Drupal

Slovenian Drupal community celebrated the release of Commerce 2.0

slashrsm — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 13:59:42 +0000

Slovenian Drupal community celebrated the release of Commerce 2.0 slashrsm Mon, 25.09.2017 - 15:59

As you may already know the Commerce Guys team released the first stable Drupal 8 version of the truly flexible eCommerce suite last week. In order to celebrate this important event many parties were held all around the globe. Slovenian Drupal community definitely didn't want to miss that.

We gathered at the sprintaj.si headquarters in Izola, Slovenija. Sprintaj.si is not a classical "Drupal" business; they are a digital print shop. They are also a happy Drupal Commerce user and this was their way to show appreciation and give back to the community. Sprintaj.si was also one of the most interesting eCommerce projects I've been involved with. They support many different printed matters and their prices are always calculated on the fly based on the customer's needs. Their killer feature are custom formats and If you ever worked on an eCommerce project you can imagine that this results in some pretty hefty pricing rules.

At the party we had two sessions:

Iztok Smolič from AgileDrop presented most important new features and changes that Commerce 2 brings and
Kevin Kaland from WizOne solutions shared his experience with migration of a Commerce project from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

After the more educational part the more fun side of the event continued. Our hosts prepared a bunch of super tasty burgers and sponsored a small barrel of beer. OMG, we could easily repeat that!

Photos by: Aleš Rebec and Ben Rajnović

We would like to congratulate the Commerce team for this important milestone. You rock!

Call for help with Media source plugin porting

slashrsm — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 08:42:41 +0000

Call for help with Media source plugin porting slashrsm Wed, 16.08.2017 - 10:42

As you may already know Media entity module entered Drupal 8.4 as Media module earlier this year. This was the result of years of hard work in contrib and core space. While the module stayed conceptually the same we used this opportunity to clean it up and refactor some things; mostly to make APIs even easier to understand and use.

Media entity comes with the concept of so-called source plugins (also called type plugins in the past). They are responsible for everything related to a specific media type: they have knowledge about their nature, about the way they should be stored and displayed, they are aware of any business logic related to them, etc.

There were many plugins already available before Drupal core decided to adopt the module and they mostly lived as separate modules in contrib space. Since the API changed a bit during the core transition all this plugins need to be updated. The process is pretty straightforward, but the number of modules that need to be worked on is quite high. This means that we'll need quite some help from the community to do this as fast and as effectively as possible.

Here is where you come in!

Are you interested in contributing but don't know how? Are you looking for a task that is relatively simple but not completely trivial? Then the porting of media source plugins might be a really good entry point for you!

There is a meta issue that is trying to keep the overview over the porting process. You will find the list of modules and their current status in it. In order to get familiar with the changes that were introduced during the core transition you should check the relevant change record. All information that is needed for ports should be available there. If you'd rather work with examples then take a look at Media entity image and Media entity document, which were adopted to core as Image and File source plugins respectively.

When you decided which module deserves your attention check its issue queue. If there is already an issue about the porting get involved there. If there is not create one to let others know that you are working on the port. In any case make sure to add its reference to the meta overview issue. This will help us to keep the general overview over the process.

Need help?

Have you checked all the resources I mentioned above and you feel that there are still things that are not entirely clear? Come to the #drupal-media channel on IRC. We are hanging out in that channel most of the times. Our weekly meetings happen in the same channel every Wednesday at 14h UTC.

Time to take some time off the Drupal community

slashrsm — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 08:11:30 +0000

Time to take some time off the Drupal community slashrsm Tue, 28.03.2017 - 10:11

When I joined the Drupal community I felt that I arrived in the enthusiastic, welcoming and positive environment. I felt that all contributions are appreciated and that we're all following more or less the same goal. This belief was also mostly the source of motivation for my extensive contributions to the Drupal 8 Media initiative in the past 4 years or so. This has dramatically changed in the last year or so and seems to be getting worse all the time.

Our community has governance and conflict-resolution rules. Everything should be clear and transparent. At least in theory. But in practice things don't work that way. Decisions (political and technical) are often made behind closed doors where only small fraction of the community is allowed to participate. Decision processes are nontransparent and leadership doesn't seem to feel any need to improve that. This was also the main reason why I recently decided to discontinue my DA membership.

I think that, in order to survive in the long term, we'll need to reform our community to become truly transparent and democratic. We've been "living" in a dictatorship and it has been working for us so far. But history shows that too much concentration of power in an small ruling clique almost always leads to its abuse (I strongly recommend this book).

My impression is that the community in general is getting increasingly toxic. It feels that there is more and more hypocrisy, lies, secret goals and partial interests being involved (and I think that the lack of transparency contributes to that). Best indicator for in my case are the community events which have (with some rare bright exceptions) become a burden instead of enjoyment for me. I still enjoy meeting some people that have become my friends during the years, but I recently started seeing the community in general as increasingly negative, abusing and exhausting.

Stress and bad mood directly linked to the happenings in the Drupal started affecting my personal life, including relations with my family. This is not acceptable and I decided to take some time off to think about the situation and to decide if and to what extent I want to remain active in the community. This decision was not made solely due to the most recent ousting (which also clearly showed how the community and its leadership actually work). It is based on many events that happened in last year or so.

