Planet Drupal

Here we go! Portland's Drupalcon is here. Here is a quick update about some of the exciting things that Metal Toad is bringing to the event. Stop by our booth (#207) and come party with us Tuesday and Wednesday. Come watch us record the podcast live and even step up to the mic if you dare. T-shirts, wine, stickers, foosball, Drupal!?!?! Whoa.

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Watch the Live Stream, courtesy of Brightcove

We'll be streaming each of our three keynotes live beginning on Tuesday, with Dries' infamous #DriesNote at11:30am PDT (Pacific Daylight Time, PDT | UTC -7).

Have a burning question you want to ask our keynotes? Michael Anello from the Drupal Easy podcast will be fielding and moderating your twitter questions in real time, to ask Dries, Karen, and Michael, following each presentation.

DrupalCon Portland is off with a bang! Over 1,270 people have already arrived to pick up their badges and DrupalCon tshirts, and we're expecting as many attendees to arrive tomorrow.

Today alone, over 498 training attendees rolled in, as well as nearly 90 attendees for the CXO event. We're expecting over 3,300 people to attend the conference this week, so don't get stuck in line, get here early and grab your badge before sessions start at 9:00am.

If you haven't registered yet and still want to attend - this is your chance!

What if, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, you could wake up to a fresh and identical development environment completely free of yesterday's experiments and mistakes? Vagrant lets you do exactly that. more>>

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has recently launched its Collections Online site, an online image library where art lovers can explore and download high quality images. This is a triumph for the accessibility of fine art in an increasingly digital world. Making this vast collection public benefits not only local art lovers but also the international art community, particularly students.

This is a bit of a follow-up to Mike Bell's introductory article on using Codeception to create Drupal test suites. He concludes by stating he "need[s] to figure out a way of creating a Codeception module which allows you to plug in a Drupal testing user (ideally multiple so you can test each role) and then all the you have to do is call a function which executes the above steps to confirm your logged in before testing authenticated behaviour."

"Something along the lines of:

$I->drupalLogin('editor');

So, after skimming through Codeception and Mink documentation, I've tinkered with two potential ways of achieving this... for acceptance testing at least.

A crude toolbox

The first method is to use two custom classes to provide details of (a) a general Drupal site and (b) the specific site to be tested. This idea stemmed from this article which suggests that including literals - such as account credentials, paths and even form labels - in tests is bad practice. What if the login button label changes?

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The big week is finally here with DrupalCon Portland kicking off in our own backyard. For those of you not familiar with Portland, we're really big into birds (yes, I'm aware that's very 2010), and chickens in particular. I'm working real hard here to make a clever connection to RedHen, the leading native Drupal CRM, and the only one named after a bird!

Just in time for the conference, RedHen has a new release with plenty of performance improvements and bug fixes. We have a production site about to launch with over 100k contacts, and our test/development environments are running with over a 100k contacts with thousands of engagements each. We still have lots of work to do, but we're confident in RedHen's ability to scale to "enterprise" levels.

Understandably, one of the most requested features since we launched RedHen as been the ability to import contacts. Our initial pass at meeting that critical need also launched last week in the form RedHen Feeds, a Feeds processor for RedHen contacts. So get those contacts out of that spreadsheet and into RedHen! Support for organizational affiliations isn't there yet, but is in the works.

ThinkShout will be helping lead a RedHen sprint on Friday, May 24th, DrupalCon Portland's official sprint day. So if you're at all native CRM curious, come join our team as we hack away on RedHen and related tools. Learn about large datasets, Salesforce integration, managing memberships, email integration, event registrations, and common use cases. Site builders, documentarians, UX specialists, and developers are all welcome.

PS - ThinkShout is co-hosting the Drupal DoGooders Happy Hour, a fundraiser for Aaron Winborn, today, Monday May 20th. So please joint us and start your week off right by giving back to someone who has given so much to the Drupal community!

Tags: Drupal PlanetRedHenconferenceevents

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to present at Internet World London, why I believe that Drupal is the best Open Source solution to build professional level websites, e-shops or online applications and why you should dig in it and do your own research about it.

