• Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
• People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria
• Republic of the Congo (Not to be confused with “Democratic Republic of the Congo”).

This post is a reflection of why we always try to avoid such architecture, and why we almost always still end up going with that level of effort; how much it should cost (less than having 140 independent sites); the common pitfalls we’ve gathered over the years (many).

What are Microsites

Microsites are sites that share the same structure and purpose, usually under one organization, but are meant to serve different branches, offices, or audiences. They can have their own content, languages, and editors, and sometimes even a different look. In a setup like the UN’s, each country office site is technically similar, but each is managed by a different local team, with its own priorities and style. They’re independent enough to feel separate, yet still connected through a shared foundation.

The term “microsite” is misleading. Once you have hundreds of them, each with custom permissions, content, and translations, there’s nothing “micro” left about it. It’s a big system pretending to be many small ones.

The Options - From Worse To Bad

None of these options are easy. Microsites are the kind of problem where every path feels wrong; you just choose which pain you can live with.

Read more

Imagine this function:

function isAllowedAccess(bool $is_trial, bool $is_paid) : bool

This function nearly makes sense, but it has a flaw in its design.

In the example above, having both ’trial’ and ‘paid’ set to TRUE is an impossible situation. Currently, the isAllowedAccess function does not prevent us from reaching this impossible state.

Fixing it with PHP’s Enum is easy.

Read more

See more about PEVB and our Drupal-starter in this video, from a presentation given in the (hallways) of DrupalCon Atlanta 2025

Read more

Read more

Infrastructure Basics

We worked with an excellent infrastructure team who provisioned the following architecture for us:

Read more

On the other hand, getting into Drupal development isn’t easy. Setting up Drupal correctly requires attention to detail and understanding its setup. Developers also need to run checks locally or rely on continuous integration systems to validate their code, which can take time.

Read more

But sometimes, we need to re-use a project for multiple sites, and we still want to keep the code private. In those cases, a private composer repo makes sense.

Read more

Caching reduces the time it takes to generate and deliver web pages by storing frequently accessed data in a temporary storage area. This leads to faster page load times and a smoother user experience.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Our main goals remain the same as from this post:

1. Standardization in multiple projects
2. Reduction in cognitive load
3. Optimization for rewrites

All the code examples in this post are inside our Drupal-starter. You can install it locally, and see all the elements under the Style guide page - https://drupal-starter.ddev.site:4443/style-guide. The Drupal-starter code base is used as the starting point of our projects, so you’ll find it very mature!

A quick reminder is that for theming, we’re using the Pluggable entity view builder module, known as PEVB.

Back to our problem - we don’t want to theme the same things over and over again. This sounds trivial, but I’m sure many are doing that. We have! Here’s an example of two different twig files:

<div class="flex flex-col gap-y-3 md:gap-y-5">
  {{ title }}
  {{ body }}
</div>

<div class="flex flex-col gap-y-3 md:gap-y-5">
  {{ author }}
  {{ teaser }}
  {{ date }}
</div>

The cards’ contents differ but the wrapper classes are the same. Also, the chances of changing the gap on one twig file and forgetting the other are high. At least for us, on bigger projects, updating the gap on only some files was a common thing.

Let’s think of the designer for a moment. Should the gap between items be 20px or 24px? The answer, for us, is “whatever works best as long as it’s consistent™.” If one card is 20px, then all cards should be the same. To deal with that, we have a limited set of trait methods:

1. wrapContainerVerticalSpacing (20px)
2. wrapContainerVerticalSpacingTiny (2px)
3. wrapContainerVerticalSpacingBig (40px)
4. wrapContainerVerticalSpacingHuge (60px)

Read more

GitHub CoPilot: The AI-Powered Assistant for Developers

I have been using GitHub CoPilot since August 2022, and it has proven to be an invaluable asset. It has provided the following benefits:

Speeding Up Smaller Tasks

GitHub CoPilot has significantly sped up smaller tasks such as creating demo content in CSV files, updating hooks, and managing dependency injections. This has allowed our developers to focus more on complex tasks and problem-solving.

Dependency Injection is a fundamental part of Drupal development, and it’s a chore that we need to do over and over again. Here’s how CoPilot speeds it up for an existing class:

Demo content is essential for our way of developing and it also makes testing much easier. But the creation of such content was, well, boring. Here’s how CoPilot speeds it up:

Read more

Architecture Overview

This diagram from the documentation of AWS contains almost every argument for considering AWS EB. Major points:

Read more

I’m one of the ones who reviews others’ code, after five years of doing this I would like to reflect on the exercise of being a maintainer.

Read more

Read more

Read more

This is a deep dive into the journey we had, and where we are now. But if you’d like to jump right into the code, our Drupal Starter Kit has everything already wired in - so you can use everything yourself without too much effort.

Read more

Having search on top of that can be a bit more challenging. There are different solutions for having a local search like lunr.js (and a Drupal module to integrate with it), but it’s quite limited. That is, it will create a local index where you could have some JS to look into it, but that is no match to full-blown search engines such as Elasticsearch.

In this blog post I will share a demo website we’ve built as a proof of concept for a much larger site. I’m not going to dwell on the advantages of static sites, instead I’m going to share the high-level concepts that guided us, along with some technical tips. While the specific details have nothing to do with Drupal - our client’s site is in Drupal, so it was convenient to build it around it. But you can really do it with any language.

Here is the demo repo, and that’s how it looks:

Concepts

With static sites, deploying and reverting deploys is easy. It’s not much more than git push or git revert if something went wrong. But what about search? As we’ve mentioned, we want to keep using Elasticsearch for things like aggregations (a.k.a. facets), spell checks, etc. But how can we support, for example, a rollback in the deploy - making sure that search is always searching only through the content that exists in the deployed static site. Thankfully, Elasticsearch supports index cloning, so we could have something like this:

Read more

The reason I try to avoid it, on the other hand, is mainly because it’s hard to create forms that satisfy the end users, and achieve their expectations. Basically, forms are bulky, and going with a mix of JS/Ajaxy solutions is often a pain. Having a JS form (i.e. some JS widget that builds and controls the entire form), that POSTs to a RESTful endpoint takes more code, but often times provides a more streamlined user experience.

Not sure why and how, but over the years we’ve been tasked quite a few times with creating form wizards. It’s frequently used for more complex registrations, like for students, or alumni applying for different programs. In the early Drupal 7 days we went with CTools’ wizard, and then switched to Elm (i.e. a JS form) along with RESTful endpoints. Drupal 8 however has one major feature that makes it very appealing to work once more with form API - that is “Form modes.”

This post has an example repo, that you should be able to reliably download and run locally thanks to DDEV. I will not try to cover every single line of code - but rather share the concepts behind our implementation, with some references to the code. The audience is intermediate-level Drupal developers, that can expect to have a good sense of how to use Form modes to build wizards after reading this post and going over the code.

Before diving in, it’s important to recognize that “wizards” come in many flavors. I personally hold the opinion that a generic module cannot be (easily) built to accommodate all cases. Instead, I look at Drupal 8 with its core and a couple of contrib modules as the “generic” solution to build complex - sprinkled with lots of custom business logic - wizards.

Read more

To better understand why the POC was built that way, I should give you the backstory.

The Backstory

In 2016, I was invited to present about Drupal & Elm in DrupalCamp Tokyo. I always like to bring this fact up in any kind of conversation - but this time there’s even a reason beyond my usual bragging rights: The flight is terribly long from Israel to Tokyo. Twenty-four hours door-to-door kind of long.

As it so happened, a short time before my flight, Adam, Gizra US Director had virtually dropped a PDF on my table. I was preparing myself for yet another long RFP (Request for proposal) with an impossible spec, and an even less possible timeline. I was surprised to see that was not the case. That PDF was forty-something pages, with a wireframe per page and some notes, showing the flow of a rather interesting app.

