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Funding Views in Core

June 19th, 2012 Comments off

While there are plenty of interesting things going on in Drupal 8 development, one of the things that has piqued my interest is the idea of getting the Views project folded into Drupal core. It’s not a full fledged Drupal 8 Initiative but rather a push from the the creator, Earl Miles.

Pointing out just that fact is worthwhile by itself, but I really want to get the word out that there is a ChipIn drive for the effort to support getting people together for code sprints and what not. Anyone that has put together a dynamic Drupal site knows how important Views is, it is worth a bit of your time to read up on what needs to be done and throw in a few bucks.

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Notes from June Hudson Valley Drupal Meetup

June 16th, 2012 Comments off

Yet again, this meetup group had more things shared than I would have seen coming. I continue to be very happy that we have this group in the area for sharing experiences, best practices, horror stories and whatnot. Modules and the like shared during introductions:

  • Jeff’s Handy Dandy Drupal Login Bookmarklet, bookmarklet to send you to a site’s login page and redirect back to the page you are currently on.
  • Feeds Tamper provides an architecture for Feeds to modify data before it gets saved.
  • Contextual layouts (different layouts/settings for various portions of a site) with the awesomesauce combination of Omega, Delta and Context.
  • Quick Tabs, allows you to create blocks of tabbed content.

After introductions Al got up and showed off what Quick Tabs can do. Through a good interface you can build a block that has tabs of content that can be nodes, views, other blocks or a couple other things. Pretty neat.

Sean then talked about his experience in porting two of his 6.x modules to 7.x. He had many things to share in this space, a few pieces of which included:

  • Modules should no longer explicitly install or uninstall its database schema in hook_install() or hook_uninstall()
  • SimpleTest is now builtin and should be used.
  • When using the Forms API, you needs to use #markup instead of #value for markup…for most cases.
  • Token has changed a lot and moved into core. He also needed Entity tokens to provide tokens for entity properties that have no tokens.

Sean had plenty more to share, but he managed to tag releases for two of his modules far quicker than anticipated. For anyone working of porting be sure to peruse Converting 6.x modules to 7.x documentation. I’m also curious how much luck porters (and devs in general) are having with the Coder module.

With the excitement of how much smoother his 7.x work went than originally planned Sean also talked briefly on transitioning a D6 site to D7. While he pretty much had to redo each view all of his data has migrated with very little pain…at least for the test site he has spent ~12 hours on. He expects to have his first site upgrade pushed out in two weeks.

Vonn followed up by showing how she is using Feeds Tamper to mangle data during imports on a new site of hers. I keep forgetting to keep Feeds in mind but now I will probably use it for future projects. A note was pointed out that when dealing with Feeds you need to make sure that content types you are importing into have “Create new revision” disabled otherwise you will have a revision each time your Feeds job runs.

One of the last things shared was the Poster extension for Firefox and Chrome. Thor uses this when interacting with web services and other web resources allowing him to make HTTP requests, set the entity body, and content type.

The next meetup will be Thursday, July 12th, shortly followed by a play day on Saturday, July 14th. July’s meetup might have a talk or we might switch to Show and Tell meetups on odd months…we’ll see.

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May Hudson Valley Drupal Meetup

May 16th, 2012 Comments off

May was another good month both in terms of information shared and turn out. We quickly got started with introductions and sharing of cool/new modules which included:

  • News that someone is looking to make Sean’s Meetup Events module and the Drupal Groups infrastructure work together
  • Maillog / Mail Developer provides an easy possibility to log all Mails for debugging purposes. It’s possible to prevent the mails to being sent, so there is no need for an extra mail server to test the mail functionality of other modules or the drupal core.
  • Module Instructions shows the content of README.txt and INSTALL.txt files for contrib modules, linked off the modules administration page.

Ben then proceded to introduce everyone to Drush, the command line tool that everyone should be using for Drupal work. He gave an overview presentation and followed up with a live interactive demonstration, stepping through key functions like module downloads and installation and using core commands like site-install.

There was significant agreement on having another Play Day soon, so Saturday June 9th will be the next one. Be sure to RSVP on the Meetup event, and perhaps share what you will be working on or hope to have a conversation about.

The next meetup will be a Show and Tell meeting held on Thursday June 14th, 6:00pm – 8:00pm. Check out the Meetup event page for more details.

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Ctrl-left in bash on OS X

October 26th, 2011 Comments off

I finally got my MacBook Pro for work a couple weeks ago and found out how much I actually depend on using ctrl-left and ctrl-right while in bash to move back and forth between words. Yes, I should probably set bash to be in vi mode, but emacs mode is how I learned so why change?

On my MBP that combination does not work. I have no idea what combination it defaults to, but since I constantly bounce between linux machines and this laptop it should be exactly what I’m used to. Thanks to Labrat’s blog post Making BASH’s ctrl-left arrow work on OSX I know now to go to Terminals’s preferences to change this. Once in Settings go to the Settings panel (yes, you read that right) and select the Keyboard tab. The first two entries for Key/Action mappings are for “control cursor left” and “control cursor right”. Double click on each and change the entries to \033b and \033f respectively (hold Esc down for \033).

Edit: I forgot about Spaces which likes “^ Arrow Keys” for switching between spaces. I had to remember to change this to avoid conflicts.

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Dropbox tip: Delayed start

July 1st, 2011 Comments off

Dropbox is a great utility to have handy, especially since it’s multi-platform and I don’t have to think about it. However, I primarily use a Linux laptop which isn’t always Internet-connected or at least not immediately when I login. This confuses Dropbox significantly since the client cannot find the servers and doesn’t retry. But this is nothing a little shell magic can’t fix.

The client starts up based on ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop, which calls dropbox start -i. Based on this NetworkManagerWifiWorkaround tip, replace the Command in Startup Applications with the following and dropbox will wait until your system successfully can ping www.google.com:

bash -c 'while ! ping -q -w5 -c1 www.google.com; do sleep 5s; done; dropbox start -i'

That’s great, except after some time (I believe a restart of dropbox) the command will revert back. So once you have the right command in ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop open up a terminal and run this command:

sudo chattr +i ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop

So now dropbox will wait for you to be connected, and won’t overwrite your change. If you still don’t use Dropbox check out their tour and then signup with my referral link to get an additional 250MB of space.

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