The speech is in English. You can enable the English or Greek subtitles by clicking the captions button or read the transcript below.

Presentation Transcript

Hello everybody, my name is Yannis Karampelas. I'm the owner and founder of Netstudio.

Netstudio is a Web Design and Web development company in Athens, Greece. I am Greek and this is the first time I give a presentation in English, so if what I say, sounds Greek to you, feel free to interrupt me and ask questions.

Drupal websites don't always need to allow users to register themselves with an account. This site doesn't, for instance. Anonymous commenting is turned on. The contact form is enabled for anonymous users. And those are the only thing that any member of the public would need to do - other than read. So nobody needs to set themselves up with a login. … Read more about Useful modules: Spambot

Blog Category: TechnologyDrupal Planet

I want to thank the good folks at ThinkShout and ZivTech for organizing the Drupal DoGooders Happy Hour to benefit my family and me, as well as giving people attending DrupalCon an opportunity to hang out and have some drinks. Even though I will not be in Portland this week, I plan to be present in spirit, beginning with a virtual appearance there. Join the crew this evening (May 20) at about 4:00 PDT to raise a glass in toast of doing Drupal Good and for a quick Q & A with me beginning about 4:30.

What a long strange trip it's been.

From Sunnyvale in 2007 when I conceived the Embedded Media Field module, to Boston DrupalCon in 2008, where I presented my first State of the Media session, to DC in 2009 where we launched the Media sprint supporting the Media suite of modules, to Chicago 2011 and Denver 2012.

These are the fun times that I recall fondly, doing good with my fellow cohorts. And by doing good, I mean really doing good things. Because where else in the business world can you spontaneously form a group of competitors, build something awesome, and give it freely to the rest of the world?

I'm really going to miss that this year. I mean that even though I continue to contribute to Drupal whatever and whenever I can, I am going to miss seeing you guys this year. There is a magic that happens when you get three or more Drupalers together in the same room. But circumstance has had its way with me these past two years and until we have a DrupalCon "Three Mile Island", I will have to be content with a virtual appearance.

So, join me on Monday evening to see my Stephen Hawking impersonation.

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It’s that time again. Drupalcon is about to kick off and it’s the biggest one yet. Over 3300 Drupalers from across the globe will meet in Portland tomorrow to delve into one of the fastest growing open source technologies in the world.

And ImageX will be there loud and clear. As Gold Sponsors of the conference, we’re building on our commitment to give back. Members of our team will be presenting in sessions, participating in birds of a feather groups, co-hosting an after party with Mediacurrent and taking part in code sprints to help support and grow Drupal.

Finally, just in time for the DrupalCon we got a first fluxkraft preview version out of the door!

It's not feature complete and does not implement any UI improvements or workflows yet, but the flux-engine is there and working.

In Drupal there are many different methods to turn long forms into multipage/multistep forms. The most known one is perhaps the great ctools module or even custom solutions using Drupal’s form API. However as you may agree with me none of these solutions are really that easy, specially when it comes to Ajax. Therefore many developers in Drupal community tried or still trying to find an even easier method. What I’m going to introduce to you is yet another magical method :).

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Steps to build your responsive drupal 7 theme

1) Understand your design and decide on the breakpoints.

2) Start with your theme info file

Exaltation of Larks will be at DrupalCon Portland next week and we’d like to share some of our DrupalCon plans.

To summarize, we’re excited to announce that we’re co-training on Drupal Commerce with Commerce Guys; we’re continuing the conversation we started last month about Long Term Support for Drupal 6; and we have a quick list of Drupal Fit activities that are happening before and during the conference.

Interested? Read on.

Drupal Commerce Training

One of our core philosophies is that high-quality trainings are one of the very best ways to help Drupal and the Drupal developer community grow, and we’ve been working closely with Commerce Guys for the DrupalCon training, Launching an Online Store with Commerce Kickstart, on Monday, May 20th.

Our joint curriculum is based on the 7.x-2.7 version of Commerce Kickstart, which was just released yesterday. The attendees of this training are really in for a treat and this is a Commerce training that’s not to be missed.

