Stanford Drupal Camp - Development

Managing Projects Through Install Profiles

redndahead — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 20:49:33 +0000

At the Stanford Graduate School of Business we manage a website that has a lot of different functionality. It was important that when we migrated from our old platform that we were able to compartementalize the functionality into maintainable pieces. By leveraging install profiles and Features we are able to accomplish this and we are able to better understand where to fix bugs when problems arise. This talk will go over how we have designed our development workflow and lessons we have learned that could improve it.

Experience level:

Advanced

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

redndahead

Session Time Slot(s):

Friday, April 18, 2014 - 11:00 to 11:45

Track:

Development

Drupal Site Tuneup - Vroom Vroom!

Kristen Pol — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 19:48:38 +0000

Beep beep!

During the development process, your site goes through many changes as you figure out which modules to use, solidify your content types and views, configure features, and deal with bugs in core, community and custom modules. Along the way, content, files, modules, and data can get outdated without you even realizing what happened. This is even more likely with a larger development team and when development is going fast.

At some point, you need to slow down and make time to do a site tuneup to get rid of old cruft and keep the site humming along. Ideally, this would happen before launch. Realistically, this might not happen until post-launch after the frenzy has died down and more routine maintenance mode has kicked in. But… it needs to happen, and it needs to happen regularly. How regularly depends on how much change happens on the site.

Come for a ride and we’ll talk about...

Tuning strategy - What types of things might need tuning over time, a strategy for managing and tracking these changes, and dealing with dev => stage => prod and features.

Tuning users - Finding and removing spam users.

Tuning content and content types - Identifying unpublished or duplicate content. Finding and removing fields not being used and identifying fields that could be removed. Analyzing content types for consolidation and changing node type on nodes.

Tuning modules and code - Handling unneeded modules that haven’t been disabled or were disabled and not uninstalled properly. Identifying modules that could be eliminated by removing or replacing functionality. Core and module updates, checking for hacks to core and community modules, and seeing if patches are still relevant.

Tuning views - Finding and removing unused views and identifying views for consolidation.

Tuning data - Safely finding and removing old variables, fields, and tables that weren’t removed properly by the system.

Tips to minimize tuneups - To make tuning easier going forward, we’ll talk about being more careful during the development cycle to introduce less “stuff” that might need cleanup later.

Vroom vroom!

About the driver/speaker:

Kristen has been working with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, and SEO. She has presented at DrupalCon Portland, several BADCamps, several Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Check out her drupal.org page for a partial list of presentations and check out more info at http://www.hook42.com/team/kristen-pol.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

Kristen Pol

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 15:00 to 15:45

Track:

Development

Site Building

Drupal and CAP

techsoldaten — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 03:40:35 +0000

Community Academic Profiles (CAP) is a system developed by Stanford as a way of consolidating faculty information into a single location. Beyond basic personal profiles, the system also collects information about publications, research and academic interests, presenting a rich and comprehensive view of the academic community and their pursuits.

In early 2014, a Drupal module was released for integrating with CAP. This module offers schools at Stanford a robust and efficient way to present content about faculty in their websites, and also to keep that information up-to-date using CAP's RESTful API. Beyond simple imports of single faculty members, the module is capable of maintaining information about an entire school, and also integrates with workgroups and SUNet IDs to provide meaningful collections of content.

This session focuses on the practical use of the CAP module. Participants will learn how to work with faculty profiles, and how to carry out the following advanced topics:

How to select profiles for import
How profiles are kept in sync over time
How to control the appearance of profiles using drag-and-drop tools in Drupal's administrative interface
How to create faculty listings
How to create lists of publications and research

This session will be conducted by Michael Haggerty, one of the lead developers of the CAP module for Drupal.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

techsoldaten

Session Time Slot(s):

Friday, April 18, 2014 - 13:00 to 13:45

Track:

Development

Stanford Specific

"Accessibilizing" Drupal

John Bickar — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 13:51:06 +0000

Want to make sure your Drupal site is accessible to everyone? Learn to maximize the accessibility features built into Drupal - and the additional features built into Open Framework and Stanford Sites - and assure those features stay intact when you make changes. See the value of testing keyboard navigation and focus, adding alternative text to images, and assuring that assistive technology presents page content in the order you expect.

