Tech News

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Ted Bowman, senior software engineer with the Drupal Acceleration Team at Acquia, joins Mike to discuss the game-changing work of the Layout Initiative. Sorry about the poor quality of part of Mike's side of the conversation (as well as the comical overdubbing of other portions of the conversation).

• Why Drupal's Layout Builder is so powerful and unique.
• Layout Initiative.
• Drupal's commitment to accessibility.
• Panels module
• Display Suite module
• Layout Builder Restrictions

• Drupal Career Online - the 12-week (3 half-days/week) best-practice focused training program begins February 25, 2019. Learn more at one of our free Taste of Drupal webinars (December 17, January 9, February 6, February 20).
• Professional local development with DDEV - 2-hour, hands-on, online workshop held monthly (January ???).
• Local Web Development with DDEV Explained - new book from Mike!

• Florida DrupalCamp 2019 - Feb 15-17 - registration and session proposals now open.

• MyDropWizard.com - Long-term-support services for Drupal 6, 7, and 8 sites.
• WebEnabled.com - devPanel.

• @drupaleasy
• @ultimike
• @tedbow

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, call 321-396-2340. Please keep in mind that we might play your voicemail during one of our future podcasts. Feel free to call in with suggestions, rants, questions, or corrections. If you'd rather just send us an email, please use our contact page.

If you use the Drupal Composer Drupal Project template for managing your Drupal 8 site’s codebase, and you commit dependencies to your Git repository, then you’ve probably run into issues involving cloned dependencies. Sometimes when requiring a dependency via Composer, you end up with a cloned version (which includes a .git directory) instead of a release version. 

If you’re committing dependencies to your repository, then the .git directories associated with cloned dependencies cause an issue when you try to commit. A common resolution is to remove the .git directory from the dependency’s directory.

While this solves the immediate issue, the next time you go to update Drupal core, you’ll likely see an error message along the lines of, “The .git directory is missing from /var/www/html/vendor/some/dependency, see https://getcomposer.org/commit-deps for more information”. How can we get past this?

Here’s my workflow:

1. Delete the entire /vendor/ directory.
2. Run “composer install” to reinstall all dependencies. 
3. Update Drupal core (normally with “composer update drupal/core webflo/drupal-core-require-dev "symfony/*" --with-dependencies”
4. Re-remove any .git directories for cloned dependencies.
5. Commit the update.

Ultimately the "proper" solution will be to not commit dependencies to the project repository. I agree that this is the best solution, but not everyone’s workflow currently supports this.

There's also a great discussion in the Drupal Composer Drupal Project issue queue about alternate methods to deal with this issue. 

Have a different workflow to deal with cloned dependencies? Share it in a comment below!

Just getting started with managing your Drupal 8 project with Composer? Jeff Geerling has some super-helpful blog posts.

All sorts of organizations have made their predictions and proclamations about what 2019 will be the year of... Some say it is the Year of Optimism and growth for helicopters, others, …of the Hack & Slash, …of indigenous languages, …of the electric SUV, and even the International Year of the Salmon.  It all comes down to what someone sees as an important aspect of their field to promote or what is or should be a trend.  DrupalEasy would therefore like propose we make 2019 the Year of Drupal Talent Development.

As an active member of the community, we've observed, had great discussions and provided several sessions at Camps and Cons about the talent shortage in the community as well as how to build a Drupal career. We feel it is pretty important to Drupal. Right now, there are more than 2,000 jobs requiring Drupal skills on Indeed, and hundreds more continually being added. The Drupal Association also recognized the need, as we discovered while putting together this blog post, with the introduction of a Drupal Educational Opportunities Newsletter, which will help get the word out to those looking to further their skills, and those looking to start a career in Drupal.  

As a training organization, we not only train within the community, but bring in new people to develop passion for Drupal. We’ve had over a decade to watch people who started out not being able to spell Drupal develop the commitment and skills to excel at it. We’ve seen our Drupal learning community grow, diversity, and expand internationally, as new students hone their skills and strive to contribute to the community while they do it. Through all of this talent development for Drupal and the community, most gratifying is seeing the companies and organizations compete for the people building rewarding and fulfilling careers through experience and participation. 