Three years later I still refer to those pages as the best spec we’ve ever received. The people behind those wireframes were Dr. Wendy Leonard and her Ihangane team. They were planning an electronic medical record for an HIV prevention program in Rwanda.

I was really impressed. Sure, the wireframes were rougher than usual, but they did exactly what they were supposed to. The team was smart enough to not rush into development and in fact, they even printed out the spec pages, went to the field, sat with nurses, and let them click on the screens. The printed screens. They clicked on paper!

Anyway, did I ever mention I was invited to Tokyo in 2016?

That long 24 hours flight. I’ve finished my book (“Ancillary Justice”), watched a movie (“Wreck-It Ralph”, as for some reason I love watching cartoons on planes), and there were still many hours before my arrival. So I took my laptop out, spun up a Drupal backend and an Elm frontend - and the first POC for Ihangane’s app called “E-Heza” was born in the sky.

Read more

• First, Drupal 8 is – in my opinion – the first version of Drupal where someone could say that multilingual works, pretty much out of the box.
• Second, the documentation about how to deal with different scenarios is quite good.
• And third, from a user experience perspective, translating the user interface of a site is really hard.

In this post we will talk about the third point and what we did to manage that complexity.

Read more

Read more

It’s notably about Organic groups for Drupal 8, but not just. In fact, I think that at this point in time, my story about it, is just one out of three. Pieter Frenssen and Maarten Segers, the co-maintainers have their own voice.

But to make this one even more complete (and interesting), we should hear also Kristiaan Van den Eynde’s voice – the author of Group – a competing/complementing module.

Coincidentally and apart from me, all those people heavily invested in group functionality are Flemish. So, if you ever wondered how the story of “Three Flemish and an Israeli walk into a Bar,” goes… Here’s your chance.

Read more

Here’s the story of our affair with it.

Read more

Read more

If you expect this to be a pat on the shoulder kind of post, where I’m talking about some hyped tech stack, sprinkled with the words “you can just”, and “simply” - while describing some incredible success, I can assure you it is not that.

It is, however, also not a “we have completely failed” self reflection.

Like every good story, it’s somewhere in the middle.

The Exciting World of Stamps

Many years ago, when Brice and me founded Gizra, we decided “No gambling, and no porn.” It’s our “Do no evil” equivalent. Along all the life of Gizra we always had at least one entrepreneurial project going on in different fields and areas. On all of them we just lost money. I’m not saying it necessarily as a bad thing - one needs to know how to lose money; but obviously it would be hard to tell it as a good thing.

Even in the beginning days, we knew something that we know also now - as a service provider there’s a very clear glass ceiling. Take the number of developers you have, multiply by your hourly rate, number of working hours, and that’s your optimal revenue. Reduce at least 15% (and probably way more, unless you are very minded about efficiency) and now you have a realistic revenue. Building websites is a tough market, and it’s never getting easy - but it pays the salaries and all things considered, I think it’s worth it.

While we are blessed with some really fancy clients, and we are already established in the international Drupal & Elm market, we wanted to have a product. I tend to joke that I already know all the pain points of being a service provider, so it’s about time I know also the ones of having a product.

Five years ago Yoav entered our door with the idea of CircuitAuction - a system for auction houses (the “going once… going twice…” type). Yoav was born to a family of stamps collectors and was also a Drupaler. He knew building the system he dreamed of was above his pay grade, so he contacted us.

Boy, did we suck. Not just Gizra. Also Yoav. There was a really good division between us in terms of suckiness. If you think I’m harsh with myself, picture yourself five years ago, and tell yourself what you think of past you.

Read more

Everything was working great… and then all the tests broke.

This is the story of how adding a single feature into an app can break all of your tests. And the lessons can be learned from it.

The Feature that Introduced the Chaos

We are working on a Drupal site that makes use of a multisite approach. In this case, it means that different domains are pointed at the same web server and the site reacts differently depending on which domain you are referencing.

We have a lot of features covered by automatic tests in Webdriver IO – an end to end framework to tests things using a real browser. Everything was working great, but then we added a new feature: a content moderation system defined by the workflow module recently introduced in Drupal 8.

Read more

So far this is what Drupal provides out of the box. On top of that, you can use Behat or WebDriver tests. These types of tests are usually easier to write and are closer to the user needs. As a side point, they are usually slower than the previous methods.

Read more

But I just want to upload images to my site…

There is a clear difference between what a user expects from a CMS when they try to upload an image, and what they get out of the box. This is something that we hear all the time, and yet we, as a Drupal community, struggle to do it right.

There are no simple answers on why Drupal has issues regarding media management. As technology evolves, newer and simpler tools raise the bar on what users expect to see on their apps. Take Instagram for example. An entire team of people (not just devs) are focused on making the experience as simple as possible.

Therefore it’s normal to expect that everyone wants to have this type of simplicity everywhere. However, implementing this solutions is not always trivial, as you will see.

Read more

• Evaluate how easy it will be to use Drupal 8 to create a restful backend.
• Show a little bit how to set up a simple project with Elm.

We will implement a very simple functionality. On the backend, just a feed of blog posts with no authentication. On the frontend, we will have a list of blog posts and a page to visualize each post.

Our first step will be the backend.

Read more

This blog post is for you if you have a project with Travis integration, and you’d like to maintain and optimize it, or just curious what’s possible. Users of other CI tools, keep reading, many areas may apply in your case too.

Unlike other performance optimization areas, doing before-after benchmarks is not so crucial, as Travis mostly collects the data, you just have to make sure to do the math and present the numbers proudly.

Read more

And so it goes with web projects:

Stakeholder: I want it to be like [insert billion dollar company]’s site where the options refresh as the user makes choices.

Me: [Thinks to self, “Do you know how many millions of dollars went into that?”] Hmm, well, it’s complicated…

Stakeholder: What do you mean? I’ve seen it in a few places [names other billion dollar companies].

Me: [Gosh, you know, you’re right] Well, I mean, that’s a pretty sophisticated application, and well, your current site is Drupal, and well, Drupal is in fact really great for decoupled solutions, but generally we’d want to redo the whole architecture… and that’s kind of a total rebuild…

Stakeholder: [eyes glazed over] Yeah, we don’t want to do that.

But there is a way.

Read more

Combine that with the fact that he knows I dislike speaking on the phone, let alone at 6:53pm, almost two hours after my work day is over, you’d probably understand why I was surprised to get a call from him. “Surprised” as in, immediately getting a stomach ache.

The day I got that call from him was a Sale day. You see, we have this product we’ve developed called ״Circuit Auction״, which allows auction houses to manage their catalog and run live, real-time, auction sales - the “Going once, Going twice” type.

– “Listen Bruce,” (that’s how I call him) “I’m on my way to working out. Did something crash?” I don’t always think that the worst has happened, but you did just read the background.

– “No.”

I was expecting a long pause. In a way, I think he kind of enjoys those moments, where he knows I don’t know if it’s good or bad news. In a way, I think I actually do somehow enjoy them myself. But instead he said, “Are you next to a computer?”

– “No. I’m in the car. Should I turn back? What happened?”

I really hate to do this, but in order for his next sentence to make sense I have to go back to 1922 Tokyo, Japan.

Read more

[Dramatic music in the background]

Sort of… Mark Zuckerberg showed us what it could really be. Though, we need to understand that for now, bots are more like what Dries showed us in his keynote at DrupalCon Baltimore.

Read more

It might be that the browser could not click on an element, or the frontend could not contact the backend, or the frontend has a runtime error (well, you might be faced with it, but at Gizra we use Elm, where it is practically impossible). Who knows, even the browser could crash due to lack of memory - the same applies to Travis too. One solution is to manually start reproducing what Travis does. It’s fun the first time, but doing it again and again is just a waste of time. But recently, our CTO, Amitai gave excellent pointers about dockerized Selenium and insisted that having video recordings is much better than simple static screenshots - and it was so true.