This is my personal decision and has nothing to do with my employer. I really enjoy working at MD Systems and have no intentions to introduce any changes into that part of my life.

Get ready for the Media workshop at Drupal dev days Seville

slashrsm — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 11:43:57 +0000

Get ready for the Media workshop at Drupal dev days Seville slashrsm Wed, 22.03.2017 - 12:43

Tomorrow I'll be giving a workshop about the Drupal 8 media. As part of it we'll build a "media" site from scratch. We will start with the standard Drupal installation, add modules and configuration and see how far we can get.

If you are planning to attend the workshop and want to be fully productive I'd ask you to take some time and prepare your development environment. We will need Drupal 8 checkout with the following modules:

Besides that we'll also need Dropzone and Slick libraries, which you can install based on the docs provided in the README files of the respective modules ([1], [2]).

You can download all dependencies manually or use the project template that I provided for you. Simply clone the repository and run composer install && composer drupal-scaffold in the project root.

Want to learn Entity browser?

slashrsm — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 15:17:56 +0000

Want to learn Entity browser? slashrsm Wed, 15.02.2017 - 16:17

One way to start is to check the session that gave at the Drupal dev days Milano in June 2016. I went through the architecture of the module and most common use cases.

I also proposed a Media workshop for Drupal dev days Seville where I want to cover the entire Drupal 8 Media ecosystem from the site builder's perspective. Besides that I also proposed a session about my recent experiments with Elixir. Not necessarily Drupal or PHP related, but I think that looking beyond our bubble can be very beneficial.

Possible solution for knowledge sharing in the Drupal 8 media domain

slashrsm — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 09:48:05 +0000

Possible solution for knowledge sharing in the Drupal 8 media domain slashrsm Mon, 06.02.2017 - 10:48

Drupal 8 has very good media handling support. Media team has (and still is) working hard to make Drupal the best CMS in the world when it comes to managing media. We have many modules in the contrib space that solve most of the common use cases in the domain. There is one problem though; there are many of them and some of them are quite complex and abstract. I've noticed that many times users struggle to completely understand what each module is responsible for, which features it comes with and specially how they all together fit into the bigger picture.

There are so-called feature modules (such as File entity browser, Media, Content browser, Media entity browser, ...) and distributions (such as NP8, Thunder, Lightning, ...) which ship with default configuration for the 80% use case. They are plug and play solutions, but it is also possible to use them as a base for learning and research of the ecosystem.

But unfortunately that's not enough. While some people learn the quickest by exploring existing solutions (myself included) that isn't the case for everyone. A lot of people need more guidance and those are the users that we're currently not supporting as much as we should. In order to drive further adoption of the media ecosystem and Drupal 8 itself we need to solve this knowledge sharing problem that I believe we have.

I was thinking about this problem a lot lately and I think I came up with an idea that could help us solve it.

It is a book.

A problem solving oriented book which would guide users through the ecosystem, explain individual parts and, most importantly, offer a bunch of recipes for the common problems. It wouldn't be one of those 800+ pages technical books (who has time to read that?!). Rather it would be a compact source of information which you can have on your desk and use it when you run into a problem. We all want to build websites and the purpose of this book would be to help you do that as fast and as efficiently as possible.

Book would produced by the people that designed and built the Drupal 8 media ecosystem, which would ensure highest levels of quality. It would be released under a Creative commons license with its sources publicly available on GitHub. Printed and compiled eBook versions would be sold through the standard channels.

Why copyleft?

I honestly believe into the free sharing of knowledge in our society. My opinion is that the only way to evolve our civilization is to freely share the knowledge that we have. There are also practical reasons besides the philosophical one. Making the book publicly available ensures that it will be likely updated as the ecosystem and Drupal itself evolve and change. This wouldn't necessarily be the case if the standard copyright license would be used.

Great idea! Why didn't you realize it already?

I am glad that you agree! :) Well... it is not that easy. Producing a real book is not that simple and it also comes with quite some expenses. There is the cost of the content production, proofreading, design, print, shipping, ... I've done a back of a napkin calculation and estimated that we'd need around 20.000€/$21.500/17.000GBP to do it.

My idea was to start a crowdfunding campaign to raise this amount. Backers would, depending on the perk level, get an eBook, print edition or both. Besides that they'd also get early access to the repository with the ability to provide feedback during the process of writing.

Now I need your feedback

I need to hear from you. Is this something that would benefit the community? Is there any better way to educate users about the ecosystem? Would you prefer an online video course instead of a book? In-person training? Something else? Would you be prepared to back the crowdfunding campaign? If yes, what amount would you be prepared to invest?

Please use the form below to share your thoughts. Thank you! I appreciate it.

Playing with the Sculpin static site generator

slashrsm — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 21:08:24 +0000

Playing with the Sculpin static site generator slashrsm Sun, 29.01.2017 - 22:08

I can hear you asking: "What the hack is that?" Let me quote the Sculpin's authors:

Sculpin is a static site generator written in PHP. It converts Markdown files, Twig templates and standard HTML into a static HTML site that can be easily deployed.