How can we make it the Year of Drupal Talent Development?  A simple way is for each of us to simply sharie information on Drupal as a career and the opportunities in Drupal to those who may benefit from it. For those with the need and resources, providing the education and training needed for individuals or teams. There are some great resources to get information about Drupal as a career. 

The US Department of Labor has an Occupational Outlook Handbookprovides summaries of careers including salary ranges, anticipated job growth, and types of work environments.  Their entry on Web Developer careers, though not specific to Drupal, seems to track pretty well. There is also great salary information about Drupal specific web development through the Indeed Salary Tool, as well as Glass Door's version. 

Of course, salary is just a part of it, so a few years ago, we put together a Drupal Career Resources page to provide an index of information, insight and news for those looking to get into Drupal. It is a quick way for those of us who are in the community to share a lot of information.    

We also truly believe that solid education in the ways of Drupal is key to get and keep people active in the community.  Mike Anello teaches our our 12-week live, Drupal Career Online course twice each year.  The career technical education course is licensed as a certificate program through the Florida Department of Education Commission for Independent Education.

Drupal Career Online is a  comprehensive program that includes 2 class sessions and one co-working lab session each week, along with Mike's office hours and access to other training provider resources, most recently Drupalize.me.  Participants are also provide rich learning resources including a lesson guide, class slides, links to go further in-depth into topics, and a screencast for every lesson, which is all accessible through a session-specific class web site. 

Prior to each DCO session, we hold Taste of Drupal mini-webinars to introduce people to Drupal, Drupal careers and our course.  There are 2 more sessions before the Spring 2019 session of Drupal Career Online kicks off on February 25th.  Those interested can sign up for a Taste of Drupal, or contact us to get more information.      

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Ryan Price, Principal Engineer, Drupal and Web with Autodesk joins Mike Anello to discuss the hurdles involved with implementing a continuous integration system, OpenDevShop, improving hook_help(), a Drupal 8 Feeds-like module, and DrupalCon Seattle!

• Autodesk Knowledge
• Article by juampy at Lullabot.
• DrupalCon NOLA presentation: Production is an Artifact of Development by @dev_meshev
• Composer template for Drupal projects.
• OpenDevShop They recently started crowdfunding.
• Reuse the README.txt file of a modules/theme in hook_help
• Entity Import module introduction

• Professional local development with DDEV - 2-hour, hands-on, online workshop held monthly (April 17).
• Local Web Development with DDEV Explained - new book from Mike - version 2!

• DrupalCon Seattle - April 8-12, 2019 - Summits.

• Drupal Aid - Drupal support and maintenance services. Get unlimited support, monthly maintenance, and unlimited small jobs starting at $99/mo.
• WebEnabled.com - devPanel.

• @drupaleasy
• @ultimike
• @liberatr

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, call 321-396-2340. Please keep in mind that we might play your voicemail during one of our future podcasts. Feel free to call in with suggestions, rants, questions, or corrections. If you'd rather just send us an email, please use our contact page.

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Get ready for your trip to Seattle with this April Fool's Day special episode of the DrupalEasy Podcast.

a Dr. Seuss joint (sortof)

From the top of your head to the tips of your toes,
You are a Drupaller, everyone knows.

You think about Drupal all day and all night.
You’re more than obsessed with getting things right.

Your Views and your Fields and your Content Types,
Simply scream “Drupal!” here are some reasons why:

Your User Experience is so Steve Jobs-esque
Your Splash Awards medals are spilling off your desk!

Your API documentation site,
Lets your developers get sleep at night.
You’re well known to eat your own dog food.
When you’re done with work you’re still in a good mood.
And why not? Your patches have all been applied,
The hackers can’t get in, and they even tried!

I heard a rumor at DrupalCon Seattle,
That your coding standard leaves code reviewers rattled.
Before you go saying that I must be kidding,
Know that I suck a peek, I did some digging…
I couldn’t find one curly brace out of place,
One line break too many or one poor stack trace.

Have you ever noticed just how our community
Is one of the best at promoting unity?
We’re very good at giving hugs,
Especially to those who have fixed our bugs.
But if you’re not a fan of physical affection,
We don’t make a big deal of your objection.
(We’re still glad you chose to sit in our section)

Like Birds of a Feather or a Business of Ferrets,
The Drupal community celebrates merits.
Even if you don’t pretend to know code,
Your contribution deserves to be showed.
Webchick will help you, as luck would have it,
When your first core improvement is ready to commit.
(Stick around until Friday, and you won’t regret it)

And if this is your first time at DrupalCon...

