developer | Cocomore Drupal Distribution

DrupalCon Munich code sprints were a great success

7 September 2012

I took a train from Frankfurt (Germany) down to Munich the Saturday before the DrupalCon. When I joined the Multilingual Sprint on Sunday morning, many of them had already been sprinting for a full day and a number of issues were ready for review, so I dived in, observing the behavior of Drupal 8 before and after applying patches, proof-reading the patches for anything odd (e.g. typos in the documentation), discussing the issues in comments and in IRC with people who were sitting just across the room (other times actually speaking in person). By the end of the day, instead of the dozen or so people that Gábor Hojtsy, the Multilingual Initiative team lead, had expected, there were close to 50 people at the location, some joining us in the work on Multilingual issues, some working on other Drupal 8 tasks, and some who were just arriving in Munich and followed the Tweets to where we were. Luckily, the location rented for the Saturdays and Sundays before and after the DrupalCon week was big enough to accommodate all the extra arrivals.

While on the topic of the venue we used for those weekends, I’d like to personally thank Stephan Luckow and Florian (“Floh”) Klare of the Drupal-Initiative e.V. for all that they did to find a nice place that would still leave us with a budget for food and for their valiant work on stretching the food budget while still serving up excellent fare, in keeping with the fantastic meals we enjoyed the rest of the week. Instead of ordering delivery, they prepared almost everything themselves, including beautiful open-face sandwiches, fruit platters, and lovely grilled specialties at a club we went to where you can barbecue in the Biergarten.

…thanks for the huge help to the local organizers, especially Florian Klare and Stephan Luckow. They helped us manage collecting and spending sponsor money wisely with the Drupal Initiative e.V, prepared great sandwiches and fruit plates for us and even organized a sprinter party night with grill food. It was amazing to work with such helpful and flexible local organizers.
—Gábor Hojtsy, September 5, 2012

Luckow and SirFiChi of the Drupal Initiative, organized the location and made us great food!

Since people were “fresh”, I think a lot of work got done on the first weekend and the Monday before the conference (more than 50 people joined us and worked on various core initiatives on Monday in the room we later used for core most conversations at the Sheraton), which also meant that issues were still fresh in our minds while we had days of sessions and conversations, so when we started sprinting again on Friday we had lots of new ideas for the tasks we were still working on. Friday’s sprints were at the Westin Grand, where there was great attendance both upstairs in the main room as well as a large room downstairs from it, where Drupalize.me hosted a core contribution workshop to ease people into the process of contributing to core. I decided to go to that workshop since I’m still pretty new to it all and found a few people sitting nearby who were I was also able to interest in some Multilingual tasks, so while the main group sprinted upstairs, we also worked downstairs. Later on, I came upstairs, and since there were not a lot of simpler tasks for “core newbies”, like myself, I took some time to sprint on a module I contributed some time back, before there was much of anything for Drupal 7 in the area of “multilingual”… and tried to make my module more multilingual-friendly. I got a few good commits and a new release out for Internal Links and also recruited a colleague to look at the code with me, provide some ideas, and become another maintainer. So I personally found Friday quite productive.

Modules of the Month: July - A big crop of interesting new Drupal modules

9 August 2012

Modules of the month story banner illustration.

July saw a bumper crop of interesting new modules contributed, many of them with already-stable Drupal 7 releases. The kind of modules being released now also seems to be indicative of Drupal 7’s level of maturity. We are no longer seeing the modules which fill gaping holes in the standard feature-set, but now we are seeing loads of performance-enhancements, accessibility improvements, productivity tools for Drupal developers, backports of Drupal 8 awesomeness, mobile theming augmentation, and integrations with non-PHP-based systems, just to name a few of the common categories that seem to be trending at this point in the release cycle. And the mainstay modules that have had some major issues have almost entirely been released in stable versions (but they are not within the remit of this article). Yes, things are looking good.

