LauraRocks

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Drupalcon Vienna

09.30.2017 by LauraRocks // Leave a Comment

Drupalcon Vienna 2017 is over. This time it felt like a week has never flown past so fast. So many interesting sessions, BoFs, trainings, endless conversations, amusement park (!!!) and beer going on that it’s hard to say what was the highlight of this event.

I remember last year coming to (my very first) Drupalcon Dublin by myself and didn’t know what to expect from the con. I had no idea what I was getting myself into – and didn’t expect to find the community that I did. When you work daily with Drupal you sometimes forget what’s behind it all and there is nothing better than a community event to remind you what working with open source software means and how important the community behind is.

I wanted to collect some of the things that I found interesting in Drupalcon Vienna 2017 in this blog post.

Drupal out of the box

There is a lot of interesting projects going on in the community. One of my personal favourites is the “Out of the box” -initiative, a much needed improvement to first-time experience when installing Drupal. There is still a lot of “ground” issues to be solved but the theme is already looking really good and the team behind is very dedicated to make this happen. You can find the project roadmap in www.drupal.org/node/2847582 and Keith Jay has also written a good blog post about the current state of the initiative.

User experience for site administrators

Another thing that was circling in the air was the user experience for site admins. Dries showed a preview of the new layout builder in Drupal 8 and there was also a lot of discussions about improving the user experience in Paragraphs module. With the recent development in WordPress concerning the Gutenberg editor it is about time to do something in Drupal as well. Dries suggested choosing a javascript framework for the admin side of Drupal and that might be the key factor in the success of getting Drupal up to speed with other CMS:s in admin user experiences.

A preview of Drupal 8's experimental layout builder: https://t.co/Y3ljpS3ggT #DriesNote #DrupalCon pic.twitter.com/aUKheoW9AK

— Dries Buytaert (@Dries) September 27, 2017

Looking for someone to help fund Drupal's Paragraphs module: https://t.co/hDnSwbUVHq. Please contact me or @miro_dietiker.

— Dries Buytaert (@Dries) September 27, 2017

Decoupled Drupal

Another big topic was decoupled Drupal. It is not a new subject, and with Drupal 8 and its “API-first”-approach, there has been a lot of progress going on there. There are two separate projects with different approach to  decoupling Drupal and I would suggest anyone interested in this subject to look them up. Even (or especially) if you are not a Drupal developer.

Check out:

Contenta CMS

Reservoir by Acquia

Drupal in Europe

The big question that was also present was the future of Drupalcons in Europe. The Drupal Association has decided not to do Drupalcon in Europe in 2018. That doesn’t mean that this was “the last European Drupalcon” ever, but it means that there has to be a new way of doing Drupalcon sustainably in Europe, whatever that requires. There is already a lot of movement behind the issue and a group has been appointed to work on the best process to include all views and get a good idea of what Drupalcon should look like in 2019 in order to appeal to larger audience.

Drupal Marketing

Marketing of Drupal was another topic that got a lot of momentum in the Drupalcon Vienna. Both bigger and smaller agencies are struggling with the fact that in the current competitive environment of CMS’s, we also have to market Drupal (the software) to the clients along with our own pitch. For that we need something to help agencies. We need an easily available “marketing tool kit” to grow Drupal adoption and showcase what Drupal can do. There were marketing sprints, BoF’s and discussions during the week and hopefully we get something produced as a community. I participated in a BoF “Marketing challenges in the Drupal world”, organized by Marina Paych. There was also a bigger Drupal Marketing Sprint that Chandeep Khosa wrote a post about.

Sprinting

Friday was a sprint day and this time I had a little more experience with sprinting but I still went to the mentored sprints and joined the group working in “Major issue triage”. I think that the process behind that is really useful and the flowchart is very good starting point for a developer that is new to contributing to Drupal. I might just have to organise a local sprint in Finland and follow the same procedure. Anyone interested in helping out?

Community spirit

At a more personal note, this Drupalcon was absolutely amazing because of the new people I met, along with the people I already knew in the community.  I still can’t believe how welcoming and friendly people are in the Drupal community. Where it is a newcomer in Drupal or a “rockstar” core developer, everyone is ready to speak to strangers and make them feel welcome to the community. I saw this happen many many many times during the con and couldn’t be more happier about it. Even Dries came to the sprints on Friday and took the time to talk to people around sprint rooms. I was personally really happy to get to meet Dries and talk about contributing to Drupal.

I am going to miss my friends from the community, but hopefully not for long. There is a huge amount of camps happening in Europe and I have a not-so-secret wish of going next year to Drupalcon Nashville. So see you somewhere!

Categories // You Code Girl! Tags // community, drupal

About Drupal and re-doing stuff (story of my life)

06.22.2017 by LauraRocks // Leave a Comment

So, this is a rant about the day I had yesterday. Or about the weeks I had before today. Or the 3 years I’ve spent with Drupal. Don’t get me wrong, I love Drupal. Today I moved to the other side and love it again but right now, but when I started writing this I just HATED IT SO MUCH!

A have to confess that even though I’ve been doing web developing a *long* time (mainly with PHP & mysql & javascript) I don’t see myself as a real Drupal (8) developer. Maybe with Drupal 7 I still could manage relatively complex problems and projects with custom code but even then I did a lot with just site building. But now with Drupal 8 I’m still at the early stages in the learning curve and just trying to hang on. So my projects so far has mostly been about site architecture, site building, front-end stuff and so on. And so was this project supposed to be. I didn’t have the time or the budget for custom code.

Drupal for ambitious (and small)

I wrote in my earlier post about Drupal being good for ambitious project. Well you know what. We’ve always had ambition, even for the smaller client projects. We still sometimes choose Drupal for the “too small” projects if we see something that we could learn or something valuable extra that Drupal could bring to that client.

What ends up being the most important things for almost all of our clients

  • Multilingual stuff everywhere. And it has to be easy
  • Content being used differently throughout the site. Save in one place, use differently all over
  • Categorizing content
  • Permissions to edit content only tagged to specific category and/or to add content to that category.
  • Microsites
  • Media handling

Yeah, a lot of stuff. Almost all where pretty much tackled with D7, but D8… Some of these seem to be easier, like multilingual, but then when it comes to contrib modules, it can be a real hassle. Some of these are the essence of Drupal for me, like views & taxonomies. Some are hard on both, like media handling. And then the permissions and microsites. And the last one is what bit me hard this time.

I know there has to be an easier way to do these things, but what I ended up doing was basically going with one solution for 3-4 whole days in a period of three weeks and then thinking again and redoing everything in 3 hours. And that has been the story of my whole Drupal journey. Everyone who knows Drupal, knows that there is always at least ten ways of doing things. And many of us go through every alternative of those when we learn Drupal and then (maybe) choose one. Unless maybe if you are in a bigger company and someone tells you what and how you should do things (which would of course save a lot of time…). But I wouldn’t know about that, this has been the “Drupal way” for me.

Microsites with taxonomies

So I needed a super light-weight microsite solution with permissions to people to edit only their microsite and tag some other content to belong to that microsite (but appear also elsewhere). I know that there are cool modules like Groups and Organic Groups and in D7 I have used the Workbench module succesfully, but even that needed some custom code to be able to edit both content and the terms. So everything seemed like an overkill for this project. Moreover, I usually like to know a little bit more about the code of modules I use, and unfortunately I still haven’t had the time to check Groups thoroughly, it seems awesome.

The struggles I confront with microsites and permissions usually are

  • More than 1 person needs to edit the microsite (so no “own” content shortcut)
  • Someone with higher permissions needs to easily make a new microsite (from client’s side)
  • Microsites need a menu and someone needs to edit it
  • There are usually over 50 microsites in one site (so maybe not a menu per microsite)

So what is a microsite then? For our cases it usually is 3-4 nodes grouped together with their own menu. Something has to glue them together. And there my thinking started; so why not taxonomy term? Let’s reference everything with a taxonomy term and then get some permissions in. Next reaction: Oh, cool, taxonomy menu is ported (actually re-written), so basically we could get the terms to the menu without giving editors too much power? With one patch it is actually pretty multilingual, even more cool. But wait, we need permissions, and specifically edit permissions per taxonomy term. Oh, there is Taxonomy Access Control Lite (Tac Lite) already for D8, cool, that should be enough. And the journey went on, I picked few modules here and there, until I realised that getting the taxonomy term page actually to work as a main page for the microsite, getting the taxonomy term references actually working in multilingual site (also as contextual filters in views, that was a pain), working with block visibility in this scenario  was just too much complicated. So, I took a step back and decided to think this over one more time.

This was the time when I realised that maybe I’ve been too ambitious from the start. And made a new, much simpler solution. Sometimes it’s just better to make it again. And again. And again.

One entity as a microsite

So here we are. All good ideas abandoned and feeling the project slipping a little bit to the wrong direction. During the site building I’ve learned a lot, mostly how complex things can get when talking about permissions, menus, multilingual, taxonomies etc.

So what did I realise? Only the fact that like in Drupal 7, you can actually do a lot with just one entity and the amazing Inline Entity Reference. What if we could make the whole microsite only one entity, make the “menu” a little fake by using for example tabs that work with Ajax and comes from jQuery UI, already in the core. We just make one small custom javascript and use the jQuery UI as a dependency in the theme’s libraries.yml file. Now that’s an idea to look into. So I started to build the entity and theme it to look like a small microsite in it self. And the other content that the same user can add, but reference only this microsite? Well, you can use inline entity reference for that!

It gets a little bit tricky when using the entity reference as a relationship in views, (see this). And I always get double content when using entity reference as relationship, but changing query settings fixes that. But besides those, even the multilingual content seems to be in place. And big hurray for entity reference being multilingual!

Conclusions

So, what did a learn. A lot. But mostly that you always have more than one option and usually the most simple or obvious one isn’t the one you start with.

Oh, and one other thing, it’s important. USE Twig Tweak module! Seriously. Even just for drupal_dump(). Or better yet, drupal_view() or drupal_block(). I’m twigging it!

 

Categories // You Code Girl! Tags // D8, drupal, ranting, site building

My own time

06.10.2017 by LauraRocks // Leave a Comment

I have to admit it… I’ve always been a workaholic. It never seemed a problem before I had a child. I used to work long hours and get side projects going on the side as well. And still I managed to get some time for my hobbies as well. I have been a member of an a cappella group for 18 years and also enjoyed skiing in the winter whenever I could. But something changed drastically after having my daughter.

Suddenly I didn’t have any extra time for myself and had to cut the working hours down as well. I had to take time off from my hobbies and there hasn’t been any time for side projects either. So I have to see what happens with this blog…

Getting out and off the computer

When you are a serious workaholic and try to balance your work life with family time, you just need to have something that you can do as a family that really requires you to leave your computer at home. Summers are short or even non-existent in my home country, but when it’s  sunny and warm like today, there’s nothing better than heading to the sea. Today we managed to get a good evening with our friends at a seashore restaurant with a boat. No work, no stress, nothing but the sea, sun and my precious family <3

 

 

Categories // Lifestyle Tags // archipelago, boat, family time

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LauraRocks

Agency partner, Web developer, coder, sitebuilder, mother, a cappella -singer…

These are strictly my own opinions about the world of code and family life and the tricky balance of the two.

I sometimes write bugs in my code and a lot of times (spelling) errors in my blog posts, that’s just life. Everyone gets a syntax error now and then. In code and in life.