March 5, 2009

IRC backchannel log for Totally Rocking Your Development Environment, DrupalCon 2009
DrupalCon Day 1: Notes and Links from March 4, 2009
Presentation Zen: Visualization of the credit crisis

IRC backchannel log for Totally Rocking Your Development Environment, DrupalCon 2009

March 5, 2009 - Categories: drupal

IRC chat, thanks to Stephane Corlosquet

This was for my Totally Rocking Your Drupal Development Environment talk at DrupalCon 2009. =)

bryankennedy	my favorite development environment requirement = electricity
bryankennedy	glad i got near the power strips
jrglasgow	Be Lazy!
lyricnz	Such infectious enthuiasm
jrglasgow	http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris
danblah	hah nice jrglasgow
jackaponte	is now known as palante_jack.
jrglasgow	http://api.drupal.org
jrglasgow	What? I only maintain 5 or 10 modules myself!
danblah	lol, she has to much time on her hands!
jrglasgow	Hey, I’v read about all the modules, at one point in time, then there just got to be too many.
danblah	so true nothing worst is when i start putting a module together then find that it was already done a few hours in
tcconway	drupalmodules.com rocks
edeloso	biggest problem is sorting out which is the most current and well developed for the specific domain
jrglasgow	danblah: I’ve done that as well
Morbus	what’s going on in the trellon room?
alaken	Going through all 4000+ modules is being lazy???
lladnar1_	I guess you have to work hard to be lazy
scor__	Morbus: Totally Rocking Your Development Environment
scor__	http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/session/totally-rocking-your-development-environment
bryankennedy	It’s lazier than writing a module that’s already been developed.
jrglasgow	Morbus: we are discussing being lazy, the first of the 3 virtues of a programmer
lladnar1_	is now known as lladnar1.
scor__	bashing windows and IE
Morbus	thanks.
jrglasgow	scor__: that’s exactly why I can this week
jrglasgow	^^ came
vasi	For the firefox profile manager on Mac OS X, here’s my way to do it: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2008/08/shortcut_to_lau.html#comment-2622794
Lane	did she use some term to describe “relentless improvement”? “kaisa” or something?
Lane	or did I just mishear?
vasi	kaizen i think
scor__	vasi: thanks for sharing your tips – keep it coming!
vasi	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
tcconway	http://getfirebug.com/
Lane	vasi: thanks!
vasi	np
vasi	Safari and Chrome have “private mode”, that also lets you log in as two drupal users in one browser
vasi	(Firefox 3.1 should have that too)
Lane	tamper data sounds fun just in general, nevermind for development work
jrglasgow	When you hate clicking on things, TAB is your best friend
jrglasgow	Lane: Tamper Data is fun, especially when writing screen scraping scripts.
tcconway	any good iMacros tool for the Mac?
vasi	tcconway: i don’t think there’s anything free
tcconway	figures….
danblah	dude thats crazy
danblah	this ext sounds sick
vasi	wow, Drupal for firebug shall be my new god
vasi	worships
danblah	https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8370
tcconway	I’m in LOVE http://drupal.org/project/drupalforfirebug
japerry	omg bouncy bouncty!
bryankennedy	isn’t selenium kinda like imacros?
bryankennedy	http://seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/
danblah	lol
bryankennedy	you can use that on a mac
tcconway	OW – PAIN
lladnar1	Drupal for firebug rocks!
tcconway	amazing!
tcconway	I can’t live without AdminMenu
japerry	tcconway: same here.
danblah	admin menu ftw
jrglasgow	Instead of Admin Menu I use Simplemenu, SimpleMenu has the full Navigation Menu, not just the Admin menu http://drupal.org/project/simplemenu
tcconway	Sacha is adorable!
tcconway	(couldn’t resist)
bryankennedy	Login with email should be in core.
jrglasgow	bryankennedy: I agree, let’s make a push to get it there