These days at Gizra - on client projects - we can benefit by knowing exactly how and why our browser-based tests failed. The fact that we already used Docker inside Travis helped a lot, but this additional video recording on the browser-based test makes the life of the developers much easier.

Read more

Before diving into this, we need to understand the authentication types provided by RESTful:

1. Cookie - Validating the user cookie is not something new for us. We have been doing it for years, and it’s one of the first techniques web developers acquire. But, to validate the request we need to pass a CSRF token. This token helps make sure the form was not a fraud. An example could be a form that tweets on the behalf of us on Twitter. The existence of a valid CSRF in the request would make sure an internet scam could not generate the form and upload to Twitter a photo of a cat, when you’re a dog person.

2. Access token - RESTful will generate an access token and bind it to the user. Unlike the cookie which needs a CSRF token to be valid by Restful, we get a two-for-one deal. The existence of the access token in the DB is verified and references us to the user which is represented by that access token.

Read more

But ever since I came across Elm, Javascript and I are hardly friends. I respect it, but can no longer turn my eye from its shortcomings. Functional programming has caught my heart and mind.

In this post I’m not going to try and present strong points on why you should adapt this stack, but rather share with you the unique path we are paving.

Elm

Elm was my first dip into the functional programming (FP) world. I recommend starting from there. It’s way more gentle than Haskell, and it has, of course, one important advantage - it helps you build rock solid, crazily fast, joy-filling, web apps.

Maybe this [post and video]({{ site.url }}/content/faithful-elm-amazing-router/) will get you excited as well.

Gentle Intro to Haskell

A good way to start explaining what’s so special about Haskell is to dive directly into Haskell. While PHP is defined (by some) as a “productive” language, Haskell is often blamed (by some) as being an “academic language”. Both statements are probably wrong.

Often when mentioning Haskell, we talk about the compiler and the type system. They are truly marvelous tools. For the type system, I think the Elm post I lined above should be enough to get the hang of it. But I’d like to continue and reveal a bit more by highlighting mini examples on how Haskell makes us approach development tasks differently.

Lists

Below are examples from the REPL (the interactive shell for Haskell)

> [1, 2] ++ [3, 4]

[1, 2, 3, 4]

What we have here are two lists of integers that are appended to each other. A list of integers is represented as [Int] in Haskell. The ++ is the operation that causes those two lists to be grouped into a single one.

Haskell comes with some handy shortcuts.

Read more

The complication stems not from the dynamic content, but rather from the fact that the CSS that can be applied inside email templates is limited. In general, targeting multiple email clients can be worse then getting your CSS to work on IE9!

This post will walk you through a solution we use to address these requirements, but before jumping in, let me first explain Gizra’s approach to themes. We don’t use custom CSS in Drupal themes. When we start building a website, we divide our work into several milestones, the first is creating a clean and static markup, using Jekyll. At Gizra, we take pixel perfect very seriously, and by doing the markup first, we can concentrate on building our App pages exactly the way they are suppose to look, test their responsiveness, show our clients a first draft, and fix bugs before getting into the logic. We use gulp to compile the SASS files into one CSS file, and after doing that, we copy the CSS file to the themes folder. Then we take our static pages, cut them into pieces, and use them in Drupal themes and plugins.

By doing this, we can focus on our logic without worrying about how it may look with different dynamic content. Focusing on Frontend and Backend as separate tasks makes building websites easier and faster. Even fixing bugs discovered while implementing dynamic content can now be easily fixed. Our No more CSS in your Drupal Theme! blog post talks more extensively about the way we work with Drupal themes.

The same approach is implemented when we create an email template. We first build the email markup with static content, and then we use it to create dynamic content messages. Oh, and we cheat, because we don’t write a single line of HTML or CSS!

Read more

OG8 is the third time I’ve written OG for Drupal. The first OG7 version was a head jump into the Entity goodness that Drupal 7 brought along with Entity API. The second version was taking a small step back away from the Entity fiesta, but took two steps forward into the field API.

I think that as a developer I have matured since then. Edge cases are no longer my concern. I mean, I’m making sure that edge cases can be done and the API will cater to it, but I won’t go too far and implement them. It’s not that in OG7 we tried to tackle all of the edge cases, but in OG8 it’s even less.

In fact, although we write a lot of new code as part of the porting, as the way we write modules for Drupal 8 has changed considerably, writing OG8 feels like… Well, it feels like I’m mostly deleting files.

Myths Debunked

It’s not too rare to hear rants about OG. Often they are not backed by actual data, or even refer to older versions.

Read more

After some time contributing to the Drupal project in different ways, I finally decided to step up and get involved in one of the Core Initiatives. I was on IRC when I saw an announcement about the JSON API / GraphQL initiative weekly meeting and it seemed like a great chance to join. So, this blog post is about how you can get involved in a Core Initiative and more specifically, how can you get involved in the JSON API / GraphQL Initiative.

Read more

I’d like to give an overview about their state, the amazing community effort around them, and also share some of my personal thoughts about contribution to Drupal 8 in general.

Organic Groups

The heroes: @RoySegall, @pfrenssen @damiankloip, @chx et al.

For years Organic Groups has been one of the proven solutions for multi-sites functionality, in the form of one code base, one database, and one dashboard to rule them all. After so many years and seeing so many different implementations, such as Harvard’s OpenScholar, OpenAtrium, and many others, I’m even more confident OG is doing many things right.

Most of OG7’s concepts are being migrated to OG8, but obviously this is also a good time to fix some old mistakes. One of the mistakes was treating users and content (i.e. non-user entities) alike. But, well, you know - they are not. Because when we came to re-think of it, membership really makes sense only for users. For example, if the membership state is active, pending or blocked, that should indeed be applied only to users. So we’ve changed it:

Read more

We started with a simple site that will replace an existing static site. But we needed to migrate node attachments, and we just couldn’t find an existing solution. Well, it was time to reach out to the community

Any example of #Drupal 8 migration of files/ images out there? (including copy from source into public:// )

— Amitai Burstein (@amitaibu) April 8, 2016

A few minutes after the tweet was published, we received a great hint from the fine folks at Evolving Web. They were already migrating files into Drupal 8 from Drupal 7, and were kind enough to blog post about it.

However, we were still missing another piece of the puzzle, as we also wanted to migrate files from an outside directory directly into Drupal. I gave my good friend @jsacksick a poke (it’s easy, as he sits right in front of me), and he gave me the answer on a silver platter.

Read more

For the first in the series, we chose the topic of price estimations because it provides a real - and perhaps radical - example of how transparent communication from the beginning about a project’s needs alongside its budget can turn the process on its head. In the video below Amitai Burstein discusses how a budget-and time-driven discovery process gets a project off on the right foot.

Read more

My first Con was an overwhelmingly great experience and I learned a ton of new things. Here are the top 12:

1) Count down from 100 if you can’t fall asleep at night

DrupalCon sessions and keynotes are diverse and engaging. For instance, the Community Keynote by @schnitzel (Michael Schmid), was full of tips to keep your brain ready and aware, such as: Start your day doing things you dislike, drink plenty of water that will force you to take a lot of pee breaks, and play with kids to clear your mind.

The enormous amount of people and ideas exchanged in DrupalCon are so invigorating that you might find it hard to sleep at night. Try counting backwards slowly from hundred to zero. I have already put it to the test and it works - that tip alone was worth the trip.

2) Gator omelette for breakfast

New Orleans is a seafood and meat town. Crab, crawfish, sausages, bbq, and alligator - the Queen City is not known for its consumption of vegetables.

Breakfast portions are huge and everything is golden-brown. But in New Orleans there is a special name for that little strip of green ground in the middle of a boulevard - “neutral ground” (thanks Trivia Night!). Perhaps they can grow fresh vegetables there!

Read more

So you received from your client a scary looking SQL dump or Excel file with old website data. Where should you start?

Here are some of the best practices we apply in Gizra to ensure a smooth migration project, with the least possible amount of surprises or bugs.

