drupal

Today I needed to migrate a URL/Link into a Drupal 8 site, and I was scratching my head over how to migrate it so there were distinct values for the URL (the actual link) and the Label (the 'title' that displays to end users and is clickable). Drupal 8's Link field type allows you to set a URL in addition to an optional (or required) label, but by default, if you just migrate the URL, the label will be blank.

I first set up the migration config like so:

And source_url was defined in the migration's source.fields configuration.

In my case, the source data didn't have a label, but I wanted to set a default label so the Drupal 8 site could display that as the clickable link (instead of an ugly long URL). To do that, it's similar to migrating a formatted text field, where you can migrate individual components of the field using the syntax [field_name]/[component]. In a Link field's case, it looks like:

On a recent project, there was a Migration run that took a very long time, and I couldn't pinpoint why; there were multiple migrations, and none of the others took very long at all (usually processing at least hundreds if not thousands of nodes per minute). In Drupal 7, if you enabled the XHProf module, then you'd get a checkbox on the configuration page that would turn on profiling for all page requests and Drush commands.

In Drupal 8, the XHProf module was completely rewritten, and as a side effect, the Drush/CLI profiling functionality is not yet present (see: Profile drush/CLI with XHProf in Drupal 8).

Since I don't have the time right now to help figure out how to get things working through the official XHProf module, I decided to use a 'poor man's profiling' method to profile a Migration run:

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a blog post titled Solving the Emoji/character encoding problem in Drupal 7.

Since writing that post, Drupal 7 bugfixes and improvements have started to pick up steam as (a) many members of the community who were focused on launching Drupal 8 had time to take a breather and fix up some long-standing Drupal 7 bugs and improvements that hadn't yet been backported, and (b) there are two new D7 core maintainers. One of the patches I've been applying to many sites and hoping would get pulled into core for a long time was adding support for full UTF-8, which allows the entry of emojis, Asian symbols, and mathematical symbols that would break Drupal 7 sites running on MySQL previously.

My old blog post had a few steps that you could follow to make your Drupal 7 site 'mostly' support UTF-8, but there were some rough edges. Now that support is in core, the process for converting your existing site's database is more straightforward:

DrupalCamp St. Louis 2016 will be held on September 10-11 in St. Louis, MO, on the campus of the University of Missouri, St. Louis, and we're excited to announce that session submissions are open!

We'd love to hear people speak about Drupal business, case studies, coding, community, DevOps, front end, PHP, project management, security, or any other Drupal topic. If you're interested in speaking, please submit a session for consideration, and we'll announce the selected sessions before August 1st.

After a few months of testing, I'm happy to announce Hosted Apache Solr now supports Search API Solr with Drupal 8! Both Search API and Search API Solr have been getting closer to stable releases, and more people have been requesting Drupal 8 search cores, so I decided to finish testing and updating support guides this weekend.

I wanted to post this as a 'save the date' to any other midwestern Drupalists—here in St. Louis, we'll be hosting our third annual DrupalCamp on September 10 and 11 (Saturday and Sunday) in St. Louis, MO. We'll have sessions on Saturday, and a community/sprint day Sunday, and just like last year, we'll record all the sessions and post them to the Drupal STL YouTube channel after the Camp.

We're still working on a few details (nailing down the location, getting things set up so we can accept session submissions and registrations, etc.), but if you're interested in coming, please head over to the official DrupalCamp STL 2016 website and sign up to be notified of further information!

Drupal VM is one of the most flexible and powerful local development environments for Drupal, but one the main goals of the project is to build a fully-functional Drupal 8 site quickly and easily without doing much setup work. The ideal would be to install Vagrant, clone or download the project, then run vagrant up. A few minutes later, you'd have a Drupal 8 site ready for hacking on!

In the past, you always had to do a couple extra steps in between, configuring a drupal.make.yml file and a config.yml file. Recently, thanks in huge part to Oskar Schöldström's herculean efforts, we achieved that ideal by switching from defaulting to a Drush make-based workflow to a Composer-based workflow (this will come in the 3.1.0 release, very soon!). But it wasn't without trial and tribulation!

Another year, another field trip for the Pi Dramble—my 5-Raspberry-Pi cluster! I presented a session titled Highly available Drupal on a Raspberry Pi Cluster at php[tek] 2016, which just so happens to have moved to my hometown, St. Louis, MO this year!

For this presentation, I remembered to record the audio using a lav mic plugged into my iPhone, as well as iShowU to record what was on my screen. Sadly, I didn't have a secondary camera to capture the Pi Dramble itself, but you can glance at all the other 'Let's build a Pi Cluster' videos if you want to see it in action!

Here's a video recording of the presentation:

Drupal VM 3.0.0 "The Light Sailer" was just released, and you can grab it from the Drupal VM website now. We spent a lot of time during DrupalCon New Orleans sprinting on Drupal VM, fixing bugs, and updating ALL THE THINGS to make sure this release solves a lot of pain points for individuals and teams who need a great local development environment.

Let's get right into why this is the best release of Drupal VM EVER!

The fastest and most modern environment

Drupal VM now defaults to Ubuntu 16.04 (which was just released in late April), running MySQL 5.7 and PHP 7. This means you're getting the fastest, most reliable, and most modern development environment for your Drupal 8 projects.

Another year, another Acquia Certification exam...

I'm at DrupalCon New Orleans, the first North American DrupalCon since the release of Drupal 8. In addition, this is the first DrupalCon where the Acquia Certified Developer - Drupal 8 Exam is being offered, so I decided to swing by the certification center (it's on the 3rd floor of the convention center, in case you want to take any of the certification exams this week!) and take it.