Did you know that Drupal is eighteen years young?
We’re just getting started, we’re still having fun!
Of all websites, we’re say, five in a hundred,
The more ambitious ones are quite well funded,
But even for NGOs our scopes are not blunted.
We’ve got thousands of community projects,
To extend, integrate, and meet all of your specs.
Even if you don’t speak like a geek,
I’m sure the vendors won’t judge you like some kind of freak.
They’ll help you translate the Greek, so to speak.

If this is your first event, or your hundred and first,
We welcome you to dive in to Drupal head first.
Bring us a challenge, we’ll find you a guru,
As long as you understand our Kool-Aid is blue.
(We do have other interests besides Open Source,
We’re human aren’t we? Why yes, of course!)

Have you met Dries Buytaert? He’s the project’s creator.
Without him, I might be a Red Lobster waiter.
He’s tall and Belgian, well over two meters,
(Not that I’ve measured him, that would be cheating),
He’s the lead of this project and he helps set the agenda
To give us some staying power and stay just a bit trendy.
There are really so many others to thank,
Given ten thousand thank you notes, none would be blank.
It takes a village, at least that’s what I think.

So welcome to the land of rainstorms and coffee,
Of mega-giant software companies,
To DrupalCon Seattle, it’s like my family reunion.
Think Digital. Be Human.

• Professional local development with DDEV - 2-hour, hands-on, online workshop held monthly (April 17).
• Local Web Development with DDEV Explained - new book from Mike - version 2!

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, call 321-396-2340. Please keep in mind that we might play your voicemail during one of our future podcasts. Feel free to call in with suggestions, rants, questions, or corrections. If you'd rather just send us an email, please use our contact page.

Direct .mp3 file download.

Michael Hess, (mlhess), Senior Technologist and Adjunct Lecturer at University of Michigan and member of Drupal's Security Working Group joins Mike Anello to talk about recent Drupal core security updates, security release processes, Drupal 7's future end-of-life, and the new Drupal Steward program.

• February 20 Drupal core security advisory (8.6.10)
• Announcing a Drupal security bug bounty program paying up to €15.000
• Drupal 8 automatic updates initiative
• DrupalCon Seattle session on automatic updates
• Drupal 7 end of life - November, 2021
• Interested in your organization becoming an Drupal extended support provider? Email [email protected] or go to PSA-2019-02-25.
• Interested in joining the Drupal security team? Visit security.drupal.org/join
• Introducing Drupal Steward.

• Drupal Career Online - the 12-week (3 half-days/week) best-practice focused training program begins August 26, 2019. Learn more at one of our free Taste of Drupal webinars in June, July, and August.
• Professional local development with DDEV - 2-hour, hands-on, online workshop held monthly (May 8, June 12).
• Local Web Development with DDEV Explained - new book from Mike!

• DrupalCamp Chattanooga - June 7 and 8, 2019.
• DrupalCamp Asheville - July 12-14, 2019.
• Midwest Drupal Summit - August 8-11, 2019 - Michael is the primary organizer - for more info, go to #mwds in the Drupal Slack workspace.

• MyDropWizard.com - Long-term-support services for Drupal 6, 7, and 8 sites.
• WebEnabled.com - devPanel.

• @drupaleasy
• @ultimike
• @mlh407

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, call 321-396-2340. Please keep in mind that we might play your voicemail during one of our future podcasts. Feel free to call in with suggestions, rants, questions, or corrections. If you'd rather just send us an email, please use our contact page.

I recently decided to begin rebuilding the various landing pages on DrupalEasy.com using Layout Builder, introduced as a stable module to Drupal 8.7 core. Prior to this, the various landing pages on the site had been built using Paragraphs module.

While I appreciate what Paragraphs module can do as a layout tools for individual entities, I learned the hard way that perhaps it isn't the best tool for the job of building landing pages. 

I've been keen to use Layout Builder for awhile, but also hesitant to make the switch. Layout Builder has (unstated) lofty goals - to be the de-facto method of building landing pages in Drupal. I'll be perfectly happy if I didn't have to use Paragraphs or Panels in the future, instead relying on a core module.