Indeed, there are so many interesting new modules this month, that it’s harder than ever to choose which ones are worthy of profiling here, so the list is quite a bit longer than normal. I hope you are as excited as I am to see all the cool stuff that’s now easier-than-ever to do with your Drupal-based site.

As usual, this list does not include most “integration modules” for fee-based commercial services and likewise leaves out modules which, at time of review, did not have an official release of any kind. Modules for very “niche” audiences (such as those for integration of regional services) are also omitted, among others which seemed a bit too complicated to provide a short explanation of what they bring to the table. It’s possible some of these more complex modules might be covered in separate articles, though.

Enough with the caveats and chit-chat… let’s look at the modules!

Modules of the Month: June - Most promising new modules

11 July 2012

In June 2012, there were over 160 new Drupal modules released. This article provides some coverage for the most noteworthy of those modules, at least from our point of view. As in the past editions of this article, we generally ignore modules which are only for limited use cases or which simply provide integration of commercial third-party services. We also have not tried out many of these modules and have not thoroughly tested any of them. We normally don’t list modules that seem to be far from “ready” (e.g. no actual release yet), but we can make no claims as to the stability of the modules covered. Be sure to back up your database before testing new modules that might cause pain and suffering.

I think that many might agree that some of the most significant new modules from June were Author, Edit, and Layout—released by Angie Byron and Wim Leers as part of the Acquia-sponsored Spark distribution, which aims to improve the content-authoring user experience for Drupal 8 (the current distribution and modules allows us to use these improvements in Drupal 7 and help improve them). This work is still not ready for use on production sites (“dev” releases at most), but the progress is exciting, nonetheless. And despite the fact that Acquia is sponsoring development, we can all contribute to this awesome project by experimenting and reporting our experience (bug reports or ideas about ways to further improve the user experience) and/or submitting patches. We are definitely excited about Spark!

Thanks to Sascha Grossenbacher and Miro Dietiker of MD Systems there are a number of new support plugins for the Translation Management Tools (TMGMT) which they have recently released, now providing support for translation services available from Google, Microsoft, MyGengo, Nativy, and Supertext. Each of these new modules that extend the main Translation management module are currently available as dev releases for Drupal 7.

Matt Cheney of Pantheon Systems has also recently released a number of exciting “apps” (modules which depend on the Apps module) to flesh out the feature-set of their popular Panopoly distribution; these include: Panopoly Admin , Panopoly Core , Panopoly Demo , Panopoly Images , Panopoly Magic , Panopoly Pages , Panopoly Search , Panopoly Theme , Panopoly Users , Panopoly Widgets , and Panopoly WYSIWYG. All of these new modules are still considered to be in “beta” for Drupal 7, and while some of these may work without the Panopoly distribution, I won’t cover their functionality in detail. They do appear to provide some useful enhancements to Drupal’s standard installation and what their distribution could formerly offer, so this is some significant progress and worth taking a look at if you want to provide a friendly user experience or want to keep up with the latest and greatest in development for distributions.

The rest of the most noteworthy modules are listed in alphabetical order with brief descriptions of their functionality, development status, and module categories on Drupal.org (in some cases, we selected appropriate categories if none were provided on the project page. A couple are not actual modules, but are included as Drupal “projects” also worthy of mention.)

Updates on Drupal 8 Progress from Drupal Developer Days, Barcelona

19 June 2012

It’s been a busy past several days in Barcelona (for the Drupal Developer Days) and most of us who’d been sprinting during the week before seemed to be in the same condition by Sunday—rapidly running out of energy from progressive sleep deprivation from an increasingly later return to our hotels. But it’s been an exciting week for Drupal core (and contrib) development and significant work has been completed on the Drupal core (mostly building up Drupal 8, but also some for added features in Drupal 7) while a lot of important decisions have been made which will likely shape development in a number of initiatives for the coming months until the sprints at DrupalCon Munich.

In addition to the Sprint I was primarily involved in (I was just trying to get my feet wet with assisting the Drupal 8 core development process by joining the multilingual sprint, but I did write my first committed core patch—admittedly this was a very basic patch), there were also sprints running for “Views in core”, Entity API, Media initiative, Mapping in Drupal 7, configuration management, abstracting social networking, search-related sprints, the Drupal.org upgrade… and possibly more still. I’ll cover some of the highlights of the week that I’m most knowledgeable about.

Multilingual Initiative

The multilingual initiative sprinted all week before the Developer Days sessions, and even continued through the weekend. And a lot of key decisions were made and important code changes committed and pushed to the central Drupal 8.x repository.

New user interface translation improvements in Drupal 8

This is something I got to do a bit with, but Swiss developer, Michael Schmid (Schnitzel on d.o), of Amazee Labs, was the primary developer working on this task during the Sprint. He and his colleague, Vasi Chindris, were among the stars of the week. It was a real privilege to get to look over their shoulders and to get Michael’s support when it came to using Git to manage code in the sandbox we were using for the issue. (Thank you, once again, Michael!) Once everyone was happy with the work, it got committed to core. This new sandbox workflow, used for larger issues, helps avoid a lot of bugs creeping into the main branch, as has happened during previous periods of intense core development. Of course the tests and test bots catch a lot of issues which could otherwise be major headaches for all concerned (automated testing was also a part of Drupal 7 development). If you recall, the long wait for Drupal 7’s release was due to hundreds of critical bugs. Now this should be a thing of the past since we have an established threshold for critical issues; and the core team only commit new patches to the central repository when we are below that threshold (15 “critical” bugs, 100 “major” bugs… among other thresholds specified).

New system for translating Drupal’s user interface

The new user interface translation system allows you to keep imported (community contributed) translations separate from customized translations and search for a particular translation within either or both categories as well as filter by translated strings, untranslated strings, or both. If you have any unsaved translations, they are highlighted to help remind you not to leave the page without saving them and there discussion about providing a dialogue to prevent a site admin from accidentally leaving the page with unsaved changes, too. There is also an issue to allow the string search to be non-case-sensitive (checkbox) to find more strings that contain a particular word or phrase, regardless of text case. Since this feature came up in discussion after the rest of the user-interface changes had already been made, we elected to put the discussion about adding this feature in a separate issue. If you have ideas for what might further improve the Drupal 8 user-interface translation workflow, your input is valued.

Greetings from the Multilingual Sprint at Drupal Dev Days, Barcelona

14 June 2012

Morning stand-up meeting at the Drupal 8 Multilingual Sprint

I was supposed to get into Barcelona at 10:30PM on Tuesday evening, but with delays in my flight, it wasn’t till after midnight that our plane landed; it was after 1 a.m. by the time I reached my hotel. Normally travel, when it runs late and long, makes me feel exhausted, but I was excited to be joining my first Drupal core sprint. I’ve been wanting to do a bit more to help build Drupal and it’s great to not only be somewhat aware of what’s coming in Drupal 8, but to also know that I’ve at least played a small part in making it happen.

I wasn’t sure I would attend the Drupal Dev Days in Barcelona till a couple of weeks ago, but I’m glad I’m here. We have a fairly sizable group of developers here at the Citilab helping work on cutting through the issues for Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative (D8MI). I’ve been helping with some user interface quirks and since it had been long enough since I’d actually done string translations of the user interface, I started out yesterday as a “tester”… at least trying to look at the problem of translating the interface (e.g. translating “Add content” to German) as if I had never done anything like that before. And we did find some issues and, even better, we were able to address and correct those issues during yesterday’s coding. Others have been working on multilingual issues related to the new configuration management system, and a number of other issues which you, too, can help with, if you’d like to join us remotely (or in person, if you happen to already be in Barcelona — the Sprints continue through Friday, too). There are currently about 40 of us in the IRC channel for i18n and I'd say that at least half of those are working on the Sprint. There are about a dozen (give or take, since people are working on other sprints, too) who are here in Barcelona working on D8MI.

You can help make Drupal 8 better, too!

