This past week at Drupal Costa Rica, I had a nice conversation with Todd Ross Neinkerk of Four Kitchens, who was there presenting on the notion of de-coupling content management and content display (here's video of a similar talk he did in Austin).
Managing configuration is an extremely important part of any multi-person website project, but in many cases, this area of the project does not receive as much attention as it deserves. The tools that have been available for Drupal 7 do not provide complete coverage of all configuration settings, leading to inconsistencies in configuration handling and inconvenient workarounds.
If you are not familiar with Composer yet, see the Composer Tools and Frameworks for Drupal presentation that Doug Dobrzyncski and I did for DrupalCon LA. It’s easy to get started quickly with Composer today with starter projects such as
Web development is better together. As we create increasingly ambitious digital experiences and build more mission-critical web presences, the number of people working together on these projects grows. Fading are the days where the list of everything you need to make a website can fit on the back of a postcard. Instead, modern web projects require the efforts of multiple people working closely together in a collaborative fashion.
Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is the largest school system in Virginia and the 10th largest in the United States, with more than 200 schools and centers serving 186,000 students. To keep this large community of students, parents, teachers, employees, and the general public informed, FCPS is building out a network of 195 school websites.
Behavior-Driven Development is a widely-used testing methodology that is used to describe functional tests—that is, tests that operate on the whole of a system—in natural, readable language called Gherkin syntax. The goal of this methodology is to make the contents of the tests approachable to non-technical stakeholders. This makes it possible for a project’s functional tests to be meaningfully used as the acceptance criteria for the product.
Composer has brought the PHP community a long way, making dependency management much more convenient. With the advent of Drupal 8.0.0-rc1, even more people are going to be using composer indirectly, whether they realize it or not. This is because Drupal 8 uses Composer to manage its external libraries. Drush also uses Composer to manage dependencies, which means you can get spectacularly bad results, including some very difficult to diagnose crashes, unless all of Drush’s dependencies are very strictly compatible with all of Drupal’s dependencies.
Updating WordPress plugins and Drupal modules is a pain, but it can become unmanageable when you have dozens or hundreds of sites. Pixo has automated the process to apply all plugin and module updates on Pantheon sites with a simple command. In this post, we explain how to use this automation and we share the code.
As website development contractors, we sometimes come across existing Drupal or Wordpress sites that are just chock full of large, under-optimized client uploads that take forever to load in our browsers. We sometimes find our servers choking to death, not because of [insert disliked developer here]’s rogue php script, but because the server just can’t keep up with the thousands of requests for xyz image at 3000x2000 pixels, uncompressed.