I was biding my time until Layout Builder was stable in core, and now that it has come to pass, I wanted to take the time to rebuilding our landing pages while updating their content, layout, and styles just a bit.

For starters, I created a new "Landing page" content type. Knowing that all of our landing pages will just be a series of blocks, I didn't add any fields - in fact, I removed the default "Body" field from the content type. I also created a default layout by selecting the "Use Layout Builder" checkbox on the content type's "Manage display" page. Knowing also that I may want to tweak the layout of some of our landing pages, I also selected the "Allow each content item to have its layout customized." (this effectively replaces the Panelizer contrib module). 

From there, I clicked the "Manage layout" button and set up a default layout for our landing pages. I'm not going to take you step-by-step through the process, but it's quite intuitive - and far better than any of the community's attempts to provide a browser-based layout tool in the past (no offense to anyone who has tried - it's a really difficult problem!)

After that, I created a new "Landing page" node and went directly to the "Layout" tab. The default layout I created in the previous step was ready for me to populate - but I was also able to tweak the layout for just this node as well. The process for adding content to the layout is easy primarily because it utilizes Drupal core's settings tray functionality. Existing blocks, custom blocks, as well as fields belonging to the content type are easily placed. I especially like the "Show content preview" checkbox for simplifying (and speeding up?) the interface during construction. 

My experience wasn't without hiccups, however. I did run into a couple of issues that I'd imagine a few other folks will stumble upon as well.

First, I tried adding a system Search block to one of my layouts. When I did this, I was unable to save the layout. I traced this issue to an issue related to rendering form blocks inside Layout Builder. At the time of writing this post, I didn't feel there was a mature enough patch yet, so I opted to remove the Search block for now. 

As this site is hosted on Pantheon, **and its codebase is built on https://github.com/pantheon-systems/example-drops-8-composer** , I ran into an issue where I was unable to add a new section to any layout. Turns out it was caused by this issue - luckily the fix for this was easy.

Finally, as I use the Bootstrap base theme for this site, when adding a bit of styling, I noticed that I had to override (using CSS) some of the breakpoints that Layout Builder uses by default. Specifically, Layout Builder has a 40em breakpoint, which doesn't align with Bootstrap's (default) 768px breakpoint. Not a big deal to do with a little bit of CSS (Sass), but important to note nonetheless. I used the following Sass to align layout builder's 2-column layout with the Bootstrap breakpoint:

Overall, I'm really happy with Layout Builder so far - the resulting landing pages are easier to update - both from a content and a layout standpoint. It also provides a good deal of confidence knowing that I'm now using a core solution that will only improve with time.

Direct .mp3 file download.

AmyJune Hineline, Open Source Community Ambassador at Kanopi Studios joins Mike Anello to talk about her upcoming Contribution Tour 2019, as she visits numerous Drupal and WordPress events to help train new contributors.

• WordCamp US (St. Louis)
• Drupal-GitLab integration
• SimplyTest.me
• Matt Glaman's ContribKanban
• A11ytalks

• Drupal Career Online - the 12-week (3 half-days/week) best-practice focused training program begins August 26, 2019. Learn more at one of our free Taste of Drupal webinars in July and August.
• Professional local development with DDEV - 2-hour, hands-on, online workshop held monthly (June 12).
• Local Web Development with DDEV Explained
• Quicktip: Some of my favorite (newer) DDEV things
• Quicktip: Layout Builder in core - first impressions

• Drupal Camp Chattanooga - June 7 and 8, 2019.
• Drupal North - Montreal June 12-14, 2019.
• Drupal Camp Asheville - July 12-14, 2019.
• Drupal Camp Colorado - Denver - August 2-5, 2019.
• BADCamp - Berkeley, CA October 2-5, 2019.

• Drupal Aid - Drupal support and maintenance services. Get unlimited support, monthly maintenance, and unlimited small jobs starting at $99/mo.
• WebEnabled.com - devPanel.

• @drupaleasy
• @ultimike
• @volkswagenchick

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, call 321-396-2340. Please keep in mind that we might play your voicemail during one of our future podcasts. Feel free to call in with suggestions, rants, questions, or corrections. If you'd rather just send us an email, please use our contact page.

Direct .mp3 file download.

