Planet Drupal

This has been a long time coming. left-click advanced is pleased to announce that on Saturday, March 23rd, Commerce Point of Sale (POS) has been released on Drupal.org. Commerce POS is a point of sale interface for the Drupal Commerce suite of modules. It is the (only slightly better named) successor to the UberPOS module, which did the same thing for Ubercart.

While the interface remains similar, this is an evolutionary leap forward for Drupal based POS systems. In comparison with UberPOS/Drupal 6, Commerce POS has a lot more to work with. It heavily leverages Views, modal popups, and Drupal 7's ajax framework to achieve a simpler, but more flexible interface. And did we mention it's built on top of Drupal Commerce?

Using the flexibility of Commerce allows site builders to design powerful, rules-based workflows for POS orders, without writing a lick of code. For the developers among us, Commerce POS offers a flexible, object oriented interface and command plugin system that is somewhat similar to Views handlers. And, it's backed up with tests, which should help ensure the stability of the system.

While we still have a ways to go before a full stable release, we're moving fast. Currently, work is underway to create an Authorize.net card present payment method (necessary for using swiped cards), writing documentation for installation and use, and squashing any bugs that may appear. For those interested in helping out, it is recommended that they visit the project page for further instructions.

Tags: uberposCommerce POSdrupaleCommerceCommerceCategory: Drupal Planet, News

Erica Ligeski, Acquia U graduate, now full-time Marketing Engineer on the Acquia.com website is another of the many Drupalists with a non-technical background. Her path took her from performance and dance, to arts management, to total geekery! Just like me, at some point along the way she needed a website for an arts project and fell in love with Drupal. The rest is history.

erica_ligeski_final.mp3

TL;DR -- Drupal 8 Toolbar code improvements are moving along. Let's discuss contrib DX improvements, propose solutions and build them.

Near the end of 2012 we updated the Drupal Toolbar with a mobile first design approach.

http://drupal.org/node/1137920

We accepted many followups as the cost of getting this improvement committed to core. I'm happy to say that a large number of these, including the most pressing, have already been addressed.

https://drupal.org/node/1846970

Several folks have been working on the issue to resolve the conflict between the Toolbar and Overlay.

http://drupal.org/node/1847084

We're close to having this fix committed. It will be followed by two more improvements:

https://drupal.org/node/1847314
https://drupal.org/node/1860434

Once the code cleanup tasks are completed, I want to address in a concerted and focused way, how we make the Toolbar a Drupal component that contrib authors will find useful and usable. We're addressing this issue here. Please leave comments in the following issue as well!

https://drupal.org/node/1894964

The most prominent issu to my mind is the interaction between Menu and Shortcut, noted in this regression issue https://drupal.org/node/1852346. Toolbar should be flexible enough to allow us to resolve such a display issue.

These are the known (to me at least) set of modules that will leverage Toolbar.

Core
Contextual
Menu (?)
Search (?)
Shortcut
Tour
User

Contrib
I10n_client: http://drupal.org/project/l10n_client
Responsive Preview: http://drupal.org/project/responsive_preview

What I would like to know from you, as core and contrib developers, is this:

1. Do you foresee that your modules will leverage the D8 administrative Toolbar?
2. What are the details of your use case?
3. Do you have insights into the D8 architectural improvements we could leverage to further improve the Toolbar?

We have several months before code freeze to get improvements in place. I think this is sufficient time to the flexibility that contrib will need going forward with this Drupal release.

One of our students is learning Drupal and trying to master Views.

They wanted to know how to style different areas of each Views.

So, this tutorial is an introduction to templates and theming for Views.

As our example, we're going to use the "Front page" view which is on the defaults available when you first intall Views.

This webinar demonstrates the best way to keep your FileMaker data sync'd with Drupal, and vice-versa. If you find yourself doing lots of import/export operations between FileMaker and your Drupal website, then you need to watch this webinar. Also, be sure to read these two supporting blog posts for the real meat and details of the process: 

9 Steps to Sync your FileMaker data with Drupal

Featured Recipe: FileMaker and Drupal

The single most important page on your website is your homepage. It is the one place that most of your customers will be exposed to your brand for the first time. It is critical to make a great first impression.