Resources:

We posted some of these resources before the session, but we have updated this section to include additional information that was discussed during the session.

Checking Color Contrast

Keyboard-only Testing

The Importance of Focus Indication

A Few Links about Carousels

Drupal Testing Tools

Video and Captioning

Miscellaneous Resources

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

JSutton

John Bickar

Session Time Slot(s):

Friday, April 18, 2014 - 14:00 to 14:45

Track:

Development

Stanford Specific

A Perfect Launch, Every Time

suzanne.aldrich — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:00:22 +0000

Launches are tough on a new developer. Everyone remembers the lump in their throats around launch time; the rush to finish content, make final theme tweaks, adjust for sudden browser weirdness. As momentum picks up, the odd change request always appears, databases are slingshot hither and yon, while everyone scrambles to resolve merge conflicts like a Tokyo train at rush hour.

We emerge scarred but smarter, intent on making the next launch less painful. But with different teams launching different sites, it can be hard to establish an iterative process. Especially as new work accumulates in the backlog, we reap what we sow in technical debt from rushed launches, quick & dirty choices made under the gun, and unimplemented ideas from retrospectives.

Pantheon, however, has the same Customer Success team launching several enterprise sites per week, while assisting hundreds of self serve customers when they need a hand. Because we need to work effectively, we have developed the tools and process to ensure:

Great Site Performance - On Day One
Less problems over the long run
Clear Expectations from Informed Stakeholders

The session will cover other key areas:

Preparing For Launch for the PM, Stakeholder, Developer & Sys Admin
Auditing the Site for landmines, carniverous acid pool islands, and deadweight
Load Testing to obliterate surprises with actionable results

This session is Platform Agnostic; whether you use PAAS, shared hosting, or wield your own hardware, PMs, developers, and clients will leave with new tools in their belt to launch with less agita. We will share some of our challenges and how we overcame them, and hopefully hear from you about how you overcame yours!

Slides:

stanford_drupalcamp_2014_-_a_perfect_launch_every_time.pdf

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

suzanne.aldrich

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 14:00 to 14:45

Track:

Development

Stanford+Connects: Building Custom User Experience on a Solid Drupal Platform

sreynen — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 20:33:56 +0000

Last year, the Stanford Alumni Association began a series of events to connect Stanford Alumni around the world with a rich and engaging program, including informal Q&A sessions with President Hennessy, micro-lectures, collaborative seminars, and an extensive interactive component. The website for this series of events began with the most basic needs of event registration, and evolved over time into a highly customized experience that mirrors these unique events.

The process of planning, designing, and building the Stanford+Connects site is an excellent demonstration of Drupal's capabilities, both in providing a solid base of functionality and as a framework for extensive customization. We will walk through this process and highlight how Drupal allowed it to succeed at each point along the way, from the earliest planning to the ongoing iterations.

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

sreynen

juaneclark

Session Time Slot(s):

Friday, April 18, 2014 - 15:00 to 15:45

Track:

Development

Stanford Specific

Beginning Module Development

jcrespo — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 19:53:59 +0000

Maybe you're a Drupal site-builder or frontend developer looking to get into Drupal backend development, or perhaps you're already a PHP developer and looking to get familiar with Drupal. If so, this session is for you.

Overview

Instead of the first obligatory "Hello World" example code, we will create a new Drupal 7 module that improves the UI of a popular contrib module.

We will build a fully-working module from scratch in 40 minutes. This session will discuss best practices prior to building a module, how to organize your custom modules, tackle a real-world problem, troubleshoot, and step through the process from inception to completion of a new module.

Audience

PHP developers new to Drupal, and site builders that are interested in development. Assumes basic knowledge of PHP and CSS.

Topics Covered

Hooks overview.
Research before creating a module.
Best practices for development in Drupal.
Common troubleshooting tasks.
How to organize your modules.
Creating a module.
Drupal-specific functions.
Brief overview of the Drupal developer's toolbox.