Jen Lampton (Backdrop user account), co-founder of Backdrop CMS, senior Drupal developer at Jenerationweb.com joins Mike Anello and Ryan Price to get reacquainted with Backdrop and to discuss why it could be a good long-term solution for sites after Drupal 7's end-of-life.

• Backdrop CMS
• Silkscreen CMS - Backdrop fork.
• Backdrop CMS Mini Camp at Twin Cities Drupal Camp - June 6-8.
• Backdrop status of 100 top Drupal projects.
• Backdrop CMS contributed projects.
• Software Freedom Conservancy
• Support Backdrop CMS
• Jen's DrupalCon Seattle Presentation, A world without features - save time by managing exportables
• Flexible Layouts in Backdrop Core
• Dirk Frimout - the first Belgian in space.

• Drupal Career Online - the 12-week (3 half-days/week) best-practice focused training program begins August 26, 2019. Learn more at one of our free Taste of Drupal webinars in July and August.
• Professional local development with DDEV - 2-hour, hands-on, online workshop held monthly - next workshop: July 16, 2019.
• Local Web Development with DDEV Explained

• Drupal Camp Asheville - July 12-14, 2019.
• Drupal Camp Colorado - Denver - August 2-5, 2019.
• BADCamp - Berkeley, CA - October 2-5, 2019.
• DrupalCamp LA - August 24-25, 2019.

• MyDropWizard.com - Long-term-support services for Drupal 6, 7, and 8 sites.
• WebEnabled.com - devPanel.

• @drupaleasy
• @ultimike
• @jenlampton
• @backdropcms

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Miro. Listen to our podcast on Stitcher.

If you'd like to leave us a voicemail, call 321-396-2340. Please keep in mind that we might play your voicemail during one of our future podcasts. Feel free to call in with suggestions, rants, questions, or corrections. If you'd rather just send us an email, please use our contact page.

Version 1.9.0 of DDEV-local introduced the ability to share your local project online via a temporary, public URL using ngrok.

This allows you the ability to quickly and securely provide access to your local site to other developers and stakeholders as well as an easy way to test your local site on other devices.

ngrok is a service that exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls via public URLs over secure tunnels. Once the small ngrok client is installed on your local machine, the ddev share command will enable the sharing and provide you with a public URL for your local site.

While there are paid tiers for the ngrok service, a free tier is provided with reasonable limits on usage. See the ngrok web site for details. In the first example, we'll utilize the free, anonymous tier.

The free, anonymous tier does not encrypt your data between your local and the ngrok servers, even though an https connection is provided from the ngrok servers to connected clients. Therefore, it is strongly suggested that once you get the free, anonymous tier working, create a free account and authenticate your local ngrok client to ensure your data is encrypted the entire trip.

Note that this is a one-time setup for your machine, and does not have to be repeated for each of your DDEV-Local projects.

Download and install the client specific to your OS from https://ngrok.com/download. While there are instructions to download and install ngrok on various operating systems, I found that using Homebrew (Mac OS X and Linux) was easiest:

brew cask install ngrok

If you're using Windows 10 and Chocolately, then I recommend installing with:

choco install ngrok

Run the following:

ddev share

If successful, this command will return some information about the share, including public URLs with which you can access the site.

As requests are made to the site, the screen will update detailing each request.

Note that in the screenshot above, that the "https://94d5c548.ngrok.io" public URL is forwarding the insecure "http://127.0.0.1:32786". If we were to set up a ngrok account and authenticate our local ngrok client, it would be forwarding "https://127.0.0.1:32786" instead.

Use Crtl-C to stop the sharing.

Secure your data by signing up for a free ngrok account and then authenticating your local ngrok client with your account credentials using the command provided by the ngrok web site:

./ngrok authtoken

Once your local ngrok client is authenticated, the next time you do a ddev share, you'll be able to see that your connection uses https from end-to-end.

While the free ngrok plan is normally sufficient for smaller projects, paid ngrok plans include multiple users, custom domains and subdomains, additional connections, static IP addresses, and other features.

This tutorial is an excerpt from version 3 of Michael Anello's Local Development with DDEV Explained book - coming soon! Version 3 will include everything new to DDEV-Local through version 1.9.1. Pick up an electronic copy of Version 2 for less than $10 and you'll automatically get free access to Version 3.