vasi	any recommended debugger UI?
jrglasgow	tcconway: I agree
vasi	i’m using Komodo
vasi	but it’s non-idael
vasi	*ideal
sceo	XDebug = like Krumo?
vasi	(i find Eclipse’s debugger painful)
japerry	didn’t emacs die?
alaken	I’m using freeware Komodo edit
sceo	+1 for Komodo Edit
vasi	(and don’t even get me started on vi)
japerry	ducks
bryankennedy	jrglasgow – yeah, i knew I should have had a commitment to do some code before I suggested
vasi	Does the freeware Komodo have debug?
jrglasgow	+1 Komodo Edit
bryankennedy	xdebug is more than krumo
jrglasgow	vasi: no
vasi	sceo: no, not at all like krumo
bryankennedy	you can use krumo with xdebug
vasi	it lets you actually step through lines of code
danblah	w00t! shooting
vasi	as they execute
jrglasgow	+1 Git
alaken	Komodo edit – MUCH better with the Komodo Source Tree add-in
Moonshine_	can be handy for xdebug also… https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3960
tcconway	what? You have to check things in?!?!
bryankennedy	brining new drupal developers into SVN or CVS is a big learning hump….so useful though
sceo	puts xdebug on the list
tcconway	makes a note to checkin.
edeloso	I agree with the whole source tree… makes sure that version of core code is tied with the site…. upgrading a multisite hosting can be a nightmare
tcconway	works really well for us too.
bryankennedy	whole tree in svn is great, especially b/c most websites have SOME non-drupal pages or info in them somewhere
sceo	source code control + drupal — so many approaches. we battled this for hours and hours at my company… we don’t really still have a good method
tcconway	wait – you can have subdirectories in /sites/all/modules?
vasi	sceo: yeah, it’s hard
vasi	tcconway: yup
bryankennedy	we use sites/all/modules/dev and then svn ignore on trunk for dev modules
tcconway	wow.
vasi	bryankennedy: doesn’t that make your dev env hard to migrate?
openprivacy	check out drubuntu’s layout http://groups.drupal.org/node/6270
tcconway	bryankennedy: brilliant!
bryankennedy	vasi: nah, you just ignore it on trunk, not on the branches
vasi	bryankennedy: nice
Lane	so what’s a good VCS for a single-person shop with no VCS experience or even awareness?
bryankennedy	you have to do some manual moving around when you branch
Lane	well, some awareness.
tcconway	Lane: I’ve had good success with VisualSVN
vasi	Lane: i’d start with SVN
Moonshine_	likes subversion as it’s time tested, lots of tools and not CVS
nick_vh	Finally got some connection, yeah!
roginald	nice
vasi	but git is nice, too….it just breaks your brain
bryankennedy	and svn has a free book
bryankennedy	http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
roginald	i started using svn for local with 0 knowledge and it seems fine
bryankennedy	You can start using svn in a day, it’ll take a year to learn really well.
nick_vh	we use unfuddle for our repository and issue tickets. Really nice tool
openprivacy	svn >> cvs
bryankennedy	But it’s easy to weather mistakes with SVN
bryankennedy	was kicked from the chat room by dcdc. (flood)
tcconway	svn ftw
Lane	thanks all
scor__	bryankennedy: what happened?
Lane	that’s very helpful
Moonshine_	Lane: what os for dev?
bryankennedy	posted too much
bryankennedy	ooops
openprivacy	ubuntu
Lane	linux (CentOS 5) and Leopard
bryankennedy	Sound like we could have an entire session on version control strategies for Drupal.
scor__	bryankennedy: submit a BoF!
sceo	bryankennedy +1 yes and I would definitely go
bryankennedy	BoF?
lladnar1	I still struggle with keeping database changes in svn
edeloso	anyone had luck with versioning and changes to the database for modules that use a content type built with CCK?
lladnar1	Staging and deployment… I’ll be there
Moonshine_	Lane: In Leopard I use Subversion that’s built right into Komodo and SCPlugin for the finder http://scplugin.tigris.org/
Lane	Moonshine_: Thanks.
bryankennedy	lladnar1: yeah totally
alaken	can anyone recommend a how-to for this branch mergins stuff
lladnar1	Anyone have a good answer for database structures and confit settings?
roginald	for a recap of last year’s dev/stage/build talk there is a video of the session here: http://www.archive.org/details/DrupalconBoston2008-BestPracticesInDevelopmentEnvironmentsStaging
bryankennedy	lladnar1: this one helped me at one time – http://blog.daemon.com.au/go/blog-post/merging-with-subversion-and-eclipse
lyricnz	what’s the link to Sacha’s pages again?
lyricnz	notes for this session, that is
vasi	i would LOVE a VCS BoF
vasi	btw, i recommend that people learn how to use the command-line for version control….
bryankennedy	make sure to svnignore your sites/default dir so you don’t put your DB pass in your version control
msonnabaum	yay bash
openprivacy	we rename settings.php to settings.inc and commit that to the SVN repos; then create a 2 line settings.php that includes settings.inc and sets the $db_url
openprivacy	you can also create any other local overrides into the settings.php file
sceo	http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/node/3974
sceo	http://dc2009.drupalcon.org/node/3810
sceo	^^ any of those apply?
vasi	openprivacy: yeah, we do that too
vasi	we call it ‘settings-private.php’
vasi	and then we have tools that check if there’s a settings-private.php nearby, and will read it to autodetect the db/user/password
vasi	makes dump/restore much easier
openprivacy	since we do multisites for every project (Dev/QA/Live) I wrote a pushdb script that moves databases between them, changing all the appropriate values – doing dumps of the from and to DBs first
tcconway	what’s the tag?
openprivacy	it parses settings.php for the db_url
tcconway	vimpirator
tcconway	http://vimperator.org/trac/wiki/Vimperator
nick_vh	aegir
vasi	AEGIR
vasi	http://conkeror.org/
tcconway	http://groups.drupal.org/aegir-hosting-system
nick_vh	real nice tool for lot’s of sites
tcconway	geben
vasi	http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_vhost_alias.html#virtualdocumentroot
openprivacy	I haven’t got geben working yet
tcconway	what’s her blog url?
vasi	we just have VirtualDocumentRoot /var/shared/sites/%-3/site/
nick_vh	unfuddle
vasi	and then you checkout a site inside /var/shared/sites/
nick_vh	www.unfuddle.com
nick_vh	really really good!
lyricnz	has script to upgrade modules between versions, when module is under SVN control – which determines local patches, makes upgrade, reapplies patches, does svn add/delete as required. Maybe that’s useful to someone
japerry	definitely good!
vasi	and it appears as blah.ourdomain.ca
sceo	http://sachachua.com/site/ I think
vasi	blog url: http://sachachua.com/wp/2009/03/01/25-tips-for-totally-rocking-your-drupal-development-environment-pre-session-notes/
vasi	basically with VirtualDocumentRoot, you don’t need vhost
tcconway	quote of the session: “Spaces, no tabs. Spaces, no tabs”
vasi	entab/detab \o/
openprivacy	coder will mark those
lyricnz	Sacha ftw
tcconway	agreed.
msonnabaum	haven’t tried Drush for running update.php, but here’s a kinda ghetto bash script I wrote to run it: http://colonqbang.com/content/automating-updatephp
danblah	w00t for ghetto bash cripts
sceo1	is now known as sceo.
ccalnan	http://drupal.org/project/install_profile_api for those who want to know about install profile
vasi	does anybody use a local DNS?
vasi	i’ve been thinking of doing that for staging….so i can see what a site will look like with the final domain
tcconway	I kinda do…I take advantage of MAMP Pro’s local dnsin’
vasi	ah
nick_vh	http://krimson.be/en/debugging-drupal-6-using-xdebug
nick_vh	another handy url
bryankennedy	great session
vasi	who’s emailing the log?
scor__	http://openspring.net/tip/script-for-dumping-your-drupal-database-by-reusing-settingsphp
scor__	vasi: I will

Totally Rocking Your Drupal Development Environment

DrupalCon Day 1: Notes and Links from March 4, 2009

http://sachachua.com/blog/p/5867

March 5, 2009 - Categories: drupal

Building APIs that Rock
Jeff Eaton

More than 400 people packed into the Acquia Room to hear Jeff Eaton talk about APIs, a surprising number considering the early 9:00 start. Jeff talked about the importance of designing a module so that other modules could use it through code instead of through the user interface. He gave a number of examples, including how Views is divided into the API and a module that adds a user interface on top of the API. Great stuff. Pay close attention to the deadly sins of APIs towards the end of the attention, where Jeff outlines common errors and how to avoid them.

…and all of it was presented in a lively manner, with frequent interjections from a co-presenting puppet! Check it out.

Keynote: Dries Buytaert talked about the history of Drupal and where it’s going. Highlights: Picture of Dries when he started Drupal, complete with sombrero and chess board.

Liveblog
Photoset

Totally Rocking Your (Drupal) Development Environment
Sacha Chua

Around three hundred people attended my session on Totally Rocking Your Development Environment, which consisted of a 40-minute whirlwind tour of my favorite Drupal development tips, and a free-for-all session where people shared their awesome tips too. It was lots of fun! People told me that they enjoyed the energy AND they walked away with a couple of tips that could save them hours of effort and frustration. Hooray!

Session description
IRC backchannel log, Stephane Corlosquet
Outline notes, Jeff Schuler (who did an excellent job at capturing audience tips, too!)
Video, Alan Doucette

Totally Rocking Your Development Environment – also covered mostly stuff I knew, but I did learn a few tips (and also learned a little from my next door neighbor. It was a great talk by an incredibly enthusiastic speaker. I can’t believe though, that she suggested using Makefiles for Drupal!

DrupalconDC Report #1, Michelle Murrain

Handling Asynchronous Data with Drupal
Josh Koenig

Josh Koenig gave a quick demo of how to use Drupal.behaviors to contextually modify webpages using Jquery. Using contexts allows you to make it easy to embed behavior (ex: node edit form) within other elements, like a thickbox.

Session description
Presentation and examples
Video

Advanced Theming Techniques
Trevor Twining and Bevan Rudge

This promised to be quite interesting, but it got derailed halfway through. =| I did pick up a few tips about using preprocess functions as much as possible instead of copying and pasting theme code to override things.

Session description
Video

Business Analytics with Views
Frank Febbraro, Irakli Nadareishvili

Frank and Irakli demonstrated upcoming features that make it easy to summarize and graph data using views. You can configure this module to use the FlashCharts, AmCharts, or Google Charts engine. Interesting! =)

Session description

Boosting Our Raw Capacity to Provide Drupal Training
Sean Effel, Allie Micka, Lee Hunter, and Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg

Sean started by emphasizing that different learners have different skill levels, interests, and needs, and that by addressing those specific needs, we can help people not only use Drupal but also get ready to contribute to the community. He talked about his approach at drupaltherapy.com, where he coaches people on Drupal. He shared the core curriculum he’s figured out, but said that as people move beyond that, people have specialized needs.

Barry talked about the lab hours that his company offers to people who have subscribed to the program. It’s a code clinic where the company helps developers and users with their systems. It’s not open to walk-ins from the street; people have an existing relationship with the company, and that allows the company to provide more targeted help. At the beginning of the session, everyone shares what questions they’re working on. They split up to work on the tasks individually or in small groups. At the end of the session, they wrap up by sharing what they learned, what they didn’t learn, and what kind of follow-up they have planned. The company shares post-session wrap-ups on their website.

Alex talked about how his company strongly believes in training both their developers and salespeople to contribute back to the community. Their training is modeled on the Google Summer of Code, and new employees start off by working on some outstanding tasks. They also give their employees 20% time to contribute to Drupal, often on projects that the company selects. They find that community contribution is a great way to vet people both before and after they join the company.

Lee posed two koans: If you document the software, you’re doing it wrong. Also, put the cart before the horse. He meant that a lot of documentation focuses on the features and the interface of the software instead of what the users want to do, and that writing the documentation before developing the system is a surprisingly effective way to work.

Session description
No video recording