Drupal Commerce Meetups Every Month

This is a good time as any to let everyone know that we’re proud sponsors of the Drupal Commerce Meetup, which meets in Los Angeles on the 4th Tuesday of each month.

Not in Los Angeles? Not to worry, these meetups are also being broadcast online for everyone to tune in for and enjoy. The next meetup is after DrupalCon on Tuesday, May 28th, so be sure to sign up over at Drupal Groups to hear what the next meetup is about.

These meetups are recorded and the video from last month’s meetup is available online. The video features a presentation by Ryan Szrama on Relify and personalized product recommendations. Relify neatly narrows the gap between Drupal Commerce and recommendation systems, like Amazon’s “you may also like” suggestions.

Long Term Support (LTS) for Drupal

We’re hosting a BoF (birds of a feather) discussion on long-term Drupal support (particularly for Drupal 6 sites when Drupal 8 comes out and bug fixes and security releases for Drupal 6 are discontinued).

Long Term Support is a topic that is near and dear to us and a number of our clients and this BoF is a followup to our earlier post, Drupal 6 End of Life When Drupal 8 is Released… Or Not.

We’re preparing an “LTS” version of Drupal 6 and have a lot more planned, so stay tuned to the DrupalCon BoF schedule and @LarksLA on Twitter for news of when this BoF gets scheduled.

Drupal Fit

Finally, if you haven’t heard of Drupal Fit, it’s a group of nearly 200 Drupaleros who are dedicated to fitness is one form or another (mental, physical, etc.) and to sharing their experiences with other Drupal community members.

Here’s a summary of some of the Drupal Fit activities at DrupalCon Portland.

• Other than the Drupal Fit group itself, the authoritative place for fitness activities at DrupalCon Portland appears to be the Drupal Fit plans for DrupalCon Portland 2013 discussion started by Jeff Linwood;
• Steve Parks has some great words of advice on avoiding the Drupal Flu™ at DrupalCon this time around;
• Two groups are assembling at Mt. Hood — one group is hiking Oregon’s highest summit; the other group, led by Denis Voitenko (the focus of Drupal Fit’s first community spotlight) is biking down it!
• A few months ago, Portland native Dan Lin posted his suggestions for how to lose 10 pounds at DrupalCon.

Are there any other Drupal Fit activities not mentioned here? Send @DrupalFit a shout out on Twitter.

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Drupal Commerce 1.x has had a full release for a year and a half. We rolled the initial full release at DrupalCon London, and since then we've put out a few of minor releases to fix bugs, add minor features, and touch up its APIs.

Since that time we've also fielded requests for a 2.x branch with increasing regularity but have postponed the matter until Drupal 8 itself settled down some. Drupal Commerce 1.x was developed when Drupal 7 was still in its unstable release phase on top of incomplete Views, Entity API, and Rules modules. While some contributors were eager to dive into a fresh branch of Drupal Commerce that allowed major API changes and rewrites, we weren't exactly eager to reproduce the effort of developing a major contributed Drupal module on such an unstable foundation.

However, in order to be ready to take full advantage of the new features and modules in Drupal 8, we met last year to draw up a roadmap for Drupal Commerce 2.x. The roadmap provides:

1. An overview of our primary goals - re-architect around the new Drupal 8 systems where appropriate and mitigate the challenges users and developers have faced with Drupal Commerce 1.x,
2. A list and description of our major development emphases and how they will affect various systems in core Drupal Commerce,
3. And a task list of specific changes we're either contributing to in Drupal 8 or expecting to make to Drupal Commerce itself.

I'll be presenting the roadmap at DrupalCon Portland and am looking forward to getting busy with the code. As development progresses, we'll keep the roadmap up to date.

Check out the roadmap to see where you can get involved today.

We're super-excited to announce that we've been invited to present a half-day workshop during DrupalCamp Austin. The Camp takes place the weekend of June 21-23, 2013 and we'll be presenting "Getting Stuff into Drupal - Basics of Content Migration" from 1:30pm until 5:30pm on Saturday the 22nd. The workshop will cost $75 and we'll be covering the basics of three of the most common ways of importing content into Drupal: the Feeds, Migrate, and the Drupal-to-Drupal data migration (based on Migrate) modules. Interested? Check out all the details and then register today.

