drupal 8

I presented Drupal 8 - A Brief Introduction at DrupalCamp STL.14 on April 26, 2014.

Drupal 8 brings a lot of changes. Many standby contributed modules are now included with Drupal Core, and many small changes add up to the most exciting Drupal release yet! This presentation guides you through many of the biggest changes, highlighting how Drupal 8 will accelerate your web development and provide tools to make Drupal the best content management platform on any device.

View the slideshow below, or follow the links at the bottom of the post to view the full presentation and video.

Links for full slideshow/video:

Lately, I've been working a lot with Ansible, a simple but powerful infrastructure management platform. I now use Ansible playbooks and ad-hoc commands to manage all of Midwestern Mac's infrastructure (this site, Hosted Apache Solr, Server Check.in, and many ancillary servers), and as a result, I've started using Ansible for pretty much any kind of work I need to do in development—including configuring my own Mac, and developing with Drupal 8.

Meet Ansible

For those who haven't heard of Ansible before, it's often described as being a little like Puppet or Chef, used for configuration management. You define the configuration of a server, and Ansible makes sure the server is configured as defined. But Ansible goes quite a bit further—it's also great for deploying applications (especially in tandem with tools like Jenkins), running commands on servers, and day-to-day management of a few, hundreds, or even thousands, of servers—it's an end-to-end configuration management tool. Ansible also has a great, and rapidly-growing community, building it up and making it markedly better every release.

Ansible uses YAML to define configuration (just like Drupal 8!), and is relatively easy to pick up, especially if you already have some experience on the command line. You can read more about it in a book I'm writing, Ansible for DevOps, and hopefully, I'll be able to tell you more about Ansible in person at DrupalCon Austin—I've submitted a session titled DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory! (please leave a comment and let me know what you want to hear!).

Drupal development VM (Vagrant + Ansible)

I used to use MAMP (a simple-to-install Apache + MySQL + PHP setup for Macs) for all my development, which made adding virtual hosts to Apache relatively simple. However, there are many downsides to developing with MAMP—I could never configure things like drush, APC, the version of PHP, MySQL, or auxiliary tools like XDebug and Solr, exactly how I wanted or needed them.

2014 is going to be a big year for Drupal. I spent a lot of 2013 sprucing up services like Hosted Apache Solr and Server Check.in (both running on Drupal 7 currently), and porting some of my Drupal projects to Drupal 8.

So far I've made great progress on Honeypot and Wysiwyg Linebreaks, which I started migrating a while back. Both modules work and pass all tests on Drupal's current dev/alpha release, and I plan on following through with the D8CX pledges I made months ago.

I have been at the Midwest Drupal Summit for the past few days, focusing on #D8CX and reducing Drupal 8's technical debt (at least, a tiny bit of it!).

Wysiwyg Linebreaks

My main goal at the conference was to port the Wysiwyg Linebreaks module to Drupal 8. I originally built the module for Drupal 6 while helping the Archdiocese of St. Louis migrate almost 50 separate Joomla-based websites into one organic-groups-driven Drupal site. Their legacy content used linebreaks (rather than markup like <p> and <br /> tags) for paragraphs of text, and when we originally enabled Wysiwyg with TinyMCE, the editor ran all the text together in one big paragraph. The Wysiwyg Linebreaks module fixes that problem by running some JavaScript that adds the required tags when an editor is attached to a textarea, and (optionally) removes the tags when the editor is detached.

DrupalCon Portland is only a couple months away (early bird registration ends soon, so get your tickets if you haven't already!), and I'll be headed out that way. If this will be your first time attending a DrupalCon, be sure to read my First Timer's Guide to DrupalCon from last year.

At this year's DrupalCon, I'm excited to hear about everything going on with Drupal 8, as we're nearing the end of the development cycle, and a release candidate is on the not-too-distant horizon.

After having a baby and shying away from much Drupal contrib/core work, I finally had some time in the past few weeks to get up to speed on many of the Drupal changes that have been committed in the past month or so—and boy are they amazing (CKEditor in core, new node edit form, new responsive layouts, new admin toolbar, config, views, etc.)!

...there's a site for that.

I just found out about SimplyTest.me today, and it allows you to, well, simply test any Drupal.org-hosted module, theme, or distribution in seconds.

No longer do you need to spin up (or maintain) a live website locally (which usually takes an extra minute or two—at least) just to check out a module or make sure a theme or distribution fits your needs before using it on a live or development site.

Instead of simply getting a screen shot or trying a theme on a demo site, you get a full Drupal website set up and configured with the module/theme/distro (as well as it's dependencies), so you can play with it to your heart's content (for 30 minutes if you don't have an account on the site, an hour if you do).

For the past couple years, discussions about 'PSR-0', PHP standards, and some sort of framework standardizations have been popping up here and there. It wasn't until a bunch of 'PSR-0 Interoperability' patches started popping up in the Drupal core issue queues that I decided to take a closer look at PSR. (The latest? PSR-1 (Basic Coding Standard) and PSR-2 (Coding Style Guide) have been accepted).