Modules from the Month of May - Most promising new modules

11 June 2012

In May 2012, 150 new Drupal modules were released; this post provides an overview of some of the most promising modules including developer APIs, theming tools, configuration assistants, useful enhancements to other modules and much more.

Going through the list of new modules, I found it difficult, this time, to select the “most useful”. Of course what seems “useful” depends largely on ones use case, so what you find indispensable, I might I find useless today, and tomorrow I might decide it’s a vital part of my new project. With one exception, the selected modules should all be reasonably “ready for use” (i.e. they at least have a release of some kind) and are mostly modules I could imagine using, myself, even if I don’t have an immediate need for many of them. Some modules which were not included in this selection include several "third-party integration” modules, especially those for “commercial” services. And in contrast to the post made for the April’s “modules-of-the-month”, I have not attempted to sort the selection of modules by category, but instead have the list sorted alphabetically, by project name—the summaries include the categories used on the modules’ Drupal.org project descriptions (and reasonable categories have been added for a few modules which currently haven’t got any categories selected on drupal.org).

As with last time, I have not been able to personally test all of the modules, so don’t blame me if you enable one that looks promising… and it hoses your database.

How not to delete Drupal variables in your module's uninstall function

4 June 2012

It’s considered “best practice”, if a module creates any variables, to delete those variables in the module’s uninstall function. Before Drupal 7, this was done in a call to db_query(). But with the “new” DBTNG (Drupal 7 Database API), using db_query() is no longer recommended. See the documentation for db_query():

Do not use this function for INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE queries. Those should be handled via db_insert(), db_update() and db_delete() respectively.

However, browsing through (a relatively small set of) Drupal modules I have for my local Drupal 7 installations, I still see a number of modules which are using db_query to delete variables, typically something like this:

<?php
  db_query("DELETE FROM {variable} WHERE name LIKE 'some_module_%'");
?>

Let’s rewrite this fictional module’s call to db_query() to instead use db_delete():

Modules of the Month: Most awesome new Drupal contrib modules from April

2 May 2012

April 2012 delivered a fresh batch of promising and useful-looking new contributed modules to the Drupal world. Perhaps because the immediately-preceding DrupalCon gave developers some time to collaborate and work on their contributions more than they normally might, this month seems to have a notable number of interesting new projects, especially considering the relatively “mature” state of Drupal 7 at this point. To help keep abreast of some of the most interesting new developments we have planned a monthly article to showcase these new modules; this is the first edition of our “Modules of the Month”. At this point in the release cycle, newly released modules are mostly only being released for Drupal 7, but a few have also been released for Drupal 6 as well; where Drupal versions are not mentioned, you should assume the module is only for Drupal 7.

Caveat: I have tested some, but not all of these modules. Be especially careful if you choose to use any of the “pre-stable” releases on production sites. I should also note that some other awesome modules released in April may not be included—I did my best to select the modules I’d be most likely to use, but there are some “special use case” modules which were not covered, but which might be very useful for some sites. The 30-something modules included here have been sorted into very loose categories.

3rd Party Integration / Social Media

Twitter Follow Block

The Twitter Follow Block module, by Pradeep Saran, provides a nicely styled box to show your Twitter link and followers in a jQuery-loaded block that can be placed in any region of your theme. You can configure the dimensions of the block (and thus, the number of “follower thumbnails” displayed) and you can choose from different color schemes to better match your current theme. It currently only displays the Twitter feed for one Twitter user, but what might be an interesting development would be a way to dynamically load the Twitter username (e.g. from a Profile field) so that the Twitter follow block would link to different users (based on the author of content currently viewed or the profile page being viewed, if applicable). The module is currently available as a “stable” 7.x-1.0 release and I look forward to seeing this get further developed.

Social Buttons

The Social Buttons module by Linnovate’s Raz Konforti, provides a field that can be added and configured for any content type (or any fieldable entity) and includes default button code for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+, but you can also easily add new buttons. Since it’s a field, you can also determine where and whether it is shown for each display (node view, teaser, RSS, etc). It has a 7.x-1.0-beta2 release as well as more recent commits to the developer branch.

Content Access Control

Hidden Nodes

The Hidden Nodes module, created by Bryan Ollendyke of Penn State University, helps allow staff to hide nodes from regular visitors while still allowing users with “staff” permissions (admin or author/editor -type roles) to see the content in the menu as it will appear when the content is finished. This helps get around the issues caused by the “black-and-white” absoluteness of published/unpublished status (and only being able to access content through the “administer content” system). It was created to integrate well with the Outline Designer module, another project sponsored by Penn State. Hidden Nodes has recently had its fourth beta release and is certainly an interesting project for streamlining team-based content workflows.

Restrict node page view

The Restrict node page view module, authored by Christian Johansson of Sweden’s Kodamera AB, helps prevent users from viewing content outside of its intended context. The example use case for this module involves a requirement to prevent users from directly viewing Views slideshow nodes (via their node/xxx paths), but of course there could be other content you want to restrict access to but still have its information available in a Views display, so direct access to the node by most roles can easily be blocked with this module. The initial release is shown as “stable”, and it’s simple enough, so may never require any fixes or updates. That said, I do hope that they modify the module so that full-node access is only restricted to selected node types (i.e. blacklist). It currently adds a set of permissions for all node types, which defaults to no view access for all roles and content types, which would be a pain on sites with lots of roles and content types, especially if the goal is only to restrict non-staff access to one limited node type out of many.

The permissions created by the Restrict Node Page Access module.

Cocomore joins the W3C to improve Web language technologies

18 April 2012

We have officially joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group. The group will create a new standard to help language technologies (the ‘LT’ in MultilingualWeb-LT) perform better in a more and more multilingual Web.

There are plenty of reasons to support multilingualism on the Web. Despite English often being considered a ‘lingua franca’ on the Web, the reality is different. In the world there are many different languages and their speakers want content in their native tongue(s). These are not necessarily small language communities: there are over 500 million Spanish speakers in the world, over 10 million native Quechua speakers and over 20 million people who call Tagalog their mother tongue. Being able to provide content in multiple languages can open new ways of communicating with these people.

Scrum - A short overview

30 March 2012

We have a major upcoming project here at Cocomore which is in the initial planning phase. It’s too early to provide the finer details of the project, but it involves creating a product database for a large publishing house and Drupal 7 has been chosen as the project framework. By mid-June, we will likely have four developers working on it, full-time. Of course, anyone who deals with software development almost certainly knows the problems that tend to occur during the planning of large-scale, long-term projects like this one: in the beginning, the client is often not yet 100% certain of their needs or desired end results, so new requirements and ideas arise in the middle of project development. This means that projects built to the initial specifications often fail to completely meet the client’s needs, which can be disappointing for everyone involved.

Hoping to avoid this scenario, we (our software development team, and project and senior management) proposed implementing the project using Scrum. This allows us to flexibly respond to changes in requirements and keeps the customer closely tied to the project development process so we can avoid unpleasant surprises at the end of development. At a recent Cocomore “KnowledgeLab”, I presented a brief overview of Scrum methodology, a topic which is certainly too broad to cover, in-depth, in an hour-long presentation. So I limited the scope of my presentation to the most essential elements of the Scrum process: roles, events, and artifacts; then used Lego Scrum to try to better illustrate the model. This article provides an overview of the same basic concepts covered in our workshop session and describes how I helped immerse team members who had not previously worked with Scrum in the concepts and processes. We have been using Scrum for other “ambitious” Drupal projects and plan to provide in-depth case studies for some of them, with details about more specifics related to Drupal; this article provides a general foundation for understanding these upcoming case studies.

Scrum: a process model for agile software development

Agile software development is characterized primarily by an iterative procedure with alternating planning and development phases. The advantage this provides is that parts of the system are developed early on and can be tested before implementation of other parts. This reduces the risk that project development heads in the wrong direction. Rather, responding quickly and flexibly to changes in the requirements, the components of a system can be redefined to best meet a client’s real needs.