Few days ago a need for a very simple website arose which was way too simple to use Drupal 8 for it. Even Wordpress would be way over the top. On the other hand I really wanted to try static HTML generators for a while and this seemed a perfect opportunity to do that.

There are many static HTML generators out there, Jekyll probably being the most popular (it is also supported by GitHub pages, which makes hosting trivial). I, however, decided to go with Sculpin because it is written in PHP and is using Symfony and Twig. I am already more or less familiar with all these technologies, which made the task a bit easier.

Result?

Few hours, very simple Bootstrap based theme, FlexSlider, some Markdown and violà! Site was done and running. It is performant, I can host it literary everywhere, no need to clear caches every time when something behaves strange, no updates, security out of the box, ...

I could totally use something similar for this blog too. Heresy against The religion of Drupal™ you say? Maybe.... But think about it. I am already using Markdown (not really a WYSIWYG fan) to write my posts. That wouldn't change at all. I use Disqus for comments, which would play perfectly fine with static HTML. I could use Liquid Forms or something similar to run the contact form or simply ask people to reach out via Twitter or IRC. That's it. It could probably be done in a day while it took me 3 or 4 days to migrate my Drupal 7 blog to Drupal 8. Not to mention the significantly easier maintenance.

I might even consider doing that when the migration to Drupal 9 comes around. We'll see what the hip thing at that time will be...

All this got me thinking...

Solutions like Jekyll and Sculpin are gaining popularity in the lowest end of the web market. By that they are eating into what used to be market of CMSes like Drupal and Wordpress just a few years ago. Benefits are clear (mainly performance and easy maintenance). The user experience and the ease of use is still on the CMS side, but for slightly tech savvy users it is completely doable. And this might very likely change in the next few years (every software tries to improve over time, right). That said, this kind of tools might (together with pure SaaS solutions) dominate the lower-end web market in the future.

"But Drupal 8 is enterprise-oriented. That's what we care about!" you'll say. OK. Probably true, but...

It is easier than ever to build custom web projects in PHP. In the times before Composer, Packagist and all other nice stuff that we have today existed it was total PITA to find and bring a bunch of 3rd party libraries together to help you build a custom app. In just a few short years this became much simpler and will become even easier as our tools and ecosystem evolve. And PHP is not alone in this world. There are many new and modern languages/platforms that are all doing similar things from this perspective. All of them have some kind of package manager, dependency resolver, repositories of 3rd party packages, etc. It is to be expected that this will only continue. Tools will become even easier to use, 3rd party libraries/packages will become more powerful and building custom projects based on them even faster.

Higher-end projects usually have some budget to invest into development. What would you choose if the cost of development using a CMS like Drupal would be similar to the cost of building a custom project? Specially if you don't need all the features and complexity that CMS offers?

"Are you saying that Drupal is going away?" you ask.

Of course not. Drupal is a great tool that can efficiently solve many problems. But there are definitely better tools for some others. It also seems that there is strong competition on all sides of the web market, which is eating into the pie that was reserved for traditional CMSes in the past. Drupal will need to think about this and position itself into that segment of the market where it is the strongest. The days of "Drupal for everything" are clearly over.

What is your opinion about this? What do you think future will bring us? Let's continue the discussion in the comments below!

Entity browser feature freeze will happen in two weeks

slashrsm — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 08:56:05 +0000

Entity browser feature freeze will happen in two weeks slashrsm Thu, 19.01.2017 - 09:56

Today I released Entity browser 8.x-1.0-beta4. Release includes some nice features; specially Improved MultiStep selection display, which vastly improves editorial experience.

This is also the last release before the feature freeze, which will happen on February 3rd 2017. No new features will be accepted after that day until 8.x-1.0 is released. Feature requests that are not breaking backward compatibility will be accepted after that.

Huge thanks to all contributors. It has been an interesting and very rewarding ride!

Join us at the next Drupal Media sprint at the Mountain camp in Davos!

slashrsm — Fri, 06 Jan 2017 22:19:55 +0000

Join us at the next Drupal Media sprint at the Mountain camp in Davos! slashrsm Fri, 06.01.2017 - 23:19

Are you excited about the recent improvements in Drupal core Media? Would you like to join us at one of the next sprints and help us reach our goals? Now you can!

Drupal Mountain Camp 2017 will happen between 16th and 19th February in the lovely Davos. Drupal, code community, snow, fondue, outdoor activities and much more. Definitely something that should not be missed!

And the best part? There will be Media sprint going on throughout the event. Eager to join? Simply add yourself to the sprint attendance list and show up. We promise you the best sprint ever!

Results of the Drupal 8 media sprint

slashrsm — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 16:20:42 +0000

Results of the Drupal 8 media sprint slashrsm Mon, 02.01.2017 - 17:20

In December media team met in Berlin and sprinted on Drupal core media improvements for a week.

Today's @drupalmedia sprinters. Awesome group that is making #Drupal the best media management CMS! pic.twitter.com/G2LqD603pH
— Janez Urevc (@slashrsm) December 15, 2016

I demonstrated the results of the sprint in a short video.

Demo is based on the sandbox project that includes the following patches: