Drupal

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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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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The people have spoken, and the DA has answered! There will now be an AV equipped BoF room devoted to the Art of Project Management in its many forms. We’d like to send a shout out to the DA for the help in securing a space*, to our community’s project managers for your feedback and ideas and to the presenters who generously offered to join in and share their ideas!

While I was working on a project here at Propeople, I had a requirement to limit the options for an exposed filter in order to get only options that will give some results. Unfortunately Views don’t provide this kind of functionality.

Let's start with an example. I have a Content Type called "People" which has a Term Reference select list. Generally speaking we have to alter the “views_exposed_form”.

Follow the next 3 steps:

1. Create a custom module and implement hook_form_alter(). I strongly recommend not to use a form-specific alteration like hook_form_FORM_ID_alter() instead of global hook_form_alter() because it is difficult to control and manage your code. function [my-module-name]_form_alter) {
dsm($form); //be sure to enable devel module.
}

2. Now you should get the content from the $form variable

3. Next, we have to select all the matching results based on our conditions in order to edit the options from $form['term']['#options']. Personally, I prefer to query directly with db_select, but feel free to use EntityFieldQuery if you prefer.

function [my-module-name]_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) {
if ($form['#id'] == 'views-exposed-form-people-list-page') {

$available_terms = _get_available_terms();

if (isset($available_terms)) {
// Unset the existing list and add new one with available terms.
unset($form['term']['#options']);
$form['term']['#options']['All'] = '- Any Term -';
foreach ($available_terms as $available_term) {
$form['term']['#options'][$available_term->tid] = $available_term->name;
}
} else {
// Unset all options except '- Any -'
unset($form['term']['#options']);
$form['term']['#options']['All'] = '- Any Term -';
}
}
}

function _get_available_terms() {
$query = db_select('taxonomy_term_data', 'terms');
$query->join('field_data_field_reference', 'term_ref', 'term_ref.field_reference_tid = terms.tid');
$term_result = $query
->fields('terms', array('tid', 'name'))
->execute()
->fetchAll();
return $term_result;
}

That's it. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and subscribe to Propeople RSS feed to stay informed about our activity inside the Drupal community.

Language English Tags: DrupalDevelopmentTutorialsCheck this option to include this post in Planet Drupal aggregator: planet

On the eve of DrupalCon Portland, we're happy to be able to get another free community video out, Installing and Using Dreditor. What's more exciting though, is that this video is part of our Community Tools workshop, and in an effort to spread Drupal community involvement further than where we can show up to run this free workshop, we're putting all of our materials and notes online for everyone to use freely, with the Community Tools curriculum.

A Workshop is Born

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Join Kyle Hofmeyer, Joe Shindelar, Blake Hall, and Greg Dunlap to talk about the somewhat mysterious concept of entities, which was introduced to Drupal in Drupal 7. We explain what entities are, why we have them, and what the future may hold for them in Drupal 8.

• Lullabot DrupalCon Party!
• Working with Entities in Drupal 7 video series
• Drupal 8 Entity API improvements issue
• Entity API module
• Core Entity documentation
• Contrib Entity API module documentation
• Examples project
• DrupalCon Portland Sprints
• DrupalCon Session: Status of the New Entity API and Typed Data
• DrupalCon Session: The Old and New Field API in Drupal 8
• DrupalCon Session: Rest and Serialization in Drupal 8

Figuring out Entities for Drupal 7 — and 8

We're pleased to announce Drupal Face to Face, our joint initiative with the Drupal Association to promote Drupalcon and Drupal Association membership. The purpose of the project is to capture the exuberance and authenticity of the Drupal community and invite others to join. We expect to bring Drupal Face to Face to Prague and other large or important Drupal events as an ongoing project. We hope you'll participate.

Drupal Face to Face is:

Episode Number:  140 Post Topics:  Drupal Taxonomy Contrib Drupal Commerce Drupal 7 Drupal Planet

In this episode we continue learning about Drupal Commerce and begin learning how to set up Drupal Commerce Product Attributes.

In this episode you will learn:

• How to set up Drupal taxonomy vocabularies and taxonomy terms to use as product attributes.
• How to add Taxonomy term reference fields to Product types to create Drupal Commerce product attributes.

DDoD Video: 

A new theming engine, Twig, is coming along with Drupal 8's adoption of the Symfony framework. And it's downright magical.

Instead of having theme functions that have to be overridden, everything becomes an (easy to read, easy to modify) template. Instead of having to figure out render arrays, themers can use consistent template variables. And instead of having insecure output, Twig sanitizes everything by default.

If you've ever worked on a WordPress or Tumblr theme, the approach will feel pretty similar. Here's what it looks like:

And oh by the way, it's well-documented — no small point in the Drupal community!

Sound too good to be true? Well, it almost might be, because a lot has to happen in order to get this into Drupal 8. There's a Twig-focused sprint happening right after Drupalcon, so if you think this is great, come pitch in! Because if things don't get done, Twig will be held until Drupal 9. No Drupal themer, veteran or newbie, kitten or human, wants that to happen.

I spoke to Jen Lampton (with a contribution from Fabian Franz) about how Twig will result in happier veteran Drupal themers, happier new Drupal themers, and happier Drupal kittens. Be sure to show up for their featured Drupalcon session (along with Drupal CSS innovator John Albin Wilkins), “Using Twig: The new template engine in Drupal 8,” on Wednesday at 3:45 PM.

IB: What's one thing you're most excited about with Twig?

JL: Replacing the template engine with something completely different means that we get to take a good hard look at absolutely everything in the current theme system, so we can do a clean sweep.

FF: What I love the most about Twig is the syntax, and how it cleverly makes it possible to lazy-render things. The possibilities of having an interpreted language are endless.

IB: Can theme developers start converting/creating their themes now?

JL: No! If you have the time to start converting your own themes, then please, please, please use the time to help us make the theme system what you want it to be — instead. There will be time to convert your themes later, but Drupal itself can only be monumentally improved right now.

IB: Will frontend developers and themers coming from other CMSes — like WordPress — find Twig easier to use?

JL: Yes. Front end developers coming from everywhere will find Twig easier to use. For starters, Twig looks a lot more like HTML, so if you don't know PHP you'll still be right at home. For people who do know PHP and don't know Twig, there will be a learning curve, but it's far far FAR less steep than learning about what Drupal had done to PHPTemplate.

IB: Twig sounds great! What can people do to help make sure it happens for Drupal 8?

JL: There are four main areas where we need help right now, as outlined in our Twig TODO wiki.

1. Help us test all the patches.
2. Help us fix issues with the patches.
3. Help us improve the markup in core (after being converted to Twig).
4. Help us clean up the rest of the theme system.

If people are interested in any one of these four areas, they can come to the sprint immediately following DrupalCon and get some hands-on help making Drupal better. We need all the hands we can get since we are up against some major deadlines, so please please please come help us!

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It is common knowledge that Drupal 8 contains Views module, thanks to the work from the Views in Drupal Core (VDC) initiative.

Our contribution to the VDC initiative was working on abstracting Views UI's modal pattern into a generic modal API in core.

Recently one of the coolest pieces of this API was committed to core.

You can now load any content in a modal simply by adding a class and an attribute to any link.

Sound cool? Read on to learn more.

It’s that time of year again—time for DrupalCon. Aten Design Group is headed to Portland and proud to sponsor what is expected to be the largest DrupalCon ever.

Our team is once again involved in many ways, including speaking, content selection and sponsoring after hours events. We’re also bringing our latest event-themed sketchbook and brand new "Work That Matters" posters hot off the press, so don’t forget to come by the Aten booth (#235) to pick some up for yourself.

Start off the week by having fun, meeting interesting people and doing some good at the DoGooders Happy Hour on Monday at 4 PM. We will be getting together with other Drupal community members to benefit one of the community's long-time contributors, Aaron Winborn who has been battling late stage ALS.

After a Tuesday full of sessions, the Opening Reception at 5:30 PM is a perfect time to get a sketchbook and poster at the Aten booth. Then head over to the Women in Drupal Reception at 6 PM, which we are thrilled to support.

On Wednesday at 1 PM, check out Karyn, Scott and the rest of their panel present Making Drupal Meetups & Events Rock in room C123 (Trellon). Then stick around for our lightning talk at 4:15 PM on the Day Stage, Planning and Executing Multiple Projects for Maximum Efficiency and Amazing Results. Justin and I promise to keep it short and sweet.

We've got sessions lined up for Thursday too. Ken will be presenting Design Smarter, Not Harder at 1 PM in OR 203 (Palantir) directly folowed by John and Garrett’s session, Dapper Drupal - Custom Tailored Themes at 2:15 PM in OR 201 (Phase2).

In true DrupalCon fashion, we’ll be sprinting, sprinting, sprinting on Friday. Karyn and others will be mentoring people new to contribution sprints, so everyone can come join the fun.

** UPDATED ** We're going to live broadcast everything so those who are unable to join in person can still join virtually! Keep tabs on the #pmofs IRC chan and ask your questions (moderated by Don Vandemark) and we'll post the link to view here asap wednesday morning portland time.

Now also posted on Drupalcon Portland website!

 

The PMoF's Are Happening!

Thank you to everyone who helped us put this together, to the DA (*cough* Holly *cough* Steph) for the fabulous A-V equiped room they're snagging for us, to my fellow PM's for your feedback and ideas and to our presenters who generously offered to show up and do their thang!

Below is the official schedule set for Wednesday 22nd! All those looking for some awesome Project Management content are welcome to join us but it'll be first come first served regarding spots!
 

Wednesday May 22nd Room B110 - Forum One Communications 
starting after the keynote and coffee break!

 

09:00am Keynote Karen McGrane: Thriving in a world of change: Future-friendly content with Drupal 10:15am Coffee Break in Hall C + D 10:45am The Science of Guessing: Drupal Estimation Techniques from Project Managers
Speakers: Chris Strahl, Jakob Person and Shannon Vettes 12:15pm Fixed-Bid FAILAPALOOZA: Benchmark discussion of failures and solutions 01:00pm How to incrementally integrate QA into Agile
Speakers: Everett Zufelt and Akshay Barve 02:00pm Watergile Pros & Con, A Round Table Discussion 03:00pm Walking Break 03:15pm Agile + Drupal the Four Kitchens Way
Speaker: Todd Nienkerk 04:15pm Agile Workshop & Estimation Techniques: Teaching your team to do agile

Can't wait to see you guys there, start spreading the word!

Tags: project managementagileDrupalConportlandPlanet Drupal

It can be tough sometimes for web developers. That beautiful/exciting/inspiring new site that’s almost ready to launch looks great and works well in all browsers… except for Internet Explorer.  Menus don’t align properly, rounded corners disappear, images don’t quite fit the same… It’s a continual challenge to help IE fit in with the big boys Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Prepaid ticket holders, sponsors with unredeemed coupon codes, and any unregistered person looking to not pay the onsite price to attend DrupalCon have just over 24 hours to register before online registration closes this Friday, May 17 at 5:00pm PDT.

I saw this tweet flashing by in my stream today:

What immediately caught my eye was Drupaleros, the Spanish word for Drupal User. Its such a great word and just sounds great.

Or what do you say about:

We are the Drupaleros!

Awesome isn't it?

Even better, if you know your Spanish it is unisex too.

How about adopting it as the official name for us who are passionate about Drupal?

Lets all be Drupaleros!

Read the full "We are the Drupaleros" post on www.tsvenson.com