Drupal Training

DrupalCon Portland coming up soon! DrupalCon is short for Drupal Conference. It's an international event with over 3000 expected to attend. See http://portland2013.drupal.org

I’m looking forward to keynote by founder Dries on the State of Drupal 8. Dries will present his State of Drupal keynote, revealing the current state of Drupal 8 between Feature Freeze and Code Freeze, also giving a glimpse of what's beyond Drupal 8 after we have a successful release. Here’s a list of the keynote speakers: http://portland2013.drupal.org/speakers

I was excited to learn about this website, DrushMake.me. It generates a Drush Make file which is a script for Drush, the Drupal Shell. It allows Drupal developers to download and install Drupal core and contributed modules using command line.

I recently used DrushMake.me to generate a simple Drush make file to build a simple blog site. But it wouldn’t work due to the following errors:

1.    Error message: could not locate drupal version 7

Our speaker tonight is not able to make it due to illness. We will be watching a video presentation on "What's New in Drupal 8" by Chris Weber of  TheNerdery.com. He gave this presentation to his Drupal User group. http://vimeo.com/40266383

While I was searching the Internet for a good video to show tonight, I did some research on the new features in Drupal 8. The following article outlines what I found. Credits: http://www.mediacurrent.com/blog/whats-new-drupal-8

Drupal 8 has been in development since March 2011 and is now in Feature Freeze. This means that no new features will be added to Drupal 8. Drupal 8 is planned to be released in Sept. 2013. Here is a brief description of the new changes in Drupal 8:

Theming Changes
-    Drupal 7 uses PHPTemplate to produce themes
-    Drupal 8 will be using the Twig framework theming engine
-    Twig will simplify theming by using better code. See Jen Lampton’s talk at DrupalCon Sydney –
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGIqu_Te0PA&feature=youtu.be)
-    Twig allows templates to be compiled down to PHP code which is stored in RAM for superior performance as it reduces disk access

I recently purchased a new Samsung laptop with Windows 8. The 16 GB SSD drive makes it quick to start up and the 8 GB of RAM makes all my software run smoothly. I haven't used many of the Apps; I click on a square and the familiar desktop appears.

I recently installed a Vagrant server using a chef script written by Jeff Eaton of Lullabot. It works great on my Windows 7 laptop. See my blog post: Installing Vagrant DLAMP server on Windows 7 PC

I installed the Vagrant/DLAMP server on my Windows 8 laptop last evening. I needed to do a Google search to find the Windows command line. (Press Windows button then R and type cmd). Windows 8 blocks even administrators from editing the hosts file. I did a search for Notepad and clicked 'Run as administrator' and I was able to edit the hosts file.

The Vagrant/DLAMP server comes with Drush installed. I used the command 'drush dl' to download Drupal 7.19. I installed Drupal and it works well.

I went to DrushMake.me and created a drush make file. I tried to run it on my new Vagrant/DLAMP server but it didn't work. I need help to troubleshoot this problem. Perhaps it's a path problem.

Update: Turns out the Drush make file generated by www.DrushMake.me had several errors in it. See upcoming blog post for the details. The Vagrant/DLAMP server including Drush make does work well on Windows 8 PCs.

In Part 1, we installed Vagrant with only Ubuntu. See: Part 1: Gettng Started with Vagrant on Windows 7 PC

In this tutorial, we will be installing Vagrant along with a DLAMP stack. (Drupal/Linux/Apache/PHP/mySQL) You will need to have VirtualBox, Git and Putty installed.
 
Requirements:
A hard connection to the Internet
VirtualBox needs to be installed.
Git needs to be installed.
Putty needs to be installed. (putty-0.62-installer.exe)
Recommended: 8 GB RAM is recommended to run VirtualBox on Windows PCs
 
We will be using a chef script written by Jeff Eaton to download the base box, precise32, instead of using lucid32 like the example in Part 1.
 

Before starting this tutorial, be sure to read this article: Introduction to Vagrant

In this tutorial, we will be installing Vagrant, a bare bones server with Ubuntu installed. Vagrant is a server that runs under VirtualBox. You will need to have VirtualBox installed. You will also need to have Putty installed in order to access your new Vagrant server via SSH. These instructions also apply to Windows 8.
 

Vagrant is a flexible, reproducible server.

Using Vagrant, you can set up a complete LAMP server in about 30 minutes
-          If you are working with a team and you want to ensure that each team member has the exact same server configuration, you can use Vagrant.
-          If you are working on custom PHP or Drupal core patches and you want to make sure that the recurring error message is from a code error and not a server configuration error, you can use Vagrant.

Katy will be giving a presentation on Optimizing Your Drupal Workflow including lively group discussion.

This presentation is an overview of best practices and valuable tools to improve workflow for solo devs and small teams.

Are you having problems when trying to build Drupal websites?

1. You installed a new module and the site broke
2. Help! A team member overwrote my changes
3. Client changed his mind (again!) and wants the version from last week
4. What was I thinking when I did this?
5. How to save time when cloning Drupal sites

Learn valuable tools and best practices for building Drupal websites more efficiently. Recommended tools include:

• using command line shortcuts
• Git version control for documented backups
• Drush commands for automating Drupal site build/upgrade tasks
• Using local development environment, staging server to test your sites

I will be posting my notes in a series of blog articles so stay tuned.

Please RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/surrey-drupal/events/96450112/

From Aimee and Michael of Mobix Creative
 
There are few free, ‘only mobile’ themes for Drupal and I have selected the actively maintained ones. The others do not have Drupal 7  (dev or released) version or no recent updates…
 
Theme name: Mobile (Actively Maintained) (for Drupal 7 as well)
Mobile is designed as a mobile-only HTML5 theme with a focus on clean, readable, usable display of content and accessibility of functions. You can use the base theme, use one of the included child themes, or make your own child theme.
http://drupal.org/project/mobile

Millions of smartphone users are searching the web with their mobile phones looking for your services. You need a mobile-friendly website to capture their attention and convert them from visitors into buyers. Many of you have business websites that look great on your desktop and laptop. How will you convert your large scale website with large amounts of information to work on the small screens found on mobile phones and tablets?

Like many companies, SeascapeWebDesign.com is working to build a solution that works well on both large and small screens. There are several options available. You can build a separate mobile-only website to attract mobile web users. Or you can build a responsive website that responds to the size of your mobile device and automatically resizes so that it looks good on both the small and large screens.

Katy of SeascapeWebDesign.com found some challenges involved in redesigning a large screen website to work on a small screen. Here are some of them:

1.    How to downsize large banners found in the homepage slideshow to work on smartphones?
2.    I have portfolio slideshow built with Lightbox with large screenshots and blurbs. How do I get this to look good on a small smartphone?
3.    What about background images?
4.    How to optimize navigation and content for mobile devices