a high-level summary of a couple of the talks that I attended.

This is an intervention.

CSS is pretty simple. Classes, IDs, elements and pseudo-elements, with style definitions attached to each. Calling it a "language" is a bit of a stretch (though preprocessors like Sass fit the bill).

But let's be honest, for years our stylesheets cascaded right on out to infinity.

Huge files with table-of-contents comments to try to make some sense of it — until a quick fix got pasted down at the bottom. Brittle style definitions relying on tight coupling with HTML structure. Pieces of styles being replicated here and there for different components with similar features, without any way to tell they were related in the CSS.

My stylesheets were like that too, because strategies for writing CSS had barely altered since the days when it was used to change the colors of the scroll bars in Internet Explorer. Luckily, in the past couple of years both CSS architecture and CSS preprocessors came into their own.

SMACSS, or Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS, was developed by Jonathan Snook, a featured speaker at Drupalcon Portland. I'm really excited to get the opportunity to have Jonathan speak, not only because of my personally well-dog-eared copy of SMACSS, but because Drupal itself is adopting a SMACSS approach to its CSS.

I spoke with Jonathan about sustainable stylesheets and the future of SMACSS. For an even more detailed look, please join me at Jonathan Snook's featured Drupalcon Portland this afternon, Tuesday, May 21 at 4:30 PM.

IB: What's the biggest mistake you see people making when writing CSS?

JS: I think the biggest mistake is thinking of everything in the context of a single page. We're no longer just building sites with a design for a home page and an inside page. We're developing complex systems that need to work in a variety of contexts and we need a development approach that complements that.

IB: What's the biggest "win" you see in using the SMACSS approach? Why should frontend developers change their approach to CSS?

JS: The biggest win is maintainability. The SMACSS methodology makes it easier to build larger projects by breaking things down into smaller components. Like the move from spaghetti code to MVC frameworks on the server side, this separation of concerns on the CSS side improves the process of putting a site or web app together.

IB: In the last part of your book, you talk about how the SMACSS approach fits in to work using a preprocessor like Sass. There have been a lot of developments in Sass in the past year — have they had any positive effects on your use of the SMACSS approach?

JS: With Sass, the introduction of placeholders was a positive step forward. Overall, Sass (and other preprocessors) are a great way to augment — but not replace — the way people write CSS.

IB: What are your thoughts on BEM? Do you see it as compatible with SMACSS?

JS: I see BEM as very compatible. BEM really enforces naming convention, which is a very important concept in SMACSS. They both take a modular approach to site development.

IB: What are you tacking next when it comes to CSS and frontend development? Will there be a "SMACSS Part Two"? Or something else entirely?

JS: I'd love to augment SMACSS with case studies and expand on some of the ideas in the book based on things that come up in the workshops I do. I'd also like to work on a prototyping/site development tool that uses the SMACSS concepts. We had built something like this when I was at Yahoo! that I think many people in the industry would find really useful. Hopefully I can find the time to work on it!

Image credit Flickr user stevensnodgrass. It's spaghetti! (As in code.)

Join Rootwork on Twitter, Facebook and SlideShare.

Learn about Rootwork's services for nonprofits and social change.

The first time I hosted code, I did it on Github. Naturally, I got really used to the slick interface for browsing through my remote files, viewing my commits, and generally visualizing what I had hosted on their site. So when I started contributing code to drupal.org, I felt like I was working in the dark. I'd send up my commits and branches, and trust that they were up there, even if I couldn't "see" them.

Little did I know, that you actually CAN browse through your code on Drupal.org.

Every project page has a little link at the bottom left called "Repository Viewer"

This link takes you to http:// drupalcode.org/project/<your-project>.git, where you'll find…

But those are just your commits. To see your files, click the link that says "tree"...

Your files were there all along… hidden in plain view.

If your curious about how it works, the display is generated using Gitweb, an open source project for viewing remote git repositories in a web browser. This functionality used to be available at cvs.drupal.org, before the community migrated to Git for version control, and the code browser apparently moved to drupalcode.org.