Your homepage is where most people will first enter your site. It is also the page they will come back to the most, like the often-used home button on an iPhone or iPad. Unfortunately, many homepages are over-engineered and cluttered with too much information, which is the exact opposite from what most visitors want.... Read more

In this Drupal video tutorial, I show you how to bulk import products into Ubercart using the Drupal 7 Feeds Module and UC_Feeds Module.

To do so, we first need to download and install the modules along with Job Scheduler. Then we walk through how to create an Importer and set up an excel spreadsheet, saving it as a CSV file. There are a couple sticking points in the tutorial that I make sure to point out - specifically, how to make sure you images are uploaded properly and how to configure weights in your spreadsheet.

Have you ever wondered how you can programatically create an autocomplete form element in Drupal? This tutorial will show you how to develop a form that contains a text field autocomplete widget that uses the Drupal Ajax Framework to dynamically retrieve content from your database.

DC Alpe-Adria (DCAA) is first bigger event organized by Slovenian Drupal community and will be the biggest Drupal event in this part of Europe in spring 2013. It will take place in hear of the Europe, Ljubljana, ob 13th and 14th of April. 

DCAA evolved from the idea to hold the next Drupal Balkan summit, that was organized three times in three different countries so far, and got quite a community momentum in the space of Ex Yugoslavia. DCAA tries to expand this momentum to other countries in the region, including Italy, Austria, Hungary, etc.

There are a lot of reasons to attend DCAA, among the others:

1. keynotes by Jeffery McGuire (Acquia) and Florian Loretan (Wunderkraut),
2. 20+ other interesting sessions about Drupal and web in general,
3. unforgettable official party,
4. host city with thrilling history and architecture and magnificent landscape,
5. every ticket already includes a DCAA T-shirt!

There are only few days left to get your ticket at a special early-bird price (15€). Hurry UP!

Special thanks go to our sponsors and partners who made this event possible.

• What do you see as the benefit of using an external service like CiviCRM as compared to a “Drupal” specific setup like using Simplenews or Message notify?
• And for the sake of argument, what would you see as a benefit of using a “Drupal” setup over an external service?

CiviCRM

• How much integration is there between Drupal and CiviCRM?
• Can you create new lists from the Drupal interface?
• Can you create the newsletters in the Drupal interface?
• How does it deal with images in a newsletter?
• How can you add site content into a newsletter?
• Can you setup autoresponders?
• Can you setup split tests?
• Are there any analytics included?
• How do users subscribe and unsubscribe from a newsletter?

Today, Khalid gave a presentation on Drupal Performance and Scalability for members of the London (Ontario) Drupal Users Group. The slides from the presentation are attached below.

About 2 years ago (soon after Drupal 7 was released), I had a site with a number of fields attached to a content type. When I had to clear caches and reload a page, it would take an awfully long time. This is because the site would need to run load each node, run a query for each field, process it, and more. What was good, though, is that all of these fields would then get placed into the cache_field table so the node could load faster on subsequent loads.

performanceentitiesdrupalplanet drupal

Why Use Drush sql-sync

Drush's 'sql-sync' command is meant to very handily merge a local Drupal site database with a remote site's database without having to take all the individual steps of creating a remote database dump file (using drush sql-dump), transferring the dump file to the local server (using drush rsync), and then importing it into the local database (drush sqlc < localdb.sql).

(***Note: This post assumes a rudimentary knowledge of Drush alias file usage. Please read Drush's examples.aliases.drushrc.php file for more information. The aliases used in the examples are specified as 'dev' and 'prod' in my 'mdj.aliases.drushrc.php' file which is located in my C:\Users\USERNAME\.drush directory in Windows 7. Also, I am using the latest development version of Drush, which as of this writing is 6.x-dev (8.x-1.x branch)

Using Drush sql-sync

In the following command line, I am asking Drush to run a 'sql-sync' between my source alias '@mdj.prod' and my target alias '@mdj.dev' and to do so in simulation mode. Don't try this in Windows Powershell. You will get some nearly unintelligible error about "splatted variables", whatever those are. The best (and recommended) way to run Drush commands is with the Git bash shell that comes with the Git for Windows installation.

A couple of weeks ago now I released the 1.0 version of Neptune, a new Zen 7.x-5.x sub-theme. Since then I've fixed and added a number of bits and today created a recommended 1.1 release. You can see the theme in action at the demo site.