Read more

We have lost so many hours on intermediate commits, waiting for Travis to spin up a new box, run the scripts only to see it fail on the last command. Not to mention how hard it is to debug a webapp on a machine you don’t have direct access to, and there is no browser.

But there’s a new and better way - we can use Docker inside Travis.

What does that mean? In short, it means that setting up Travis, and debugging your test scripts has just become much easier. You can do all the setup, and the debugging from your own local computer!

Read more

Gizra addresses this by defining the ambiguous with the simple but powerful principle that the budget dictates the project. It all begins (and ends) at the price estimation. Our budget breakdown creates a common language for all stakeholders and sets expectations early on.

After a discovery phase, the project is broken down to timeboxed tasks - each with a clear deadline and cost to produce the deliverable. We set the maximum time to complete a task at 12 hours because this number is easily grasped by all stakeholders. Every feature and bug has a price tag and we encourage our clients not to try to buy them all (at least not at first).

An example of our budget breakdown:

Read more

One of the major security concerns in websites and web applications is Cross Site Scripting (XSS). You definitely don’t want somebody to run their own malicious code in your website. And to avoid it - you would like to have some kind of “vaccine” from such “disease”.

We all know about Drupal’s check_plain(), filter_xss() and similar functions that sanitize user generated text, but unless we are actively checking for XSS, how can we be sure we’ve added them on all the right places?

Well, we found a nice solution for it that can be easily applied in your projects as well.

Read more

One way we like to look at a project before diving into the code is through its data structure. The different entities and their relations can tell us a lot about the business logic of the site and its internal logic. We assumed that if we could easily generate a graph with all the bundles, entities, and their relations this complex task would be easier.

Having done this for a while now, I believe our assumption was right. Taking our open-source Productivity project (Gizra’s internal ERP/Project management system) as an example, it’s much easier to look at the following graph and understand that Work session, Time tracking, Payment, and Github Issue bundles are pointing at a Project, which in turn points to an Account bundle. Github Issue can also reference itself.

Read more

It’s not for me.

Read more

Q: Is responsive really needed? A: Yes, Of course.

Q: Do we always need so many breakpoints? A: No. Or, to say it differently: Yes. But not necessarily immediately.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against responsive design. I’m just saying each breakpoint has an impact on the project length and budget. It’s up to us to help the client decide how many breakpoints are right for them. As you know, Bootstrap can have custom breakpoints.

Read more

Josh asked me if I could do the presentation with him and I immediately agreed, as Josh is an awesome presenter and I knew it’s going to be fun. My answer, if I recall correctly, was:

Read more

The reason? In short - I believe it will save us money. (Oh, and it’s fun)

Read more

It all started with this Thinking Flux video which explains the problems Facebook faced in its front-end and the new application architecture they are now using.

Read more

A well known DrupalCon fact is that the action mostly takes place in the hallways and social gatherings. The logic is that the sessions are recorded, and the rest isn’t.

On DrupalCon L.A. I was spending most of my time in the hallways stalking people to show them the newly born Shoov and ask for their feedback. One of those people was my good friend Mike Anello, which later expressed his feelings about Shoov in this fun DrupalEasy podcast.

Few months later, with the next DrupalCon already around the corner and Shoov maturing every day, I’ve contacted him to get his feedback on what we have so far, and I got this:

I think one that could help me and other developers is almost something like a glossary. I’ve heard of many of the technologies in your visual monitoring “stack”, but not entirely clear on what the purpose of each one is (Yeoman, WebdriverCSS, mocha, etc… - Behat I know!

Let’s start from the end, because those three words made an impact on me - “Behat I know”.

As a reader of this post you are probably familiar with Behat or at least know what functional testing frameworks are.

Do you remember that time in the past you didn’t? Do you remember that time in the past where functional testing was just a nice to have for you and not the life saver it is nowadays?

Read more

If you have been following my recent blog posts or tweets you’ve probably noticed we are trying to bring visual monitoring along with Shoov to the masses. To do so we’re trying to reduce the complexity and codify our “lessons learned”.

Yeoman generators is one way to achieve this. With the new yo shoov - a single command makes sure all the files needed for visual monitoring are immediately scaffolded in your repository. In fact, it also sets up Behat tests along with a .shoov.yml that will allow Shoov to run your visual monitoring tests periodically.

Since visual monitoring might be new for a lot of people, the generator not only scaffolds the files but also attempts to check if your system is properly installed, and tells you how to fix it if not.

Read more

Writing the Behat test was pretty easy, however it had a major problem - it didn’t work.

@javascript
Scenario: Login to shoov
  Given I am an anonymous user
   When I visit the homepage
    And I login with my GitHub account
   Then I should wait for the text "My Account" to "appear"

When Behat sees the @javascript tag in the beginning of the scenario, it launches it (with the help of Mink extension) in PhantomJS, Firefox or Chrome. PhantomJS is usually the easiest to configure and hook into the CI workflow later on.

But the test we wrote just failed on all versions of PhantomJS we tried. Which made us switch to Firefox instead. Travis CI is kind enough to have a headless Firefox installed in their machine which we could use. Unfortunately, Firefox didn’t like our test either, but for another reason - it couldn’t parse the xpath we use to find our text elements.

So after spending some time trying to figure out a workaround, I suddenly stared at the browser I was using to find the answer - Chrome!

Read more

As much as I’d like to say I was able to enjoy the irony, the six hours I spent tracking the bug were slightly frustrating.

One of the things Shoov is built for is assisting us with a quick configuration of live site monitoring using your preferred functional testing tool (e.g. Behat or CasperJS). As awesome as services like Pingdom are, they still provide very little insight to what’s actually going on in the site. In fact, according to Pingdom, Shoov was up and running, even though no user could have logged in.

Post Mortem

At this point of time I think very few people care about the “post mortem” of this incident since Shoov is still a work in progress, however some interesting lessons were learned, and some contributions were made.

Read more

If you’re reading this, you probably already know about all of the great work that Gizra has done in the Drupal/REST space. If you haven’t, I highly recommend you check out their github repo. Also see the RESTful module.

One of the projects that Amitai has contributed is Todo Restful. It shows an Angular implementation of the canonical TodoMVC Javascript app connecting to a headless Drupal backend. It’s a great demonstration of how easy exposing Drupal content with the RESTful module is. It also shows that when a RESTful API adheres to best practices, connecting it with clients that follow the same best practices is like a nice handshake.

I saw the Todo Restful project and it got me thinking, “If Amitai did this right (hint: he did), then I should be able to get this working with Backbone pretty easily”. I was pleasantly surprised!

Here’s a simplified list of everything I had to do to get it working:

Read more

Don’t feel bad for us, as in fact I’d argue that it’s pretty common across all web projects - they just don’t know it. It seems we all need a system that will tell us when we break our CSS.

While we don’t know of a single (good) system that does this, we were able to connect together a few (good) systems to get just that, with the help of: Travis-CI, webdriverCSS, Shoov.io, BrowserStack/Sauce Labs, and ngrok. Oh my!

Don’t be alarmed by the long list. Each one of these does one thing very well, and combining them together was proven to be not too complicated, nor too costly.

You can jump right into the .travis file of the Gizra repo to see its configuration, or check the webdriverCSS test. Here’s the high level overview of what we’re doing:

Gizra.com is built on Jekyll but visual regression could be executed on every site, regardless of the underlying technology. Travis is there to help us build a local installation. Travis also allows adding encrypted keys, so even though the repo is public, we were able to add our Shoov.io and ngrok access tokens in a secure way.

We want to use services such as BrowserStack or Sauce-Labs to test our local installation on different browsers (e.g. latest chrome and IE11). For that we need to have an external URL accessible by the outside world, which is where ngrok comes in: ngrok http -log=stdout -subdomain=$TRAVIS_COMMIT 9000 from the .travis.yml file exposes our Jekyll site inside the Travis box to a unique temporary URL based on the Git commit (e.g. https://someCommitHash.ngrok.io).