In this article I am going to show you how to embed a View in a template file (.tpl). Using a cool Views API function, you can render the display of any View and even pass it arguments.

A couple of months ago, after a particularly furious week of trying to contribute something useful to Drupal core, I woke up one morning to a see a lot of activity on my twitter account (Pretty much unheard of for me).  I had received this tweet from webchick (Angie Byron).

@alasdaircf Hey, thanks for all the CMI conversion patches! Keep 'em comin'! :D 

This was an amazing feeling as Angie is one of the core maintainers for Drupal and a really big name in Drupal .  But in a deeper way I think that it symbolises some of the things that I really appreciate about the Drupal community.

Drupal, probably like many other open source technologies, is very meritocratic.  There is very definitely some level of hierarchy, not everyone is a co-maintainer of core.  Talent and ability are important and are a huge part of what drives the technology forward.  But the fact that I got thanks from one of the major core maintainers demonstrates something else.  That isn’t to say that I don’t have any talent or ability, but I am relatively new to this whole world and at the moment I don’t have the ability and comprehension of others.

What I have is an urge to put a little bit of an effort in taking what I do know and taking a little bit of time to help and contribute back.  And a big part of why I have that urge is that the people involved in Drupal seem to at least have a real appreciation for any time that I put in. I have to say that this is unusual and special part of this community.  

Having been involved in music (mostly classical) for the majority of my life,  I can say that this is not the case at all.  Behind a lot of good amateur ensembles there are people that put in a lot of effort in organising.  But when it comes to the performing, people aren’t really there to pat you on the back for trying hard if they don’t think you are performing to a standard they would like to listen to.  I’m not an idiot (well not all the time), I know that there are lots of very rational reasons for why the two are very far apart and if I were to make a comparison with sporting activities, not having any ability is a real problem.  

However that doesn’t stop the fact that alongside all the other things that are great about the Drupal community it really is a community that appreciates effort.

It isn’t just Angie who has been really great.  A big thanks to Alex Pott, Daniel Wehner, Damian Kloip and Tim Plunkett particulary for helping me to get contributing.

Just posted a new blog post to the Server Check.in blog: Moving functionality to Node.js increased per-server capacity by 100x. Here's a snippet from the post:

One feature that we just finished deploying is a small Node.js application that runs in tandem with Drupal to allow for an incredibly large number of servers and websites to be checked in a fraction of the time that we were checking them using only PHP, cron, and Drupal's Queue API.

If you need to do some potentially slow tasks very often, and they're either network or IO-bound, consider moving those tasks away from Drupal/PHP to a Node.js app. Your server and your overloaded queue will thank you!

Read more.

The UCSF Drupal Web Starter Kit project has been our most successful university project to date. It has empowered UCSF to roll out sites for small departments, offices, and researchers in a matter of minutes.

Just 3 months after launch, 70 sites have gone live.

Here are a few examples of sites leveraging the Drupal Web Starter Kit:

1. Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor & Provost
2. UCSF Depression Center
3. Drupal Web Starter Kit

UCSF has hundreds of small web properties for offices, researchers and small departments who don’t have the budgets and resources to create custom websites. Historically these groups have been left to their own devices to cobble together sites by whatever means necessary. These sites grow quickly out of date, are hard to maintain and rarely adhere to UCSF brand guidelines. 

UCSF created an initiative to build a Drupal install profile that they could offer to these groups at minimal cost and effort. UCSF turned to Chapter Three to design and build this solution.

1. A flexible information architecture

   Because this web solution had to work for small departments, offices, and researchers, we needed to find some common ground in how the sites were structured, while still providing enough flexibility for end users to modify the site’s structure to fit their needs. 

   We began by creating menu structure consisting of “Home, About, News, Events, Publications, Services and People”.  We arrived at this list after careful research of the commonalities across sites for the three key audiences. This meant that when a new website was created, the new client would have a primary navigation menu which was already created. They could then add items to the menu as needed, customizing it to fit their specific needs. 

   We also created specific content types for News & Events. Events were structured so that they could show upcoming and past.  Over time it is our goal to extend the project to create structure around more content including Publications and People.