Key features include:

• Responsive design
• HTML5 markup
• Sass/Compass integration
• Single column, configurable width layout
• Mobile friendly mini nav
• Google web fonts (Montserrat for titles and Istok Web for all other text)
• Overlapping triangle thing

Sometimes you would like to add a map to a node or block without the need for detailled configuration options. You simply want to display a map and be done with it.
Fortunately this is an easy task using Leaflet.

drupal planet english

With all the software we teach, some tasks almost always confuse beginners.

With Drupal, re-ordering field is one of those confusing tasks.

Learning how to re-order Drupal fields is easy. You can re-order fields using an easy drag-and-drop interface.

What's confusing is learning where to re-order fields.

By default, there are 3 ways to re-order Drupal fields and none of them are easily marked.

In this tutorial, we'll show you both how and where to re-order your fields.

A year and a half ago I wrote about How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Block. Since then we've been building all our sites with this philosophy and have evolved it quite a bit.... Read more

So you’re working on a site where the files folder on production is umpteen GBs and you want to save space on your disk for pictures, mp3s, movies and other important data. You might use the dummyimage module, but all those cat pictures might get tiring. You may also want to have real pictures from the production site showing up, with the correct size.

A simple way to get this working is to configure nginx to proxy all http-requests to the site’s files directory over to production. This may create issues if you have some files that you are working with in your development environment, so we tell nginx to only proxy files that return 404, by adding these lines to the server part of the site in question's conf-file:

location /files/ { error_page 404 = @exampleprod; } location @exampleprod { proxy_pass http://example.com; }

Note: This is a quick hack that might have unwanted side effects so use at your own risk! What if your local environment doesn’t have a js file that is on production and your helpful nginx server proxies it for you? It might be better to only proxy requests to the directories that you know have images or other files. Another option is to customize which types of files are proxied to nginx, I would recommend making sure that JS and CSS files are from your local environment, by changing

location /files/

to

location /files/* ^.+\.(?:!css|!js)$

Thanks to my colleagues for input while writing this post. Especially to Olli for regex skills, and James for English writing skills. 

Just some facts.
Haters gonna hate.

This is a follow-up on the article Dries Buytaert wrote in 2007 PHP is dead... long live PHP!. In the article he shares same concern that Nick Lewis for the slow adoption rate of PHP 5, less than 20% at that time. And he encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.

Caution
This article is NSFJA.

As of 24th of March 2013 according to W3Tech this is the state of PHP

Well, PHP 5 adoption rate is 96.9%, and PHP 4 is quite dead. Mission accomplished.
Let's have a look to the overall PHP health.

PHP Status and trends

Netcraft published in January 2013 the above chart, as part of their recommended article PHP just grows and grows:

• By September 2001, Netcraft's Web Server Survey found 1.8M sites running PHP.
• PHP 5 was released in 2004, and remains the most recent major version release today (5.4.11 was released on 17 January 2013). Zend Engine 2.0 forms the core of this release.
• By January 2013, PHP was being used by a remarkable 244M sites, meaning that 39% of sites in Netcraft's Web Server Survey were running PHP. Of sites that run PHP, 78% are served from Linux computers.
• Popular web applications that use PHP include content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, along with several popular ecommerce solutions like Zencart, osCommerce and Magento. In January 2013, these six applications alone were found running on a total of 32M sites worldwide.
• As of January 2013, 2.1M out of 4.3M web-facing computers are running PHP.

Notice that the previous chart uses an logarithmic scale, so the explosion of PHP sites during the last years is not easily noticed. This is an older chart (2011) by netcraft, where a linear scale was used:

W3Tech

Also this interesting comparison from W3Tec: Server-side languages used for websites. From 2010 to 2013.

Notice that in the previous chart Ruby and Python are not shown because they represent only 0.6% and 0.2% respectively.

Stackoverflow

In the next chart also we see that there is a lot of activity around the PHP tag in stackoverflow. Specially this 2013.

PS. Read now Javascriptocalypse, where you will be impressed by the jQuery numbers.

The Media module has really become the de facto standard in handling media files in Drupal 7. I really like the concept of having files (images, videos, etc) as entities. When a file is an entity, you can attach custom fields and modify how the file is displayed by customizing specific view modes.

When you install the Media module for the first time it can be intimidating because there are a lot of moving parts. But if you already have an understanding of how entities, fields and view modes work in Drupal you will get the hang of it pretty quickly.