WebdriverCSS tests are responsible for capturing the screenshots, and comparing them against the baseline images. If a regression is found, it will be automatically pushed to Shoov, and a link to the regression would be provided in the Travis log. This means that if a test was broken, we can immediately see where’s the regression and figure out if it is indeed a bug - or, if not, replace the baseline image with the “regression” image.

Read more

For example, here’s an overview of how we could monitor Twitter, if someone would actually ask us to (as always you can jump right into the repository):

Read more

One daunting task each developer hates (and often avoids) is validating their markup on multiple browsers. All of Gizra’s developers use either Mac or Ubuntu on their machines, so the line to the “IE computer” on the far end of the office is getting long. Way too long.

And honestly - after our poor developers validated their work once, if we’d ask them to do it again. And again. And again… we’d probably be left without any.

Developers morale shouldn’t be underestimated!

Shoov means “Again” in Hebrew for this very reason. Go ahead and jump to our example repo which now has cross browser tests. Writing your tests once - but testing on multiple platforms and browsers is a big win.

Read more

Well, it’s time to take Behat integration with Drupal a little further. I’ve decided to try and integrate it with Drupal’s simpleTest, as this would open the door for writing simpleTests that are more readable and more “behavior driven” by nature.

Scenario: Testing the login form.
  Given I visit 'user'
    And I fill in 'Username' with '@user-name'
    And I fill in 'Password' with '@user-pass'
   When I press 'Log in'
   Then I should see '@user-name'

Amazingly enough, the above Gherkin code which is being executed by PHPunit can test your Drupal installation!

This functionality is provided by an experimental repo, which comes with an example test.

Read more

We saw a very strange situation everywhere we looked: Dev teams were writing amazing test coverage. They were going the extra mile to setup a Travis box with environment as close as possible to the live site. They tested every single feature, and added a regression test for every bug. Heck, every commit triggered a test suite that run for an hour before being carefully reviewed and merged.

And then the site goes live - and at best they might add Pingdom monitoring to check it’s working. Pingdom at its simplest form sends an http request every minute to your site. If the answer is 200 - it means that all is good in the world. Which is of course wrong.

Our mission is to change this, and bring functional testing to the live site. One that is easy to setup and that integrates with your existing testing and GitHub flow.

While Pingdom is wonderful and is alerting us on time whenever a site goes down, its “page is fine, move along” approach doesn’t cut it for us. Here are some examples why testing on the production server is a good idea:

Read more

If you read the theory about it, it seems pretty simple. Take a screenshot of a certain page in your site which will be your “baseline” image, and from now on, whenever the code changes re-run an automated test that will compare a current screenshot with the baseline image.

Read more

If you’re excited about this, you are most likely a developer - so here’s the code.

If this data looks familiar to you, it might be because it’s the same data you see via Hedley’s Angular client.

Read more

Your QA people can barely keep their eyes open - they have worked so hard. Your lead developer who’s responsible for the deployment is almost dehydrated from so much pressure and sweat.

But it’s all worth it. Your app is live. Now everybody goes to sleep, and your pampered app, is all alone, serving your data to the entire world.

You forgot one thing - to give it a phone to call home, and tell you something went wrong.

Read more

Here is a known secret - (almost) nobody is doing QA. Since I’m not into arguing about this, I’m willing to soften it a bit to “most companies, don’t do proper QA”.

The reasons are pretty clear - not enough time and not enough budget. This post isn’t going to be about the importance of QA - that point is clear to everybody, but rather give realistic tips and tools that will allow you to start improving the quality of your projects, and actually even save you some time and money.

Read more

So, as if it didn’t have enough of best practices bundled in it already, we’ve taken another step to get PhantomCSS a “CSS regression testing” tool in.

Read more

In my last DrupalCon BoF presentation “Gizra - we’ve got your headless covered” I’ve taken the time to explain why “headless” was in fact mostly a buzzword. While I encourage you to have a look at the presentation, I’m actually more excited about telling you why I feel this is no longer the case.

Go ahead and check the live demo!

Read more

@amitaibu @juampy72 it boils down to this: I'm a frontend dev. Writing PHP is something I avoid whenever possible.

— Chris Ruppel (@rupl) November 19, 2014

I believe my comparison was wrong in the sense it was lacking the key point to Behat’s strength for us. It’s not really about “Behat vs. Casper”. The proper comparison should have been “Behat vs. Casper - With a Drupal backend”

And here’s the key difference: With Behat you can interact with Drupal’s API even when testing using PhantomJS. That is a lot of testing power!

Read more

TodoMVC is a site that helps you select the right JS MVC library. But more than that, it allows you to learn by comparing those libraries, as they all implement the same thing - a simple Todo app.

I’ve decided to fork the Angular example, and build it on top of RESTful. Looking at the Angular code, I was pleasantly surprised.

Read more

If you don’t have automated tests on your project, I would argue that you’re doing it wrong (I explain why on The Gizra Way presentation). Even having a single test is much better than none.

With that said, it’s super easy to abuse Behat. We are developers and we think sort of like machines (not really, but you get my point). If you would like to test login to your site you could easily do

Given I visit "/user/login"
 # fill the username and password input fields, and click submit
 When I fill "username" with "foo"
  And I fill "password" with "bar"
  And I press "Login"
 Then I should get a "200" HTTP response

Your test will return green, but it could be improved:

Read more

In fact, I often explain to junior devs that the most important part of a function is its signature, and the PHPdocs. The body of the function is just “implementation details”. How it communicates its meaning to the person reading it is the vital part.

But where does this whole pedantic mindset go when we open up our web-services? I would argue that at least 95% of the developers who expose their web-service simply enable RESTws without any modifications. And here’s what a developer implementing your web-service will see when visiting /node.json:

Read more

The difficulties in creating a semi or fully decoupled site isn’t in the RESTful part. Spitting out JSON is now covered by several modules, including RESTful which aims for a “best practices” solution.

One of the real problems, though, is how to prevent us, the community, from re-inventing the wheel over and over again. Basically, how do we package our frontend code similarly to how we package our generic backend code - AKA “modules”. I discussed these problems, and offered some solutions in my “BoF” presentation:

Read more

A few months ago my DrupalCon Austin session was rejected. I was a bit upset, since presenting plays a big part in my trip to the states, and also surprised, as I mistakenly assumed my presentation repertoire would almost guarantee my session would be accepted. But the committee decided differently.

This has been an important moment for me. Two days later I told myself I don’t care. I mean, I cared about the presentation, I just stopped caring that it was not selected, since I decided I was going to do it anyway. As an “unplugged” BoF.

The Gizra Way. I think this is probably the best presentation I’ve given so far, and quite ironically my rejected session is second only to Dries’s keynote in YouTube.

You see - I had a “there is no spoon” moment. The second I realized it can be done differently, I was on my own track, perhaps even setting the path for others.

Form API, Drupal 9

I use Drupal because Form API is so great

No one, ever

Read more

Enjoy the live demo

Read more

But now that RESTful integrates with Entity Validator, I would change the equation and simply say something rarely heard in the Drupal community: Forms are Fun!

Go ahead, try it yourself on simplyTest.me

Read more

Getting your Drupal to be pixel perfect is hard. In fact, it’s probably four times faster to write the logic of a page, in comparison to the time it takes to get its markup right. Not to talk about making it responsive.

If you’ve seen my presentation about The Gizra Way you noticed we take pixel perfect very seriously.

One of the tools that helps us getting the markup fast, correct and in a way that would allow us to communicate with the client is Jekyll - the static site generator. Here’s the idea in a nutshell:

• Using Jekyll we can concentrate on a clean markup
• Using Grunt we compile the SASS, and are able to push the HTML into Github pages - where the client can easily see and interact with the final markup
• The CSS produced by Jekyll is treated by our Drupal application as contrib. This means we have zero custom CSS in our theme. Seriously, absolutely no custom CSS in your Drupal theme!
• Any change to the CSS can be done only in a single place, which is Jekyll

Read more

Read more

Emmet is a great tool that can enhance your productivity and save you a lot of time when coding or prototyping. Some of you may know it as “Zen coding” and for quite some time (Since 2012) it’s known as Emmet.