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One of the admiring features about Drupal is its ability to leverage single code base to power a stack of sites. Drush the excellent command line utility eases the work of administering Drupal sites.

Our recent work raised a question, will these two blend & work together?

Of course we tried this, the answer is yes but to be used with more caution!!

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On Monday, I will fly out for DrupalCON Portland. This will be my 14th (!) DrupalCON, dating back to 2006.

There was some question whether I would attend. For the record, Morten was wrong: I will be there.

For more information about why the questions, feel free to read the eulogy I just wrote for my father.

I will mostly be spending my time at the Palantir booth, and I am looking forward to spending time with some dear friends and colleagues. I am perhaps most looking forward to the benefit event for Aaron Winborn on Monday evening.

For more information about Palantir activities, see our blog post about our events and sessions.

See everyone soon.

Media queries are a key part of responsive web design, because they control at what width (among other things) different CSS rules kick in.

"Breakpoint makes writing media queries in Sass super simple," say Mason Wendell and Sam Richard, creators of the extension to Compass, and they're right. It's not surprising that we'd want them to present at Drupalcon, since design in Drupal, like web design everywhere, has been embracing responsive web design as a fundamental principle. (Side note: This website is in the midst of a responsive web design overhaul. Cobbler's children and all that.)

I spoke to Mason and Sam about how Breakpoint makes responsive web design even easier. Don't miss their Drupalcon Portland frontend session, “Managing Responsive Web Design with Sass and Breakpoint,” on Thursday at 10:45 AM.

IB: What motivated you to create Breakpoint? How has it changed your own workflow?

MW: Before Sass 3.2 came out I had written an article for The Sass Way that previewed some of it's new features, including the ability to use variables in media queries. I created an example that baked in some names for breakpoints into a kind of "master mixin" for media queries. On my next responsive project I put the theories I'd written for that post into practice, and found that I could refine that approach. If I assigned a variable to each media query first the approach would be very flexible. Then when noticed that I wrote min-width queries way more often than any other type I set up defaults that made creating media queries very fast.

MW: There was a side effect that I think is more useful though. By assigning names to each of my media queries I'm able to keep them in context in a much more effective way. If I some media queries to deal with the width of a nav element, and then later I add an item to that nav, I can change the value of that variable and all the associated queries are adjusted. This is even more effective when handing code back and forth within a team.

SR: Breakpoint was created with the motivation to ease many of the pain points of working with media queries in CSS. The biggest pain point that Breakpoint solves is providing meaningful semantics to your media queries. When building content based responsive sites, early in your design process two unrelated items may happen to break at the same points, but as your project grows, those points may change and a simple find and replace will have unintended consequences. This is probably the biggest workflow win to using Breakpoint, all of your media queries now have proper semantics.

SR: The other big win for my workflow is Breakpoint's no-query fallback, allowing me to very easily add in fallback code for any of the media queries I write.

IB: What can Breakpoint do that just assigning variable names to specific min-widths can't?

SR: For starters, Breakpoint handles much more than min-width queries. It is designed to be future friendly and currently supports all CSS level 3 and level 4 media queries. Additionally, it's syntax is easy to use to create complex media queries, including both and and or media queries. It has native handling for all of the different media query requirement for resolution (of which you need to write at least four different queries for currently) while just writing the standard. The no-query fallbacks are a huge win as well.

MW: The main benefit is that you can assign names and manage your media queries with variables. This helps you avoid having them scattered around your SCSS, and makes is easy to understand how they're related and affect each other.

MW: While Breakpoint is optimized for min-width because they're used most often it doesn't stop there. There are a number of shortcuts built in, for fencing min- and max- values, converting pixels to ems, and even vendor prefixed queries like resolution.

MW: We even created a way to Breakpoint to report back to you what queries are in a particular context. Singularity GS uses this feature to kind of magically create responsive grid systems.