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

jcrespo

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 14:00 to 14:45

Track:

Development

Module Testing Made Simple

rablack — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 21:08:07 +0000

Drupal has a module called SimpleTest for setting up automated tests. Despite its name it is not simple to use effectively. This sessions aims to remove some of the mystery around SimpleTest and Unit Testing in general.

I will start by introducing the concepts of automated testing frameworks and how to get started with SimpleTest.

I will then cover solutions to the three big problems people tend to have with SimpleTest in Drupal 7:

Understanding the principles of SimpleTest
Understanding how to make unit testing work for you, not against you
Understanding the constraints of the Drupal environment. Drupal and PHP make unit testing a little harder than it is in C++, C# or Java.

I will finish the session with some discussion about testing in Drupal 8, where structuring your unit testing well becomes even more important.

This session assumes basic knowledge of PHP and Drupal 7 modules.

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

rablack

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 15:00 to 15:45

Track:

Development

Web Developers' Summit

John Bickar — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 17:48:18 +0000

John Bickar and Marco Wise from Stanford IT Services will facilitate a roundtable discussion among web developers, to share tips, tools, tricks, and best practices. Attend this session to learn and share about:

Git
Drush
IDEs
Development and staging workflows
Best practices

We speak PHP, MySQL, bash, tcsh, and mod_rewrite here.

Session Notes

Some of Our Favorite Tools (in no particular order)

Selenium IDE - (with a drupal-specific pugin js file user extension)
Jenkins
Live reload
grunt - Javascript task runner
bundler
guard
live css
sublime (text editor)
Fun with git! (our favorite git commands)
- git blame
- git cherry-pick
- git log -s
- git bisect
New Relic
PHPStorm - IDE for make glorious Drupal
xdebug
xhprof
komodo
vagrant
- PuPHPet
- VagrantBox
- Vagrant Cloud
aquia dev desktop
pushd
launchbar
alfred
quicksilver
sauce labs
c-scope
Features
jmeter
loader.io
ab
pound
varnish
memcache

Pain Points

drush make integration w/ hosting
css tool -> live reload /omega 4 screencast, code kit
RAM
puppet
github orgs
github vs d.o.
selenium -> jenkins
drush rsync as root
web hosting
sysadmin + access

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

mistermarco

John Bickar

Session Time Slot(s):

Friday, April 18, 2014 - 15:00 to 15:45

Track:

Development

Migrating from Drupal to Drupal: Using migrate and migrate_d2d

Kristen Pol — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:54:01 +0000

Drupal 8 is coming soon (well, when it’s ready ;) Drupal 7 is mature and has some years in it left. But, there are plenty of Drupal 6 and, gasp, Drupal 5 (and maybe even Drupal 4) sites out in the wild. In Drupal 7 and earlier, you could use the “upgrade” path for moving a site from an older (major) version of Drupal to a new version… like Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 or Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. Not that this was necessarily simple to do though. When skipping versions (e.g. Drupal 5 to 7), when doing a redesign, or due to other factors like a hacked codebase, the “upgrade” path doesn’t make sense or isn't feasible.

Enter the migrate module

The migrate module provides a framework for migrating any site into Drupal and the migrate_d2d module makes this even easier for migrating from Drupal site to Drupal site. These modules provide base classes and helper functionality for mapping between entities, maintaining relationships between data, testing migrations in small batches, rolling back failed migrations, and more.

This session will cover

Planning for a migration including entity mapping
High-level overview of migrate architecture
Dependencies and order of execution
Handling managed files
Consolidating content types and migrating nodes to other entities
Custom code in preImport, postImport, prepare, prepareRow, and complete functions
Using drush for testing and real migrations

About the speaker

Kristen has been working with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, and SEO. She has presented at DrupalCon Portland, several BADCamps, several Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Checkout her drupal.org page for a partial list of presentations and check out more info at http://www.hook42.com/team/kristen-pol.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

Kristen Pol

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 14:00 to 14:45

Track:

Development