Emmet is a plugin for a text editor which greatly improves html and css workflow. The idea behind it is to instantly expand a simple abbreviation (shortened form of a word or phrase) into complex code snippet. Emmet uses these abbreviations to parse them in runtime and transform them into structured code block: HTML, CSS, XML or any other structured markup.

Read more

So the thing is that I have a presentation titled “The Gizra Way” that I’ve been giving for the past year all over Israel, and recently in DrupalCamp Spain. Reactions were pretty good.

My prediction is that most watched #DrupalcampEs video will be @amitaibu session as soon as it is available. Really inspiring!

— penyaskito (@penyaskito) May 17, 2014

We are still looking for a place to do it. Maybe in a BoF room. Or in the staircase. Or a bar near the hotel. And you know what? I’m really excited about this idea. It feels like I’m preparing for the unplugged version of my show. Anyway, we’ll tweet the time and location once we find the place.

Read more

Don’t get me wrong - I love my job and I love my co-workers as well. It’s just that every time they talk about these things it makes me wanna stand up on our designer kitchen chair and shout: My name is Orit and I am not a Drupal geek!

I have never developed any module in my life, didn’t contribute anything to OG nor have I never requested Brice or Amitai to give me a scrutinizing code review. So here are some tips:

Read more

<?php
// Handler v1.0
$handler = restful_get_restful_handler('articles');
// GET method.
$result = $handler->get(1);

// Output:
array(
  'id' => 1,
  'label' => 'example title',
  'self' => 'https://example.com/node/1',
);

// Handler v1.1 extends v1.0, and removes the "self" property from the
// exposed properties.
$handler = restful_get_restful_handler('articles', 1, 1);
$result = $handler->get(1);

// Output:
array(
  'id' => 1,
  'label' => 'example title',
);
?>

In the past year almost every site we have is either completely decoupled from the server side where AngularJs serves the webapp, or AngularJS plays a smaller part, and we just embed web components inside a Drupal page to provide a slick UI.

Up until now our go to module was RestWs by the wonderful Klausi, which wraps around Entity API module’s metadata wrapper. Basically, it hands over to the metadata wrapper the responsibility for the access and for the actual value it spits out. It works fine, however the JSON it exposes has too much information.

Read more

I’m proud that our work is not just based on open source, but also contributes to it - big time. Case in point, the Biblio module which is responsible for bibliographies and citations since back in Drupal 4.6, and has provided a great solution. It was becoming clear the 4.6 architecture is showing its age, and could use an overhaul.

Read more

Read more

Read more

This is the static site created out of the live site. It looks the same, but loads x5 faster.

Read more

Here are 10 images that will make the whole idea clear.

This is the live branch

We branch out of it

Read more

Dekyll Frustrations

Dekyll was Jekyll based. We love Jekyll - it powers our own site, and in fact I’m writing this blog post with the excellent Prose.io. But for Dekyll we wanted to stay close to Drupal, keeping the various abilities it developed over the years like fine grained access control, workflows etc and allowing users to stay within an environment they already know.

Relying on Jekyll added another component to the system. A very good one, but still with its own requirements and needs. We wanted to simplify, and minimize the number of moving parts.

A New Beginning

So we were back at the drawing board. Around that time I saw Clay Shirky’s Ted talk. When he gave that funny yet precise explanation about why lawyers don’t use Git, I realized something.

Read more

Read more

Parents of children under the age of 9 were asked to bring them to the nearest Tipat Halav clinic for vaccination. Country-run Tipat Halav (in Hebrew, “drop of milk”) childcare clinics are a household name in Israel. Spread throughout the country, they helped it reach some of the world’s lowest infant mortality rates.

The Ministry of Health decided to create a mobile application to help parents find the nearest clinic. It commissioned one of the country’s largest development shops to create it. They decided to create a native app. This is the Android version:

I assume the iOS version is still undergoing the App Store approval process.

We discussed the app during lunch at Gizra. We’re no doctors, but we thought we could do something about the software. Going with a native app didn’t seem ideal for a single-use application which needs to be deployed on as many platforms ASAP. As for the UI, I’ll leave the image above as an exercise to the reader.

Read more

Amitai, my brother asked me to write a little something about, and I quote, “Open source or Drupal or whatever” - to give some examples and to show some pictures. He was very particular about the pictures.

This might be a good moment to point out that I’m a designer, industrial designer, I mostly work with the furniture industry making very specific objects which are decided by the manufacturer, a bunch of business guys and, well, myself. You can imagine that open source doesn’t have much to do with what I am doing, but he asked, and I don’t like to disappoint my baby brother.

Read more

We are working hard in Gizra to make this process as smooth as possible, with the goal of letting non-developers the ability to serve their content using Jekyll, on Github Pages - without them having to bother with knowing what Jekyll, Git or Github Pages are. A worthy goal indeed, but not trivial.

Read more

The DrupalCon Portland BoF

So we had this idea, of combining Drupal and Jekyll. It was a result of building gizra.com with Jekyll. When I came to Portland I already knew that apart of the usual business schmoozing, and presenting OG and the Message stack, I wanted to get other people’s opinion on our idea.

I was pleasantly surprised to see more than 20 people in the BoF (Birds of Feather) session. I had a vision of what I wanted but I still didn’t have the elevator pitch for it. The discussion we had helped sharpen the way I can explain that vision. To quote Steve Persch (@stevector)

When I heard your idea I thought it’s crazy. After the BoF I still thought it’s crazy… but!

Before diving into Dekyll, let’s understand what are the problems that it tries to solve.

Read more

Still, he had an awesome conference and a great presentation on Organic Groups and Message modules, sprinkled with anecdotes from the open source module developer’s life. Thanks to Pantheon’s video crew, you can now verify the latter claim yourself:

Read more

Read more

I’d like to share with you the second item on our list. Harvard. Seriously. If it’s the first time you hear that Harvard is using Drupal, or that they have an amazing distribution they work on called Harvard OpenScholar, or that they have a team of five developers along with two developers from Gizra and many others working on it full time, or you are not aware of the amount of contributions given back to the community… You do now.

Read more

Read more

Node.js module for Drupal is so great and a time saver, I’ve got spare time to blog about how to set it up. Future me, we’ll thank me for doing so.

First, let’s define the goals for this blog post

• Learn how to setup the Node.js module and server on a local server
• Setup on a remote server using Heroku and Pantheon

Read more

Drupal 6 had Messaging & Notification Drupal 7 has Message-subscribe & Message-notify

Message-subscribe is a new module in the Message stack, that finally ties everything together to give us the ability to subscribe to content, and send notifications.

If you know Message you already know that some development skills, or knowing Rules really really good are needed. This post will go over the main concepts and flow of the notification process.

Message-subscribe, just like Message module has zero knowledge about your business logic - it is up to you to implement the Message creation. What Message subscribe gives you, though, is one simple function your implementing module will call – and that’s it. It will take care of it from there.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

• users/[user:name]/blog – This is a page defined by Panels. It shows a list of latest blog posts
• users/[user:name]/blog/[node:title] – This is the alias of the node that is a blog post. But if you will try to use it, Drupal thinks you refer to the Panels page, and shows you the latest blog posts, instead of the node

Read more

There are several modules that try to deal with it in Drupal (such as “ddblock”, which we don’t use), however we find that using the good old Views slideshow module can give us everything we need. The following blog post gives an overview of how we achieved this task without any code, just Views configuration and a bit of CSS. As always we provide a feature that can be installed and enabled (visit /banner-rotator).

Read more

This post will go over an example (yet fully functional) module that shows how we can embed a commerce product form inside a node form, and have the node reference the commerce product - without horrible hacks.