SR: Of all of Breakpoint's features, probably the least used, but most powerful is Breakpoint Context. This allows you to call a function anywhere and get the current media query context allowing for amazingly intelligent mixins and functions to be written in Sass, something unique to Breakpoint that you simply don't have with interpolating variables.

IB: Are there any responsive web design aspects specific to Drupal theming/frontend development that Breakpoint helps with?

SR: There is nothing Drupal specific that Breakpoint helps with. Breakpoint, like Sass, was built to be backend independent. This means that if you are building any site, regardless of if it's a Drupal site or a Node site or a static site, Breakpoint is able to do its job handily without being caught up in being tied to a specific backend technology.

MW: One of the things I love about working with Sass is that it's not Drupal-specific, and it's meant to be used anywhere on the web. Breakpoint follows that example.

IB: Is Breakpoint a successor to Respond-To, or will that continue to get developed?

SR: In a way, yes and no. Respond-To was written before Breakpoint, but upon Breakpoint's release, it was decided that our efforts should be focused on a unified Media Query engine, with Respond-To as a wrapper syntax for Breakpoint. This is how the current Respond-To project exists. As of Breakpoint 2.0, the Respond-To mixin has been incorporated into Breakpoint core, so you now can use Respond-To without needing an additional Compass extension!

IB: Do you use Breakpoints module (in Drupal 8 core)? Or do you just do all of that through Sass?

SR: I personally truly dislike the Breakpoint module. Every use case I've heard for it seems to be based on the thinking that sites have three or four breakpoints and that everything can be boiled down into an easy to use admin interface. There are no standard breakpoints, period, and good, reasonably complex responsive sites will usually have 20 or more breakpoints. Responsive cannot be done from the backend, and the Breakpoint module encourages you to do so (as does the Spark layout initiative).

IB: Do you think any aspects of Breakpoint might get rolled directly into Sass in the future?

MW: It's possible, but we probably won't move the obvious parts to the Sass language. There are some helper functions that we've written in Ruby that would be very useful in Sass core. Once that's in we'll be able to offer Breakpoint without Compass.

SR: I do not believe Breakpoint will be rolled directly into Sass, nor would I want it to be, as it is out of scope of Sass core. As much as I like them, I even think the color functions in Sass are out of scope for it. Sass core should simply be the language and the bare minimum function base for it to be useable. Sass doesn't ship with any mixins, and I think it should probably stay that way. That being said, Breakpoint is fairly stable; our 1.3 release stood stable for six or so months without needing any changes until we rewrote the whole thing for our 2.x release, so maybe being merged into Compass isn't out of the question, but I do not see a need for that.

IB: I hear in addition to Breakpoint, Sam went and created some kind of magic box of Sass called Toolkit. Want to say more about that?

SR: Toolkit started life as RWD Kickstart, a project Mason and I kind of made up on the spot a year ago at one of the first New York Sass meetups. Its original goal was simply to be a collection of Compass templates to make pulling in media query and grid solutions together easily. Since then, it's evolved to be more of a collection of Progressive Enhancement, Design in Browser, and Modern Web Development tools, a toolkit if you'll let me, of useful tools. I'd say the four biggest thing that Toolkit has are a modern Clearfix mixin, progressive enhancement replace text mixins, a triangle generation mixin, and an intrinsic ratio mixin to make using intrinsic ratios super easy. It also adds *, *:before, *:after { box-sizing: border-box} and img, video { max-width: 100%; height: auto; } to your stylesheets, which are the first two things I do for any responsive project.

SR: Toolkit's templates have also evolved, Where originally there were five some odd different templates to choose from, now there are just two, a basic one to set up a basic partial structure, and a responsive web design one that pulls in Breakpoint 2.x for media queries and Singularity 1.x for grids.

IB: You sure know those late twentieth-century presidents.

MW: With a name like Breakpoint, how could I not revisit the cinema classic Point Break. Bodhi and his gang of thrill-seeking bank-robbing surfers evaded the FBI for years until the newly minted Special Agent Johnny Utah was on the case. I think we can all agree that there's a poignant metaphor for web designer there. And some pretty sweet gifs.

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