D8 - part 1 - site building and content author improvements

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alancsilver's picture
Start: 
2015-10-28 13:00 - 14:00 America/Chicago
Organizers: 
Event type: 
User group meeting

Location: TBD.... I'll get you that info by Monday the 26th

xjm will give us a good overview of - site building and content author improvements in the newly released drupal8

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Location

alancsilver's picture

This meeting will be held in room 1381 of the chemistry building on the UW-Madison campus

This room is a computer lab on the 1st floor of the building.

Some questions from today's session

xjm's picture

Thanks everyone who came to the demo today! Here are a few questions we had during the meeting that I didn't know the answer to or didn't have time to follow up on fully:

  1. Questions about deploying configuration from development to production, how configuration is stored, etc.: I'll be doing a demo of the configuration system next time (Nov. 20, location TBD). (For those who saw my longer configuration system demo at a user group meeting earlier in the year, it's mostly the same but with a couple of small improvements.)

  2. What happens to my files when no more pieces of content use them? How do I delete files from my site if they're no longer used?

    We demoed the /admin/content/files page and showed that it automatically listed the number of times the file was referenced. When we removed the last reference to a file, it switched the file from being listed as PERMANENT to TEMPORARY. We thought the temporary file might be deleted on cron, but it wasn't. Turns out that the file just wasn't old enough! catch linked me the file module's hook_cron() implementation: file_cron()

    If you don't speak PHP or are unfamiliar with D8 APIs, that says that files are only deleted when the file is older than the temporary_maximum_age configuration setting, which I confirmed you can configure on /admin/config/media/file-system. The default is 6 hours, which seems sensible -- that way, if someone removes a reference to a file by mistake and cron happens to run just then, they have a chance to restore it before the file is gone forever. You can also configure it on the form so that the files will never be deleted. But it does turn out it will be cleaned up automatically after all!

  3. We also looked into whether it might be possible to remove the file manually through the UI. I tried adding the operations dropbutton to the file view just to see what happened and I broke it. ;) I looked in my error logs and the message was this:

    Uncaught PHP Exception Drupal\Component\Plugin\Exception\InvalidPluginDefinitionException: "The "file" entity type did not specify a list_builder handler." at /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/d8rc2/core/lib/Drupal/Core/Entity/EntityManager.php line 359

    Basically, we found a bug in Views and/or the Entity system! I'll see if there's an existing bug report for this or file one if not, and link it here. Maybe it'll be fixed in the next release candidate or a later patch release.

  4. Questions about migrating from Drupal 6 or 7: I'll also cover this a little more next time.

I'll add more comments as I remember other questions. In the meanwhile I encourage everyone to download a copy of D8 and test and play with it!

The file operation link bug issue

xjm's picture

Looks like someone else already reported this bug:
https://www.drupal.org/node/2587551

Contributed modules and D8

xjm's picture

There was a question at the end of the meeting as everyone was heading out about contributed module availability for Drupal 8: what the status of a contributed module in Drupal 8 might be, what modules are in core, what modules are deprecated in favor of other core or contrib modules, etc.

This prompted me to look into contrib tracking more and I found that several resources were incomplete!

Probably the most up-to-date resource at the moment is the contrib project tracker:
https://www.drupal.org/project/contrib_tracker
Note that this isn't actually a module at all -- just a Drupal.org issue queue for the community to create and track the status of all modules and their upgrades to Drupal 8! This is great because anyone can add an issue for a module they need using the standard template, linking any relevant resources in that project's queue or elsewhere. For example, I went through last night and identified numerous modules that were no longer needed as contrib because they were provided by Drupal core, and created issues for them.

Another tool that's less hands-on is the upgrade status module:
https://www.drupal.org/project/upgrade_status
This is a module that you can install on your D6 or D7 site to get a report of whether the modules on that particular site are available for D8 or not yet. Pretty handy. Unfortunately, the module is currently completely out of date in terms of what's available in D8 core, which inspired me to work on https://www.drupal.org/node/2172239 and a couple of related bugs

Finally the Drupal.org modules listing is searchable by 8.x compatibility, though this is a bit confusing since it displayed any module that ever had an 8.x version, even stuff like Views and Entity Reference that later got moved into core. ;)
https://www.drupal.org/project/project_module?f%5B0%5D=&f%5B1%5D=&f%5B2%...

Hope that helps! We'll talk more about upgrading modules next time.

Wisconsin

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