Read more

Doing it on hook_cron() is nice if you need to send few emails, but when you need to send thousands of emails a day, it won’t do. Cron will take too long, or might hang up if we try to process too many digest emails at once.

A nice and simple solution we came up with, was to write a Drush command that will process a small batch of users, and use Jenkins to fire up this command every two minutes.

This post will demonstrate the code, that can be used by others - however you will need to copy and change the command to fit your business logic.

Read more

Message module itself is pretty simple. You can have different message types, and when you want to create a message, you actually create a new entity called Message.

Read more

The sponsoring, which already has FunnyMonkey committing to pay almost half the price, and providing on top of that developer hours, was something I’ve decided to do only after I was convinced there are some big players using OG7. The thing is that _anyway I intend to do this change. The sponsoring is just giving it a boost, and making sure it will be _sooner than later!

I’m happy I was able to post that request and to get good reaction from the community. I’m equally happy that Planet Drupal isn’t swamped with such requests. It’s not about Drupal App. It’s about harnessing the community towards a goal. Companies offering to assist by providing developer hours is exactly the proof of that.

Now here’s a quick overview of the planned changes. First the conceptual changes:

• Instead of OG having it's own field type, we easily hook into Entity reference field, as it allows registering our own handler using a CTools plugin
• Instead of saving the field values _and the OG membership as we currently do, we save the OG membership, and use hook_field_load() to populate the Entity reference with the correct value. Yes, I know, the docs clearly say that we should not load fieldable entities in hook_field_load() as it might cause loading recursion, so we'll just make sure you can't attach group-audience fields to OG membership (which anyway doesn't make much sense). The benefit of doing that, after a long talk with the people form the community, notably fago (thanks again fago!), came out as the best solution for a problematic thing
• OG membership is now tightly coupled with the field that it belongs to. This means we can care about the field cardinality (i.e. how many OG membership can be created per field), and since we know the OG membership type we can provide smarter metadata
• We can have multiple fields, to allow subscribing users/ content to group with different membership type. No more hard-coding of the field name as-well

Sneak preview time… As usual we can make a content type (Clubs in this example) a group, through the content type edit.

Read more

I was walking back home from work and thinking to myself Drupal thoughts. One of the thoughts was about OG7 and its use of “group” entity. At the time of writing OG it seemed as a good idea. It allows flexibility of showing all the groups of the site, without worrying what entity type they are (as the group ID isn’t equal to the node ID). It also allows easier internalization of group nodes, as again the group ID isn’t the node ID. In a very Drupal like way, in the other side of the world, a day later fago was asking the same question.

Read more

Now after all the required link clicking has been done we can talk about that walk Bojan Živanović (bojanz), Damien Tournoud (Damz) and I had in London. It was the night commerce module was officially released. I somehow found myself in a restaurant with the rest of the commerce guys celebrating the event. After some good paeia and a french amount of wine we headed back to the hotel. We were talking about the day we had in Drupalcon London, the sessions we attended and so on.

“Oh yeah, you had your core conversation”, I said to Damien. “You were talking about Document oriented storage, right. What is it exactly?” I asked. Damien, being Damien, gave me a Damien answer. Bojan, being Bojan, explained it to me. You should have heard what he was talking about. Seriously, I imagined people literally banging their heads in the table, and I think I even imagined someone bursting into flames. I think it’s called self combustion - it happens to geeks when they hear such ideas.

After that, there was a minute of silence before I asked Damien how did the people react, and did he think they liked it. Damien, well, you know. He just said - but this time with a little smile - “I don’t know if they liked it, but it sure was disruptive”.

The next day I had my own presentation. It’s no secret some parts of it were completely non-linear. If I may, I would use Damien’s answer to describe my own presentation.

Read more

Also checkout Pedro’s (pcambra) new suit!

Read more

Read more

From the README:

User modal module allows opening the Register/ Login/ Reset password menu items as tabs. Since the tabs are shown via JS and not AJAX, this may lead to a better user experience, as there is no time waiting for the selected tab to load. Furthermore, the user modal form can be used by other implementing modules, and for example allow a user to submit a node and register at the same time.

Read more

Here are some things, mostly related to Drupal, I’ve learned since Og-7.x-1.0

Data migration

OG6 and OG7 have different tables and different data. OG7 has its tables, its fields and its related entities (group and group membership – I’ll soon go over those). At first I tried migrating it via hook_update_N(). I still feel the burns! “Your hook_update_N() shouldn’t assume anything about the state of a module or its API”, said fago, and I listened. Just like CCK has content-migrate module, OG7 has og-migrate. Whenever a module needs to migrate data, they can set a variable to TRUE, implement og-migrate plugins (a la CTools), and the job is done. This means design decisions (and oh boy I had a few) can be rectified without many struggles.

Fields and entities

OG7 has two important fields and an entity that acts as a meta-data related to that field. og-group field, which is a Boolean field that marks if a node is a group, when is set to TRUE creates a group entity that holds the group ID, entity ID, creation data, group label etc’. So far so good, no problems here.

The second field is group-audience that holds the information about the relation a piece of content has with a group (i.e. membership). As of 7.x-1.1 whenever a user selects groups in this field, a group membership entity is created that holds the group ID, entity ID, membership state (i.e. active, pending, blocked) etc’. The group membership idea is awesome (thanks Don Quixote). The problem is actually the field. If we delete a group there is no field API bulk update, that will remove the deleted group from the member’s field. So, the group membership entities have the most up-to-date data, and the fields might not have. After 7.x-1.1 is out I intend to still use the field for its widget and formatter, but not as storage. I mean, after a user will select the groups in group-audience field, OG will create the group membership entities, but the fields will not be written to the DB. I think it’s interesting that also other modules (Field-collection, Relation) decide to use a field but not for its storage which is probably the main purpose, but for its generic interaction with the entities’ form.

(Thinking of) module renaming

Don’t do it. Seriously, I’m now stuck with some hybrid of og / group in places I prefer not to change. It’s not horrible, but if you’re the Anal type it bothers a bit.

Read more

This post covers how to build a CTools content-type plugin that has context. CTools “Context” should not be mistaken with the context module. Context is CTools way of saying, my plugin (read, block) shouldn’t be dumb. If it requires a node or a user to extract data from, then it should let others know about it. “Others” in our case is Page manager module. It will load the context for the plugins and hand it over. In fact, if the context is not present it will not even bother loading the plugin.

I have created an example module called node-preview-example, that you can simply download and enable, create an Article page, and see how Panels is now showing the body field on the left and on the right a (silly) “Summary” of the node – this is our plugin.

Read more

Now that we have imported the users using the basic tools of migration module. We will learn to import references (nid or uid) and files.

Install the migrate extras module . Migrate extra module enables import of file field.

The following example demonstrates how to import the old cars table.

Read more

The following article will discuss the right way to do this using the module Migrate (version2). Migrate V2 uses Drush (Drupal Shell) to execute the migration functions, if you are not familiar with Drush I suggest looking into this very powerful tool.

Here is a list of the main challenges I have faced during the process :

1. Mapping old information to the new structure.
2. Mapping the old values to match the new fields.
3. Moving the references between the old objects into Drupal.

Read more

Read more

Since my Greek sucks, and since they understood that their presentations can have an appeal world-wide, most of the people gave the presentations in English. Varnish, Cloud computing, Security issues, Crazy clients with crazy demands and even crazier implementations were some of the topics. Not all movies have been uploaded yet, but here are at least some of them. It’s worth watching.

Although my stay was very short I still had the chance to see the Acropolis a la Robert Douglass style. This means storming out of the hotel - because my presentation starts in less than two hours - jumping inside a taxi, checking out every spot really quickly, taking a photo or two, back in the taxi, and we’re back. It was much fun!

Read more

CSS is annoying and I’d like to deal with it as little as possible. For that I’m using 960 grid design, I’ve started looking into LESS, and the latest is a rewrite I did to the Rounded corners module.

Rounded corners is no longer a “dumb” wrapper for the jQuery plugin, but rather an API that lets you do what you want with as little code possible.

Read more

I won’t get into too much explanation here, just look at the screenshots, or try it yourself - since everything in Message is exportable, you don’t need to do anything to make it work! (Apart of generating nodes and “making friends” by flagging other users).

Read more

find ./ -name *.* -type f -exec s -i "s/group/og/g" '{}' \;

For the humans amongst us, I’ll explain. As part of the rewrite of Organic groups to Drupal 7, I thought that the name also deserves a rename – to follow Drupal’s naming standards. Since there weren’t enough votes in the poll in g.d.o I’ve decided _not to go with the change. OG module will keep its name - although in the UI we will use “Group” (the same way as node is referred to as content).

Read more

1. Download this feature and the related modules drush dl ctools panels views && drush en page_manager panels views_content views_ui story_list php -y
2. Add a few story nodes (title and body), or use Devel generate module to do it for you
3. Navigate to /story-list and you should see a list of the last 10 stories on the left and the body of the first story on the right
4. Click on any of the titles and notice how the body text changes, without any page load. Hooray!

Read more

I'm thinking, _which is easier than actually sitting down and writing a patch, that it would be neat if CTools exportables plugin had a uniform UI that modules such as Context, Message and others to come, could use.

We’re in a scratch your own itch world aren’t we, huh? So I’ve created a CTools repository in github, created a branch called export-ui and it resulted with this getting-close-to-commit committed patch.

When I started writing Message I had some understanding of how CTools exportables work but having merlinofchaos review my work, explain some of his thoughts and providing his golden code, really changed the way I look at writing generic and reusable code. In fact, I’ve decided to overhaul much of the Message module for it to be more inline with CTools’ standards.

Message was inspired by Context module. Context uses some object oriented, so I’ve copied that too. That’s where I got it wrong - because my use case was a bit different. OOP is powerful _when it’s needed but sometimes it might be an overkiller. Ok, so no OOP, but I still needed a pluggable system. CTools has the $plugin concept. It’s almost the same as having an info hook, only it’s without a hook - you place it directly on an inc file that CTools will include for you when it’s needed. But the “trick” that I’ve learned - and there shouldn’t be any drum rolls cause it might be obvious - is to use a “process” function that populates the $plugin with defaults. The defaults can be for example the callbacks that will be used, the Views handlers that will be automatically declared, the text strings, the allowed operations, etc’. Basically, when you use the $plugin, you should be thinking how an extending module can alter the module’s behavior by simple changes.

Read more

Read more

The first noticeable thing is that like Ubercart became Commerce, Organic groups has changed its name to Group. The second thing you will notice, is that Group is a complete rewrite of OG! Why was it done? OG is a great module, and it has been around for a long time. Long enough to be very popular and feature rich, but at the same time, concepts and implementations that were right in earlier Drupal versions became outdated. Using Drupal 7 new features - especially field API - were too hard to resist.

Here are the Group’s main concepts, by importance:

1. Allow associating entities (e.g. node, users, etc'.) to other entities - In plain English it means that you can have posts related to a group. Not more, not less
2. Introduce the concept of roles and permissions, on the group level
3. Provide integration with superior modules such as Views. We don't need to invent the wheel - just need to know how to hook into an existing one

Writing those concepts down made it easier to determine what should be in the core of Group and what should be a contrib module. The UI was separated to another module as-well, leaving us with a Group API module, that has as little assumptions as possible about how it will be used.

Read more

Introduction I’ve created this simple API to connect Drupal with .NET applications easily and quickly, this API was based on an API that I wrote for one of our projects, for this project we had to create a few client application to upload files, connect to desktop application and update the content. I used two different interfaces to cover all my needs, cURL - to upload files; and Services module - to create/ update nodes.

Features Snapshot DrutNet API has a Services class:

• Services.Login - Login to Drupal
• Services.NodeGet - Load a node
• Services.UserGet - Load a user
• Services.NodeSave - Save a node

Read more

Zen is my first favorite base theme. Ninesixty is the other. The following post will show how we can enjoy both of them - How we can have a “Zen-960” theme _done correctly.

As always, lets first understand _why we want to combine those two themes. JohnAlibn’s Zen is a great starter theme - if you need a list of features, just head to the project page, you won’t be disappointed. dvessel’s Ninesixty takes the power of grid 960 -that we really love as it allows us to spend less time banging our heads on CSS - and adapts it to Drupal.

The way that I look at it - Zen should be doing the job of defining the page _elements (how fonts will look, lists, tabs, etc’) and defining their RTL equivalent. Ninesixty on the other hand should be doing the job of defining the page _layout.

So what is the problem? Well, according to Drupal I’m too griddy! I want my theme to have two base themes - and that’s currently not possible. Ok, so why not just download zen_ninesixty theme (a.k.a Zen-960) and go on with my life?

Read more

For those that find my accent hard to understand, or simply for those that prefer reading - I’ve published the movie script.

Read more

Allow easily creating landing pages, with different content. The layout should be a header and footer which are always the same, and the main-content should be three columns layout, with dynamic content.

Read more

Today, I’ve decided it is time to add a message UI module. It took me about twenty minutes which ended with the commit message: “Added message UI - A shameless copy/ paste from Context module.”

It was much faster than what I thought it would be. So, it’s not just about using the same API, it is about using the API the _same way as others. And if “others” are yhahn and jmiccolis then I can sleep better at night (or at least when the baby doesn’t cry).

Read more

960 is a framework. As so, it doesn’t only give us tools, it also encourages us to use them the _right way. I think it’s a bit like forms API in Drupal that helps us build our forms correctly. In 960 you have CSS classes that can be used to set elements width and position.

Read more

My top 5 are: Views, CCK, Flag, Rules, Panels. I think that the Flag & Rules combo is less known in the community, but there are so many use cases they can cover. Because they are a bit abstracted it's hard for newbies to realize their potential.

I think there’s no better way to show my point, than a tutorial. Lazy people can even download the feature from here. This tutorial will be about having “User points” functionality without using the user points module. I’m not saying that module is bad, but sometimes I need multiple user points per user. Also, re-using existing modules always fills me with great joy. GREAT joy! Also, thinking about Drupal 7 with fields API, suddenly _user points can become _any-fieldable-entity points… The tutorial will cover the “Rule sets” concept in Rules module, which is also considered by many as a great mystery. Let’s define our mission:

Read more

It is now time for some community “tough love” - OG7 needs reviews. Before people start diving into the code, you should realize that OG has changed and its concept has been polished and can be summarized into one line:

OG brings roles and permissions to the _group level.

Read more

Read more

The hype, like all hypes, has ended. People realized that paying low prices might cost more if things didn’t turn out as they expected them to. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of talented people, but there were just as much unprofessional ones.

The idea of outsourcing is still good and valid - you move your projects into places where it will cost you less - as simple as that. Everybody wins.

So how will you know if the people you are communicating over via email (cause you can’t understand their accent when you talk in Skype) are the right people for you? The price is ok, maybe a little higher than what you imagined but the timetable they show you sounds realistic more or less - but can they deliver?

Read more

• It doesn't need to have an author
• It doesn't have comments
• It rarely changes (Maybe it has Views in it that change the content that is shown, but the layout and static text don't change)

So we can use Panels for that. It also makes deployment easier:

Read more

It seems that the new addition to CCK, the new hook_widget_settings_alter() opened Pandora's box.

There are quite a few modules that attach their own logic to CCK fields. Up until now those modules had to have their own DB or set their own variables.

In CCK 2.5, hook_widget_settings_alter() got in, which allows your module to hook into the field settings, and rely on CCK to save and load those settings when needed.

But that’s not all - as the settings are becoming part of the CCK field detection it means that when you’ll export the CCK to code - your module settings will be there. Your module now actually has import/ export functionality without you even having to bother about.

Read more