2. Three different palettes 

   We collaborated with UCSF’s brand specialist to ensure that our designs were approved at the highest level to properly represent the look and feel of the University. We delivered three different color palettes of the template so that end users could pick the color scheme they liked most for their site.

3. Robust content display options

   To empower the admins to have more control of the key content regions, we designed a WISYWIG editor with the power to do far more than add text, links and images. All project administrators can add:

   • vertical tabs
   • accordions
   • tool tips

   Additionally, special care was taken to ensure that the back end system could be easily controlled by individuals who self identified as “non-technical” people.

4. Responsive design framework

   The future is device agnostic. As screen sizes multiply by the day, we knew that delivering a fully responsive site was paramount for the long term success of this project. We accounted for this with a fully responsive solution which provides legible content on any device interface. Since this solution was meant for hundreds of groups at UCSF, accounting for the long term viability of the website was fundamental to it’s success.

We appreciate the opportunity to work with an amazing client like UCSF. The project has been a resounding success for all involved. We look forward to building on this framework long into the future to better equip UCSF's groups with the tools they need to do their jobs. 

Here we go! Portland's Drupalcon is here. Here is a quick update about some of the exciting things that Metal Toad is bringing to the event. Stop by our booth (#207) and come party with us Tuesday and Wednesday. Come watch us record the podcast live and even step up to the mic if you dare. T-shirts, wine, stickers, foosball, Drupal!?!?! Whoa.

• Read more

We'll be streaming each of our three keynotes live beginning on Tuesday, with Dries' infamous #DriesNote at11:30am PDT (Pacific Daylight Time, PDT | UTC -7).

Have a burning question you want to ask our keynotes? Michael Anello from the Drupal Easy podcast will be fielding and moderating your twitter questions in real time, to ask Dries, Karen, and Michael, following each presentation.

DrupalCon Portland is off with a bang! Over 1,270 people have already arrived to pick up their badges and DrupalCon tshirts, and we're expecting as many attendees to arrive tomorrow.

Today alone, over 498 training attendees rolled in, as well as nearly 90 attendees for the CXO event. We're expecting over 3,300 people to attend the conference this week, so don't get stuck in line, get here early and grab your badge before sessions start at 9:00am.

If you haven't registered yet and still want to attend - this is your chance!

What if, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, you could wake up to a fresh and identical development environment completely free of yesterday's experiments and mistakes? Vagrant lets you do exactly that. more>>

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has recently launched its Collections Online site, an online image library where art lovers can explore and download high quality images. This is a triumph for the accessibility of fine art in an increasingly digital world. Making this vast collection public benefits not only local art lovers but also the international art community, particularly students.

This is a bit of a follow-up to Mike Bell's introductory article on using Codeception to create Drupal test suites. He concludes by stating he "need[s] to figure out a way of creating a Codeception module which allows you to plug in a Drupal testing user (ideally multiple so you can test each role) and then all the you have to do is call a function which executes the above steps to confirm your logged in before testing authenticated behaviour."

"Something along the lines of:

$I->drupalLogin('editor');

So, after skimming through Codeception and Mink documentation, I've tinkered with two potential ways of achieving this... for acceptance testing at least.

The first method is to use two custom classes to provide details of (a) a general Drupal site and (b) the specific site to be tested. This idea stemmed from this article which suggests that including literals - such as account credentials, paths and even form labels - in tests is bad practice. What if the login button label changes?

read more

The big week is finally here with DrupalCon Portland kicking off in our own backyard. For those of you not familiar with Portland, we're really big into birds (yes, I'm aware that's very 2010), and chickens in particular. I'm working real hard here to make a clever connection to RedHen, the leading native Drupal CRM, and the only one named after a bird!

Just in time for the conference, RedHen has a new release with plenty of performance improvements and bug fixes. We have a production site about to launch with over 100k contacts, and our test/development environments are running with over a 100k contacts with thousands of engagements each. We still have lots of work to do, but we're confident in RedHen's ability to scale to "enterprise" levels.

Understandably, one of the most requested features since we launched RedHen as been the ability to import contacts. Our initial pass at meeting that critical need also launched last week in the form RedHen Feeds, a Feeds processor for RedHen contacts. So get those contacts out of that spreadsheet and into RedHen! Support for organizational affiliations isn't there yet, but is in the works.

ThinkShout will be helping lead a RedHen sprint on Friday, May 24th, DrupalCon Portland's official sprint day. So if you're at all native CRM curious, come join our team as we hack away on RedHen and related tools. Learn about large datasets, Salesforce integration, managing memberships, email integration, event registrations, and common use cases. Site builders, documentarians, UX specialists, and developers are all welcome.

PS - ThinkShout is co-hosting the Drupal DoGooders Happy Hour, a fundraiser for Aaron Winborn, today, Monday May 20th. So please joint us and start your week off right by giving back to someone who has given so much to the Drupal community!

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to present at Internet World London, why I believe that Drupal is the best Open Source solution to build professional level websites, e-shops or online applications and why you should dig in it and do your own research about it.

The speech is in English. You can enable the English or Greek subtitles by clicking the captions button or read the transcript below.

Hello everybody, my name is Yannis Karampelas. I'm the owner and founder of Netstudio.

Netstudio is a Web Design and Web development company in Athens, Greece. I am Greek and this is the first time I give a presentation in English, so if what I say, sounds Greek to you, feel free to interrupt me and ask questions.

Drupal websites don't always need to allow users to register themselves with an account. This site doesn't, for instance. Anonymous commenting is turned on. The contact form is enabled for anonymous users. And those are the only thing that any member of the public would need to do - other than read. So nobody needs to set themselves up with a login. … Read more about Useful modules: Spambot

I want to thank the good folks at ThinkShout and ZivTech for organizing the Drupal DoGooders Happy Hour to benefit my family and me, as well as giving people attending DrupalCon an opportunity to hang out and have some drinks. Even though I will not be in Portland this week, I plan to be present in spirit, beginning with a virtual appearance there. Join the crew this evening (May 20) at about 4:00 PDT to raise a glass in toast of doing Drupal Good and for a quick Q & A with me beginning about 4:30.

What a long strange trip it's been.

From Sunnyvale in 2007 when I conceived the Embedded Media Field module, to Boston DrupalCon in 2008, where I presented my first State of the Media session, to DC in 2009 where we launched the Media sprint supporting the Media suite of modules, to Chicago 2011 and Denver 2012.

These are the fun times that I recall fondly, doing good with my fellow cohorts. And by doing good, I mean really doing good things. Because where else in the business world can you spontaneously form a group of competitors, build something awesome, and give it freely to the rest of the world?

I'm really going to miss that this year. I mean that even though I continue to contribute to Drupal whatever and whenever I can, I am going to miss seeing you guys this year. There is a magic that happens when you get three or more Drupalers together in the same room. But circumstance has had its way with me these past two years and until we have a DrupalCon "Three Mile Island", I will have to be content with a virtual appearance.

So, join me on Monday evening to see my Stephen Hawking impersonation.

read more

It’s that time again. Drupalcon is about to kick off and it’s the biggest one yet. Over 3300 Drupalers from across the globe will meet in Portland tomorrow to delve into one of the fastest growing open source technologies in the world.

And ImageX will be there loud and clear. As Gold Sponsors of the conference, we’re building on our commitment to give back. Members of our team will be presenting in sessions, participating in birds of a feather groups, co-hosting an after party with Mediacurrent and taking part in code sprints to help support and grow Drupal.

It’s that time again. Drupalcon is about to kick off and it’s the biggest one yet. Over 3300 Drupalers from across the globe will meet in Portland tomorrow to delve into one of the fastest growing open source technologies in the world.

And ImageX will be there loud and clear. As Gold Sponsors of the conference, we’re building on our commitment to give back. Members of our team will be presenting in sessions, participating in birds of a feather groups, co-hosting an after party with Mediacurrent and taking part in code sprints to help support and grow Drupal.

Finally, just in time for the DrupalCon we got a first fluxkraft preview version out of the door!

It's not feature complete and does not implement any UI improvements or workflows yet, but the flux-engine is there and working.