drupal

Update, January 2019: I would like to point out that using Drupal VM to build production servers is not officially supported, and though it may work pretty well, you are own your own if you do use it in that capacity. Please see Drop 'official-ish' support for using Drupal VM to run production servers for more details. What follows was mostly a tech demo for a MidCamp session, and has only been used by a small fraction of the Drupal VM userbase.

In preparing for my session Developing for Drupal 8 with Drupal VM at MidCamp later this month, I wanted to build out an example of a canonical "this is the way I'd do it" Drupal 8 site using nothing but Drupal VM and Composer. And I wanted to build both my local development environment and a production environment on DigitalOcean, all using the Ansible automation playbooks built into Drupal VM.

Windows 10 is the only release Acquia's BLT officially supports. But there are still many people who use Windows 7 and 8, and most of these people don't have control over what version of Windows they use.

Drupal VM has supported Windows 7, 8, and 10 since I started building it a few years ago (at that time I was still running Windows 7), and using a little finesse, you can actually get an entire modern BLT-based Drupal 8 project running on Windows 7 or 8, as long as you do all the right things, as will be demonstrated in this blog post.

I'm excited to be presenting at this year's DrupalCon Baltimore on a topic near and dear to my heart: I'll be presenting Just Keep Swimming: Don't drown in your open source project! at DrupalCon next month.

On a basic level, I'll outline ways I deal with rage-inducingly-vague bug reports, hundreds of GitHub notifications per day, angry and entitled users, and keep a positive attitude that allows me to continue to contribute on a daily basis.

Last week, the proverbial floodgates were opened when Drupal.org finally opened access to any registered user to create a 'full' Drupal.org project (theme, module, or profile). See the Project Applications Process Revamp issue on Drupal.org for more details.

You can now contribute full Drupal projects even if you're new to the community!

Another day, another Acquia Developer Certification exam review (see the previous one: Certified Back end Specialist - Drupal 8, I recently took the Front End Specialist – Drupal 8 Exam, so I'll post some brief thoughts on the exam below.

Continuing along with my series of reviews of Acquia Developer Certification exams (see the previous one: Drupal 8 Site Builder Exam, I recently took the Back End Specialist – Drupal 8 Exam, so I'll post some brief thoughts on the exam below.

Acquia finally updated the full suite of Certifications—Back/Front End Specialist, Site Builder, and Developer—for Drupal 8, and the toughest exams to pass continue to be the Specialist exams. This exam, like the Drupal 7 version of the exam, requires a deeper knowledge of Drupal's core APIs, layout techniques, Plugin system, debugging, security, and even some esoteric things like basic webserver configuration!

Note: As of Config Split beta4, you no longer need to use drush csex/csim to export and import config accounting for splits. You instead install both Config Filter and Config Split, then use the normal Drush commands (drush cex/cim). There are also a few other tweaks to the guide below; I may update it when I get more time.

I've been looking at a ton of different solutions to using Drupal 8's Configuration Management in a way that meets the following criteria:

It's been over a year since Drupal 8.0.0 was released, and the entire ecosystem has improved vastly between that version's release and the start of the 8.3.0-alpha releases (which just happened a couple weeks ago).

One area that's seen a vast improvement in documentation and best practices—yet still has a ways to go—is Composer-based project management.

Along with a thousand other 'get off the island' initiatives, the Drupal community has started to take dependency management more seriously, by integrating with the wider PHP ecosystem and maintaining a separate Drupal.org packagist for Drupal modules, themes, and other projects.

XHProf, a PHP extension formerly created and maintained by Facebook, has for many years been the de-facto standard in profiling Drupal's PHP code and performance issues. Unfortunately, as Facebook has matured and shifted resources, the XHProf extension maintenance tailed off around the time of the PHP 7.0 era, and now that we're hitting PHP 7.1, even some sparsely-maintained forks are difficult (if not impossible) to get running with newer versions of PHP.

Enter Tideways.

Tideways has basically taken on the XHProf extension, updated it for modern PHP versions, but also re-branded it to be named 'Tideways' instead of 'XHProf'. This has created a little confusion, since Tideways also offers a branded and proprietary service for aggregating and displaying profiling information through Tideways.io. But you can use Tideways completely independent from Tideways.io, as a drop-in replacement for XHProf. And you can even browse profiling results using the same old XHProf UI!

As someone who loves YAML syntax (so much more pleasant to work with than JSON!), I wanted to jot down a few notes about syntax formatting for the benefit of Drupal 8 developers everywhere.

I often see copy/pasted YAML examples like the following:

This is perfectly valid YAML. And technically any JSON is valid YAML too. That's part of what makes YAML so powerful—it's easy to translate between JSON and YAML, but YAML is way more readable!

So instead of using YAML like that, you can make the structure and relationships so much more apparent by formatting it like so: