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Warming the cache gives your users extremely fast pages all the time. Using varnish, xmlsitemap, cron and bash you can give your clients very fast pages.

Use varnish, xmlsitemap, cron and bash to warm the cache for fast pagesperformancecachebashvarnishWednesday, May 1, 2013 - 10:13

An indefinitive guide to Composer in Drupal 8Geoffrey

In the past couple of posts, we’ve put several different facets of Drupal 8 under the microscope and discussed how each one is going to change the way you develop for Drupal in the very near future. Now, we’d like to ask a question about Drupal 8 development, one that we believe is going to be quite important in particular for developers who’ve worked within the wider PHP ecosystem.

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Coming to DrupalCon Portland is already a great start to your Drupal journey. You can get started on accelerating your career as a Drupal developer by enrolling in one of our beginner training courses.

It’s never too late to start or to dig deeper on a topic you’ve always wanted to know more about. Whether you want to learn more about theming, site building, or modules, our beginner training will help get you on your way to the Drupal champion’s circle.

When it comes to Drupal, Omega theme is hard to beat for building a responsive, mobile-friendly website. It has powerful GUI configuration tools that make it very appealing to those who don't want to mess about with code. Omega theme has taken care of the messy bits and all that's left for you is to tinker with the settings. In this post we'll go over some of the most important of these configuration settings.

I should also note that in this series of lessons we're not going to discuss creating an Omega sub-theme from scratch. For that I'll refer you to this nice little tutorial on Drupal.org. Instead, we'll do a walk-through of the settings and then finish up by talking about Omega's companion modules, which can help take your responsive site building to the next level.

If you're completely new to the topic of responsive design, you may want to read this post before continuing. It's a couple years old, but the information is still relevant and will help explain the basic ideas behind responsive design and what Omega theme is doing behind the scenes.

Omega Theme Grid Settings

Let's begin with the grid settings, one of the most useful tools that Omega theme provides. Take a look at the screenshot below to view the settings for our example site.

As you may recall, this tutorial series is using our Omega sub-theme, Foundation, so the settings above are the grid configuration for that and differ somewhat from Omega defaults. I've uploaded an image of the default grid settings as a reference, but we'll walk through these one at a time and explain what's happening so you can modify your site as you see fit. 

You'll notice the first setting is Enable the responsive grid. This setting is checked by default, which makes sense considering Omega is a responsive theme, but why would this setting be included at all?

One situation where this may come in handy is if you begin with a responsive site and later decide you'd instead prefer to serve your mobile users a separate site, which can be a good choice if you have the resources to pull it off. So by unchecking this box, you disable Omega's responsive features which instantly turns your theme into an old-fashioned fixed width website.

The next setting, Allow customizing viewport meta properties on iOS and Android devices, toggles the Viewport settings that you see immediately below that checkbox. By default, all of these settings are set to 1.0 and are not scalable by the user. These aren't good defaults, in my opinion, because they take away too much control from the person viewing your site. 

For example, by not checking Scalable by user, people browsing your site on a mobile won't be able to pinch to zoom. Pretty frustrating if they can't easily read your text or want to get a closer look at an image! Furthermore, the default for Maximum scale is 1.0, which provides the same end result - no pinch to zoom. My advice is to instead use something like the settings above so that your users will have a better experience on your site.

Default Layout Settings

These settings are a bit technical. Basically they set the maximum width of your grid and determine your breakpoints (at what width your sidebar moves under the main content, for example) and how your grid will flow when it's scaled up or down.

You'll notice that Foundation uses two of these settings and has the other two disabled. We'll start with the first setting, Fluid Layout. This activates Omega's fluid layout, which makes the site truly responsive instead of providing Omega's default adaptive layout (here's a nice post that explains the difference between the two).

Also in this setting you'll find the following media query:

all and (min-width: 980px) and (min-device-width: 980px), all and (max-device-width: 1024px) and (min-width: 1024px) and (orientation:landscape)

This bit tells Omega at what width it should change the layout. Essentially this is about reordering the regions on the page so that they look better at different screen widths. I've chosen this particular setting so that the sidebar slides under the main content on tablets. By default, Omega doesn't do this (at least not for an iPad), which often leaves the sidebar content looking cramped.

The next setting I'm using is for the Wide Layout. Notice the media query I'm using:

all and (min-width: 1240px)

This sets the maximum width of my page. You could increase this, but in the case of Foundation it probably wouldn't be a good idea because the content area would get so wide that the text would become more difficult to read (here's why).

My advice regarding these settings is to just play around a bit and see what they do. Don't be surprised if you get some weird results! That said, being able to modify these settings in the browser is a really awesome feature of Omega.

Zone and Region Configuration

The next group of settings we're going to look at are for the Zone and region configuration. Take a look at the screenshot below to see what we've got.

You'll notice that we have the settings for the Content zone expanded. What these settings allow you to do is control the width of the various regions on the page, change the number of columns used by the grid and determine where on the page a region will be placed.

I've written another post that discusses how you can use these settings to create custom page layouts, but suffice it to say, things can get really weird here. For example, you could move one of the header regions into the footer. You can even make regions disappear entirely!

These settings are really cool and really powerful, but you can also do some things that may later turn out to be confusing as hell. My advice here is to keep it simple and adhere to conventions as much as possible.

The Omega Theme Stack

As most of the remaining settings involve toggling various styles and page elements, I'm going to leave you to explore those at your leisure and move on to discuss some modules that can be of help when working with Omega theme. These modules are authored by the same team (led by Jake Strawn) that is behind Omega.

We'll start with two that work together to help you create unique page templates for any page on your site.

Delta and Context

These two modules work together to help you create unique templates for single pages, entire content types and a wide variety of other scenarios. The tutorial I pointed to earlier demostrates how to do this, and although these modules aren't essential, I do consider them extremely useful, particularly if you're not comfortable coding your own templates. Even if you're an A+ coder, these two are potentially going to be a time saver for you.

Delta Blocks

This module is actually a sub-module within Delta (Go to your modules and look under 'Theme tools' to see them all). It can also help with your page layouts, but instead of creating page templates, it converts page elements into blocks, allowing you to move them around your site. You can do things like move your logo or breadcrumbs into a new region, which is very cool, but also has the potential to get crazy if you're not careful.

Omega Tools

So you've made some changes to your theme settings, but at this point they're all stored in the database. What if you want to move your theme to another site? This is where Omega Tools comes in. It can take your custom theme settings and write them to the .INFO file, allowing you to move your theme without potentially losing hours worh of work.

This module also has the ability to revert your theme settings if you've made a big mess of things and just want to start over. 

The Wrap

So, there's a lot going on with Omega theme, huh? Don't feel overwhelmed. One of the reasons we're using the Foundation theme/installation profile is so that you can digest things in bite-sized chunks and learn from examples.

Play around a bit with the settings and see what sort of interesting changes you can come up with. In our next lesson we'll finally get our hands dirty and start customizing one of our content types - very useful and lots of fun!

In the meantime, if you'd like to leave a comment on this post, this discussion forum is where you can leave your ten cents.

Know what this means? Die hard Drupalists do.

Read the full post on Millwood Online

The monthly Drupal core bug fix release window is scheduled for this Wednesday. However, since the last Drupal 7 bug fix release was only one month ago and there haven't been many changes added to the 7.x development version since then, there won't be a release this week.

Upcoming release windows include:

• Wednesday, May 15 (security release window)
• Wednesday, June 5 (bug fix release window)

For more information on Drupal core release windows, see the documentation on release timing and security releases, and the discussion that led to this policy being implemented.

Welcome to another Commerce Module Tuesday! Today we are looking at Commerce Checkout Pages, maintained by Kai Curry from Sundays Energy. This module enhances the checkout process a great deal by making the checkout pages as easy to deal with as the checkout panes. Ever wanted to drag and drop the hard-coded checkout pages? How about create a custom “cart” page that was a part of the checkout process? Think you would like a separate checkout page for terms of service? This module provides all you need to make a custom checkout page possible from within the user interface.

Thankfully, unlike the last Commerce Module Tuesday, we simply need to enable this module to take advantage of it’s features. Note that if you’re after custom checkout panes (the things that show up on the checkout pages) then you should take a look at the Commerce Module Tuesday where we talked about Commerce Extra Panes.

(Video after the break.)

Guest blogger Si Hobbs has been a Drupal developer, trainer and business owner. He is currently based in Melbourne, Australia as Drupal consultant with Technocrat.

Personal blog tags: Drupal Global Training Daysguest blogeventscommunity

SITE BUILDING AND MORE - A BUILDAMODULE MENTORED TRAINING

[REGISTER HERE]

Jump to a section

1. A short video overview
2. This training is for you!
3. Why this training is amazing
4. What you will be learning
5. What you get with this training
6. How it works
7. Your trainers
8. Happy trainee feedback
9. Want more information? Questions?

A short video overview

This training is for you

1. If you want to meet lots Drupal experts and get tons of one-on-one help
2. If you feel like you learn faster or slower than a typical student and want to set your own pace
3. If you have a hard time listening to lectures (who doesn't?)
4. If you typically have a lot of questions about what you're learning
5. If you're not sure what your skill level is or what you should be focusing on

Why this training is amazing

This training has helped hundreds and hundreds of students over the last couple of years, and allows every single student to focus and learn the material that will be the most useful to them. Here's a breakdown of the big benefits:

Lots of one-on-one help: This training is all about personal interactions between you and Drupal experts (More than 10 of them are on board). If you have particular tools you want to learn, or hurdles you're trying to get over in your current projects, you'll have a chance to talk one-on-one with trainers who can help. Our team not only has extensive experience in the field, they are also seasoned trainers and can help you with the tools you need to discover your own solutions once you're out of the classroom.

Learn at your own pace: Whereas most trainings are the same for every student, in this training you get to work at your own pace through material that's just right for your skill level.

Real-world scenarios: It's relatively easy to learn Drupal in pieces, the hard part is putting the pieces together for practical projects. In this training, you have the opportunity to learn in a way that shows you how each piece works together in real-world projects.

A rocking good time: Because you get the opportunity to interact with skilled trainers and other students more than you would in other trainings, it can be a lot more fun and allow you to make connections that will really come in handy later on.

 

What you will be learning

The extensive BuildAModule curriculum allows you to focus on exactly what you need to know. You will only be able to work through a portion of the videos in the classroom, but we give you 4 months of access to the video library so you can start before the training and continue long after the training is over.

In the training, you can focus on one topic, or build up some basics in several topics. We will have experts that are well-versed in all of these and that can help you choose where you start:

• Basic Site Building: If you're new to Drupal, this will get you familiar with basic concepts, modules and techniques.
• Advanced Site Building: How to work with modules like Views, Panels and Display Suite to position and organize content on your site.
• Basic PHP Programming: If you have some basic Drupal skills and want to start working with code, this will help you build the basics.
• Theming: How to work with themes and sub-themes to override the display of anything you see on a Drupal site.
• Module Building: If you know some PHP and are ready to start extending Drupal, this will get you familiar with the most important APIs.

 

What you get with this training

• 4 months of access over 850 videos on BuildAModule (worth $116)
• Opportunities to connect one-on-one with numerous Drupal rock stars
• A unique sticker badge to mark your completion of the course

 

How it works

The structure of the training might sound a little strange if you haven't experience it before, but it's incredibly powerful:

Step 1: Select a set of videos to focus on

Why videos? By using videos, we allow you to move at your own pace through what is usually a very linear lecture. Instead of sitting back and listing to someone talk on stage, you can instead experience the same lecture in bite-sized pieces that you can play back at half- or double-speed while skipping what you already know, all of which help you to move faster.

Each video also has a scrolling transcript which allows you to use parts of your brain that aren't used nearly as much in a typical lecture, helping you to keep focused and comprehend more.

Step 2: When you have questions or problems, grab a mentor

Because we're not lecturing, us trainers are free to help you 100% of the time with your questions, no matter how basic or complicated. And you won't be interrupting anyone by getting help, since there's not a lecture being piped over the loudspeakers.

But can't I watch videos at home?

Good question! And yes, definitely. In fact, we give you full access to our video library and encourage you to watch as many videos as you can before the training so you can come with questions.

But there are some real advantages to watching the videos in a focused training like this, including:

• Experts are within reach all the time to help you with questions or problems (this is huge!)
• Trainers can help direct you in real time when there's something specific you want to learn
• It's much easier to stay focused when you're with a group of people all learning at the same time
• Video learning is more enjoyable in a group, and that increases stamina and makes it feel less like work

 

Your trainers

Your trainers are, across the board, experienced Drupal practitioners and also skilled trainers. You're going to have a great time with this bunch.

Click any of the links below to view your trainer's Drupal.org profile page and learn more about them:

• Chris Shattuck
• Doug Vann
• Michael Anello
• Barry Madore
• Kendall Totten
• Jeremy Zerr
• Gemini Agalo
• Dusty Boeger
• Carson Black
• Russell Keppner
• Oliver Seldman
• Michelle Krejci
• Forest Monsen
• Joshua Kopel
• David Hunt
• John Nguyen
• Scott Reynen
• Josh Brauer

 

Happy trainee feedback

"I'm totally happy. I solved a problem I've been working on for months"

"The mentored training was new to me and it was a fun experience. You are a gifted teacher."

"Excellent set of resources, between access to all the videos and the helpful mentors."

" Today's run-through was good for me in several ways. It got me on track to learn what I need to about PHP and some of the other components. Also, I am the sort of person who really likes to hear discussions among people who are more advanced in a subject that I am ...The conversations I was able to listen in on exposed me to facets of the subject I'd never imagined. Thanks to today's work, I have been able to refocus my efforts and know what I need to do … I appreciate all the effort, do keep up the good work."

"It absolutely rocked! Lots of positive feedback. Some of the trainees were doing some amazing things by the end of the day, having started from scratch."

"We had a great time at the TCDrupal Build a Module training yesterday. We had almost 40 attendees and they were *very* engaged. Everyone came back ready to rock after lunch, and we even picked up a few people from the more advanced training. Everyone was so engrossed that we had to drag them away from their laptops when it was time to go!"

"Wow! Really enjoying this. You have done such a good job of explaining this stuff. I'm here at the Drupal Camp in Minneapolis, Minnesota today with all the people doing your training and it seems to be going really well. At lunch we had some good discussions about this."

"Just wanted to follow up to let you know that training on Saturday was a big success. We had about 25 students. We got really positive feedback, and people seemed extremely happy with the day."

Want more information? Questions?

Feel free to contact Chris Shattuck directly with any questions you have about the training.

[REGISTER HERE]Drupal Planet

View the discussion thread.

Start:  2013-06-24 09:00 - 2013-06-30 19:00 Europe/Dublin Sprint

Drupal Dev Days Dublin is ideally timed to be at the very last minute when developers can still come together and make API changes to Drupal 8 core as per the current timeline.

The event is looking for sponsors, awaiting session submissions and people to register (only €25 for a standard ticket).

This is also a first of a kind event where extended sprinting is built into the planning. The generous folks at DIT (Dublin Institute of Technology) are providing space for the sprints the whole week before the event as well as the sessions. There are already Multilingual, Views and Field API/Entity API sprints proposed. Do you want to lead a sprint on Mobile, Performance or some other favorite topic or join existing sprints? Sign up for the event (on the site) and for the sprints (in the sheet linked below).

Practical details

Dates

24th (Mon) to 28th (Fri) of June 2013 (may also continue all the way to 30th of June depending on space and interest, parallel to sessions).

Times

We start each day at 9am and plan to wind down sprinting at 7pm to go for food. Exact schedules depend on teams, hunger, etc.

Location

Dublin Institute of Technology; DIT Aungier Street, Dublin 2 (only a few minutes walk from Stephen's Green).

Sign up, join the fun #node-296483 .picture, #node-296483 h3 { display: none; } #node-296483 .field-type-datestamp { margin: 0 0 2em 0; } #node-296483 dl { margin-bottom: 1em; } #node-296483 dd { margin-top: 0.5em; } #node-296483 h3.content { display: block; }

The Search API ranges module allows you to easily create a search API page with a range facet. For example, you could create a search page where users can filter products based on price, by simply selecting a price range from a facet.

The Commerce Kickstart distribution uses this module for price filtering on their product search page. If you want to see the facet in action go to the Commerce Kickstart demo site and you should see the Price facet in the left sidebar.

This is the fourth part in our series on how to build a question and answers website using drupal. In this tutorial, we would be looking at how we can allow users vote up or down on the question and answer content type. We will also be creating functionality that allows users to be rewarded with points for different activities/tasks they carry out on the question and answer site. Users who created a question are also able to choose the best answer to their question, or what you call the accepted answer.

Upon downloading the answers user points using the drush command line and installing it, you will discover it also installs a lot of other dependency modules such as rules, rates, best answer, submitted by, entity and voting.

Once installed, you will discover most of the configurations have been done for us. There is already a default widget setup that allows user voting on both the questions and answers content type. The rates and userpoints have also been pre-configured using the rules module. So that once an event takes place, an action follows. 

In other to be able to follow this tutorial properly here is a link to the first three parts part1, part2, part3

About a week ago our fundraising campaign on indiegogo finished with a total of 11'567$ raised from a total of 49 sponsors. The public count doesn't include a donation that we got from Acquia on the day the campaign closed that couldn't be transferred anymore through IndieGoGo because of authorization issues with Paypal.

I would like to thank our sponsors, all the people that believed in us and the project and who became a backer. Your vote of confidence was crucial to show the world just how much potential this project has. You were there for us right at the start, we won't forget.

At Florida DrupalCamp 2013, I presented a session that demonstrated how to utilize the Feeds, Feeds Tamper, Address field, Geofield, and other modules to create a fully-functional website for searching for Farmers Markets anywhere in the United States. While the session's intent was to inspire people as to what Drupal can do in a very short amount of time, this blog post will focus on the details of the process.

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Have you ever thought that Drupal's markup is bad and could be better? I'm sure you did. And now thanks to the Twig Initiative we are starting to move in that direction. Introducing the Dream markup!

#dreammarkup

One of the goals of the Twig and Mobile Initiatives is to improve the markup in core. Though most of initiative participants are currently involved in converting templates to Twig, but we still can start working on markup for the completed templates or make markup suggestions.

Principles

Drupal 8 dream markup should be based on two principles. First - we should push current markup to the line where front-end developers from other platforms won't feel any pain(or at least less) on moving to Drupal and also reduce this crazy hierarchy of thousands of all the elements in DOM structure. Second principle is base on the new CSS Architecture. We want to reduce common css pitfalls and also reduce the weight of CSS selectors with one shot. To achieve this we are using SMACSS principles(more known as BEM) in naming convention. For example from #sidebar ul.menu li > a to .menu__link

Time limits

There is no chance to edit the markup after code freeze for Drupal 8. Theme makers want to be sure that markup of core is stable and they can create solid themes. In future changing one markup element or class name can lead to code change in all existing themes.

Getting involved

If you have any ideas how to improve the markup, or want to join and help on working on existing issues - be sure to visit the Meta for Dream Markup. On the meta issue page you can find all the principles, related issues to work on and steps to get involved.

Language English Tags: DrupalDevelopmentCheck this option to include this post in Planet Drupal aggregator: planet

Spoiler alert: yes, we think it will be.

In our first post of this series: Help! I’m Drowning in Social Collaboration Software! we discussed how the social collaboration software landscape is a dynamic, confusing, and rapidly changing space that is hard to navigate, but full of promising tools. In our second post, Are We Asking Too Much of Collaboration Software? we discussed that success with social collaboration software requires organizations to focus on their business challenges and truly know the problem(s) they’re trying to solve in order to choose the right tool for the job. In this final post, we will address why we believe open source can the disruptive force for the space.

From our experience with social collaboration software, which recently includes rebuilding Open Atrium, we believe that open source offers a different and compelling value to this market, introducing the elements that are most fundamental to success: flexibility, extensibility, and community to a market dominated by proprietary solutions devoid of these factors.

Social media is changing fast. That’s fine in our personal lives (ooh! twitter! now tumblr!) But in the context of social business software, we have to invest for a longer term in tools that have concrete gains that relate to our business goals. Historically the most compelling business cases for IT tools were achieved when you can prove an increase in revenue or in the ability to market to customers. The problem with social collaboration software so far is that its best chance of success lies in our ability to use these tools to 1) reduce cost, 2) achieve greater productivity, or 3) leverage insights for competitive advantage. This has kept the intranet and social collaboration software in the “world of corporate IT” where saving costs and improving efficiency are all people are expecting to gain from it. Still, if these advantages can be achieved, the cost is well worth the effort. The trouble is believing the hype that we can achieve our wildest dreams and falling into common traps.

It is time for social collaboration to break out of these perceived weaknesses in its business case and prove it can have a measurable business benefit to the organization.

Consider the trends in the web content management system (WCMS) space over the last 5 years. Commercial and proprietary vendors have fallen victim to a widespread movement towards open source solutions like Drupal, WordPress. This massive landscape change has made open source the dominant choice for organizations in their WCMS because the proprietary vendors no longer had solutions worth carrying the price tag. Why would the same trend not prevail in social collaboration software where the environment has the same (or better) characteristics that make it prime for open source?

There are five reasons we think open source solutions can help organizations find the “right tool for the job” in social collaboration software while avoiding many of the traps we see in the space.

1. The return on investment is better. This software is generally a big investment for an organization. When you can keep costs down with a growing and competitive talent pool, avoid licensing and maintenance fees, and see your software improve through free community contribution, you’re going to see a higher ROI.

2. Open source is (surprise!) more flexible. We promise, you don’t know everything you need your social collaboration software to do or be capable of. Nobody does. Because those needs are changing. Open source allows you to use it, study it, and change it. That’s important, and can mean the difference between useful and outdated.

3. Their way is not your way. Vendors have good ideas, but they aren’t your ideas. You might benefit from best practices but ultimately that is a choice between what CAN be done and what your users need. Targeting the opportunities and pain points of your own organization is where the solution will start to feel genuine.

4. A “glue approach” is better for the growing feature set. The feature list alone of any of the “catch-all” platform products begs an important question: “can these guys really be good at ALL this stuff?” The answer: probably not. An open source solution that can integrate with existing “specialty” solutions lets your organization choose from the specialists who do what they do best, rather than trying to choose a monolithic solution that is a catch all.

5. The market is changing. Innovation matters. Social collaboration software is, probably more than almost any other organizational tool you use, subject to the rapidly changing landscape of social media, sharing, and collaboration trends. The features the “big guys” are working on today may be outdated by the time they’re released and the features your organization needs may not be ready or even considered.

Drupal and other open source solutions offer an answer to these traps by giving you a platform you can extend and customize without fear of lock-in. In the past years, the open source community — and particularly the Drupal community — has sought to fill the market’s needs with open source alternatives to the proprietary social collaboration solutions that exist now.

A host of modules and distributions exist to address this market now. Modules that perform specific functions like Workbench, Organic Groups, and Messaging API provide functionality like workflow management, notifications, messaging, and group management to those starting from Drupal Core.

At Phase2, we are tackling the problem with Open Atrium (now available in Alpha!) Where we hope to make a flexible integration solutions that works with other popular systems.

Many other Drupal distributions like Commons, Totem, and RedHen CRM address the need from more of a “platform” perspective, providing a starting point for a variety of social solutions with multiple pieces of functionality designed to connect teams, manage projects, allow for messaging and notifications, enable “friending” and following, and create wikis, portals, document management, and community forums.

You should not be shocked that a company whose motto is “open source. open minds.” would be pushing for an open source approach to collaboration software. But the reasons why open source matters here are compelling.

The needs are changing, the features are growing, and the market is confusing because no one can expect to understand (much less constantly make purchasing decisions) in the changing face of this space. With open source, you don’t have to, knowing that the talent pool, the reuse of best practices, the flexibility, and the innovation will keep up where a single proprietary solution falls short.

In essence, social collaboration software is moving at the speed of open source.

This screencast steps through a little known technique that uses iframes to allow for secure cross-domain communication, using the Entity iframe module.  The screencast shows how this technique can be used to allow for iframed content who's parent embedding the iframe is able to react to changes in the height of the content of the iframe.  In short: you get responsive iframed content.  If you don't care about how this works and instead want to see it in action, skip to the video below, otherwise keep reading.

Last week the DA hosted its first webinar, featuring Kevin O’Leary, Spark UX Lead, and Jesse Beach, Senior Front End Engineer. Our topic was Drupal 8 and Spark for Responsive Design. We spent a great hour reviewing the features of the D8 Spark distribution and the powerful features that it puts in the hands of content editors, wherever they may be. As a person that used to hand code web sites, the idea that I can edit a site from my phone still fills me with awe.

Personal blog tags: webinars

On April 19th-20th, I attended DrupalCamp São Paulo 2013. The event, which was born from the ashes of the cancelled DrupalCon São Paulo, was held on IME-USP (University of São Paulo), and had around 250 people from the whole country, and some from Argentina, Peru and Uruguay.

During 35 talks, a wide variety of topics were followed closely by interested developers, business people and students, from Sales to Technical, E-commerce to Mobile. A growing community!

Propeople was one of the sponsors, and I also represented the company in a talk about Feeds and data migration, in a room full of people giving me questions. We had a nice time talking about massaging data and the usual problems we face when working with migrations.

On the second day, a remarkable session performed the task of founding the Brazilian Drupal Association. The new organization, inspired by the Drupal Association, was created to answer a growing demand for Drupal promotion in Brazil and Latin America. The association will promote regular events around the country for that purpose, and much more.

This community has many-many challenges, such as making Drupal more visible in Brazilian market and attracting more sales/business people to conferences. However, there are clear signs of a increasing, more mature, community.

 

 

 

Pictures source.

Language English Tags: DrupalEventsCheck this option to include this post in Planet Drupal aggregator: planet

At this month's Central Denver meetup, I didn't have an introductions question prepared as I normally do, so I just asked the first question I thought of: what's your favorite color? That turned out to be more interesting than I expected, a close race between green and blue, with blue narrowly squeaking out a victory at the last minute.

This was the first month we did collaborative notes on Google Docs, an idea I stole from the South Denver meetup. Though we didn't have a lot of participation this time, I still like the idea of everyone being able to both contribute to notes and follow along in text to supplement the spoken presentation. It's very much in line with how we collaborate on everything else in the Drupal community.

We had two presentations. The first, from Dave Bailey, was about Drupal project planning. He talked through his approach to making Drupal projects successful, and also things to avoid that tend to make projects unsuccessful. Everyone has a slightly different process, and it was really interesting to see both the overlap and the differences in someone else's process. Dave posted his slides online if you're interested and missed it.

After that, we enjoyed a demo of drush from Ryan Kois. Drush is one of those tools that everyone recommends, but if you've never seen it in action it can be difficult to understand why it's so useful. Ryan went through the install process, helpfully (if unintentionally) demonstrating nearly everything that can possibly go wrong when installing drush. He then went through a list of handy tasks drush can help with, from the basics of cache clearing and enabling modules to more advanced features like using site aliases for database and file syncs. Ryan also mentioned a blog post where he went into more detail on site aliases.

Between project planning and drush, we ended up with a well-rounded summary of what's involved in making a Drupal site, minus the actual site. After the drush demo, someone made the mistake of asking Ryan about his shell configurations, a topic he can easily talk about for several hours. Fortunately, he was able to limit his answer to several minutes, after which many of us headed down the road for a bit more socializing at Interstate Kitchen and Bar.