drupal planet

Drupal Camp St. Louis is taking a break for 2018

The St. Louis Drupal Users Group has hosted a Drupal Camp in the 'Gateway to the West' for four years (since 2014), but this year, the organizers have decided to take a year off, for various reasons. Our camp has grown a little every year, and last year we even increased the scope and usefulness of the camp even more by adding a well-attended training day—but life and work have taken precedence this year, and nobody is able to take on the role of 'chief organizer'.

Meet me in Des Moines St. Louis Drupal Camp goes to DrupalCorn in Iowa

All is not lost, however! There are other great camps around the Midwest, and this year we're directing everyone to our northern neighbors, in Iowa: DrupalCorn Camp is going to be held in Des Moines, Iowa, from September 27-30, 2018!

Post-Mollom, what are the best options for preventing spam for Drupal?

Mollom End of Life Announcement from their homepage

Earlier this month, Mollom was officially discontinued. If you still have the Mollom module installed on some of your Drupal sites, form submissions that were previously protected by Mollom will behave as if Mollom was offline completely, meaning any spam Mollom would've prevented will be passed through.

For many Drupal sites, especially smaller sites that deal mostly with bot spam, there are a number of great modules that will help prevent 90% or more of all spam submissions, for example:

Drupal, the Fastest - Improving the evaluator experience

At DrupalCon Nashville 2018, I became deeply interested in the realm of first-time Drupal experiences, specifically around technical evaluation, and how people would get their feet wet with Drupal. There were two great BoFs related to the topic which I attended, and which I hope will bear some fruits over the next year in making Drupal easier for newcomers:

There are a number of different tools people can use to run a new Drupal installation, but documentation and ease of use for beginners is all over the place. The intention of this project is to highlight the most stable, simple, and popular ways to get a Drupal site installed and running for testing or site building, and measure a few benchmarks to help determine which one(s) might be best for Drupal newcomers.

Installing PHP 7 and Composer on Windows 10, Using Ubuntu in WSL

Note: If you want to install and use PHP 7 and Composer within Windows 10 natively, I wrote a guide for that, too!

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Since Windows 10 introduced the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), it has become far easier to work on Linux-centric software, like most PHP projects, within Windows.

To get the WSL, and in our case, Ubuntu, running in Windows 10, follow the directions in Microsoft's documentation: Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10, and download and launch the Ubuntu installer from the Windows Store.

A modern way to build and develop Drupal 8 sites, using Composer

The Drupal community has been on an interesting journey since the launch of Drupal 8 in 2015. In the past three years, as the community has started to get its sea legs 'off the island' (using tools, libraries, and techniques used widely in the general PHP community), there have been growing pains.

One area where the pains have been (and sometimes still are) highly visible is in how Drupal and Composer work together. I've written posts like Composer and Drupal are still strange bedfellows in the past, and while in some ways that's still the case, we as a community are getting closer and closer to a nirvana with modern Drupal site building and project management.

For example, in preparing a hands-on portion of my and Matthew Grasmick's upcoming DrupalCon Nashville lab session on Composer and Drupal, I found that we're already to the point where you can go from literally zero to a fully functional and complete Drupal site codebase—along with a functional local development environment—in about 10 or 15 minutes:

Updating drupal/core with Composer - but Drupal core doesn't update

For the past two minor release Drupal core upgrades, I've had major problems trying to get some of my Composer-based Drupal codebases upgraded. For both 8.3.x to 8.4.0, and now 8.4.x to 8.5.0, I've had the following issue:

  1. I have the version constraint for drupal/core set to ~8.0 or ~8.4 in my composer.json.
  2. I run composer update drupal/core --with-dependencies (as recommended in Drupal.org's Composer documentation).
  3. Composer does its thing.
  4. A few things get updated... but not drupal/core. It remains stubbornly on the previous minor release.

Looking around the web, it seems this is a very common problem, and a lot of people soon go for the nuclear (or thermonuclear1) option:

Getting Started with Lando - testing a fresh Drupal 8 Umami site

Umami demo profile running on Lando for Drupal 8
Testing out the new Umami demo profile in Drupal 8.6.x.

I wanted to post a quick guide here for the benefit of anyone else just wanting to test out how Lando works or how it integrates with a Drupal project, since the official documentation kind of jumps you around different places and doesn't have any instructions for "Help! I don't already have a working Drupal codebase!":

Two MidCamp Sessions: Local Dev for Dummies, Jenkins and Drupal

MidCamp 2018 wrapped up with a bang today, as there was another year full of great training, sessions, and my favorite aspect, the 'hallway track' (where you go around and network between and during some sessions with tons of excellent Drupalists from the Midwest and around the country).

This year, I presented two sessions; one a co-presentation with Chris Urban titled Local Dev Environments for Dummies, the other a solo presentation titled Jenkins or: How I learned to stop worrying and love automation.

Embedded below are the video recordings of the sessions (recorded as always by the excellent Kevin Thull of Blue Drop Shop!):

What do you use to build and develop Drupal sites?

tl;dr: Go complete the Drupal Local Development Survey, and we'll present the results (among other things) at MidCamp in a couple weeks!

Local development for Drupal is a subject I've invested a lot of time into. At the start of my Drupal journey, I used to use MAMP, then MAMP Pro, then a native *AMP installation. Then when I learned about Vagrant I started building Vagrant-based environments with shell scripts. Then I learned Ansible and started using Vagrant and Ansible. And then I learned Docker and used Ansible, Docker, and sometimes Vagrant!

Everyone's journey is different—but one thing most of us can agree on is: it ain't easy finding a way to run Drupal on your local workstation if you've never done it before.

Should you use MAMP/WAMP/XAMPP? Should you use Acquia Dev Desktop? Should you use Docker or Vagrant and build your own environment? Should you use a packaged solution like Drupal VM or Lando? And then how will you manage your codebase? How will you build a theme?