drupal planet

One of the first questions I'm asked by those who see the Dramble is, "How do I build my own?" Since I've been asked the question many times, I put together a detailed parts list, and maintain it on the Dramble's project wiki on GitHub: Raspberry Pis and Accessories.

For a little over $400, you can have the exact same setup, with six Raspberry Pi 2s, a network switch, a rack inside which you can mount the Pis, microSD cards for storage, a 6-port USB power supply, and all the required cables and storage!

I've been working with Drupal 8 for a long time, keeping Honeypot and some other modules up to date, and doing some dry-runs of migrating a few smaller sites from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, just to hone my D8 familiarity.

I finally launched a 'for real' Drupal 8 site, which is currently running on Drupal 8 HEAD—on a cluster of Raspberry Pi 2 computers in my basement! You can view the site at http://www.pidramble.com/, and I've already started posting some articles about running Drupal 8 on the servers, how I built the cluster, some of the limitations of at-home webhosting, etc.

Some of the things I've already learned from building and running this cluster for the past few days:

After some more tinkering with the Raspberry Pi Dramble (a cluster of 6 Raspberry Pis used to demonstrate Drupal 8 deployments using Ansible), I finally was able to get the RGB LEDs to react to Nginx accesses—meaning every time a request is received by Nginx, the LED toggles to red momentarily.

This visualization allows me to see exactly how Nginx is distributing requests among the servers in different load balancer configurations. The default (not only for Nginx, but also for Varnish, HAProxy, and other balancers) is to use round-robin distribution, meaning each request is sent to the next server. This is demonstrated first, in the video below, followed by a demonstration of Nginx's ip_hash method, which pins one person's IP address to one backend server, based on a hash of the person's IP address:

Update: As of Drupal 7.50, Emoji/UTF-8 mb4 is now supported for MySQL (and other databases) in core! See the documentation page here for more information on how to configure it: Multi-byte UTF-8 support in Drupal 7. This blog post exists for historical purposes only—please see the Drupal.org documentation for the most up-to-date instructions!

On many Drupal 7 sites, I have encountered issues with Emoji (mostly) and other special characters (rarely) when importing content from social media feeds, during content migrations, and in other situations, so I finally decided to add a quick blog post about it.

Have you ever noticed an error in your logs complaining about incorrect string values, with an emoji or other special character, like the following:

(Note: Actual Emoji was removed from this summary post to prevent Drupal Planet's aggregator from barfing on the feed... due to this very issue!).

To fix this, you need to switch the affected MySQL table's encoding to utf8mb4, and also switch any table columns ('fields', in Drupal parlance) which will store Emojis or other exotic UTF-8 characters. This will allow these special characters to be stored in the database, and stop the PDOExceptions.

I build and destroy a lot of VMs using Vagrant in the course of the day. Between developing Drupal VM, writing Ansible for DevOps, and testing dozens of Ansible Galaxy roles, I probably run vagrant up and vagrant destroy -f at least a dozen times a day.

Building all these VMs would be a pain, and require much more user intervention, if it weren't for a few things I've done on my local workstation to help with the process. I thought I'd share these tips so you can enjoy a much more streamlined Vagrant workflow as well!

For the past couple years, I've been building Drupal VM to be an extremely-tunable, highly-performant, super-simple development environment. Since MidCamp earlier this year, the project has really taken off, with almost 200 stars on GitHub and a ton of great contributions and ideas for improvement (some implemented, others rejected).

In the time since I wrote Developing for Drupal with Vagrant and VMs, I've focused on meeting all my defined criteria for the perfect local development environment. And now, I'm able to say that I use Drupal VM when developing all my projects—as it is now flexible and fast enough to emulate any production environment I use for various Drupal projects.

DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015 was held this past weekend, June 20-21, 2015, at SLU LAW in downtown St. Louis. We had nine sessions and a great keynote on Saturday, and a full sprint day on Sunday.

The view coming off the elevators at SLU LAW.

Every session was recorded (slides + audio), and you can view all the sessions online:

• Keynote - Finding the entrance: Why and how to get involved with the Drupal community
• .git basics
• Empowering Content Creators Through Better UX
• Out on a TWIG: custom theme development
• Securing Drupal
• Age of Content: Building Meaningful Content Strategies
• Scale up your Drupal Search
• High Performance Drupal
• Challenges of designing for a CMS
• Status of Migrate in 8
• Closing Session

The Camp went very well, with almost sixty participants this year! We had a great time, learned a lot together, and enjoyed some great views of downtown St. Louis (check out the picture below!), and we can't wait until next year's DrupalCamp St. Louis (to be announced)!

I'll be speaking at DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015 at SLU LAW this weekend. My session, High Performance Drupal, will cover many quick performance wins for Drupal sites, and will fix an example site that simulates many performance problems seen on real-world Drupal sites.

Sorry it's been so long since posting here—I'm still working on my book, I've read through about 5 other books, and as always, I'm tinkering with a bunch of Raspberry Pis!

The organizers of DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015 are excited to announce that the schedule is set for DrupalCamp STL.15; we will have sessions from a variety of presenters on a variety of topics—for both beginners and seasoned veterans alike!

Some of the great sessions lined up include a session on Git basics, the status of Migrate in Drupal 8, content strategy, securing Drupal, improving performance, improving search, Twig, and more! To kick it off, we'll have an awesome keynote from Alina Mackenzie (alimac) about getting involved in the Drupal Community.

Check out the sessions: DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015 Session Schedule.

Register for DrupalCamp STL.15 today, and build your schedule on the site—besides these excellent sessions, you'll get a tasty catered lunch, a comfy t-shirt, and some great memories and networking opportunities on both days of the Camp!

DrupalCamp STL.15 (June 20-21, in St. Louis, MO) will be the first DrupalCamp in St. Louis with a day dedicated to sprints to help the Drupal community. We're expecting a great turnout, and there are already a number of proposed sessions (many of which will be selected and announced on June 5!), and it's not yet too late to propose a session of your own!

This year's keynote, by Alina Mackenzie, will focus on the Drupal Community—what it is, why it rocks, and how you can get involved in the community. After the keynote, some great sessions, a tasty lunch, happy hour, and a good night's rest, we'll spend sprint day (Sunday June 21) making Drupal better, and maybe even pushing Drupal 8 a little closer to an 8.0.0 rc1 release!

Registration is now open, so go reserve your spot at DrupalCamp St. Louis 2015; I'll see you there, hopefully at one of the sessions I proposed, either on High Performance Drupal, or Local Development Environments and Drupal VM!