Spokane Day-time Learn/Co-Work Group Feb 11

What we discussed at the meeting:

• Jon and Diane have figured out how to get PDF printing working on a site they've built, using the "Printer, email, and PDF versions" module https://www.drupal.org/project/print. However, they found that the documentation for this module (https://www.drupal.org/node/190171) was confusing and incomplete -- Jon had to email the developer of the module to get instructions. Jennifer suggests that they fix this problem:
  - Log in to drupal.org
  - Edit the pages so the documentation makes more sense.
  Drupal documentation is edited by the community, like a wiki. Anyone can edit any page, and you are encouraged to do everything from fixing typos to making the content on the documentation pages better. Please do!
• Domain Access https://www.drupal.org/project/domain -- Jon has a question about how to push content from the production site from production to staging to dev.

  He's decided to push the entire database from production to staging to dev, and then go edit the settings for Domain Access (probably in a database table!) so that it is looking for the right family of sites on dev/staging instead of the production family of sites.

  Jennifer points out that another option for synchronizing content from one site to another is the Migrate module https://www.drupal.org/migrate -- but this does require some work to set up. There's a Drupal to Drupal sub-module that can help with the setup work: https://www.drupal.org/project/migrate_d2d -- check out their UI.

• Jennifer talked about Content, Configuration, and State information, and how they are all munged together in the Drupal database in Drupal 7 and later, and much better separated in Drupal 8. See https://www.drupal.org/node/2120523 for more information
• Shawn asked about the usage stats information near the bottom of project pages on drupal.org, such as:
  

  Reported installs: 6,043 sites currently report using this module. View usage statistics.
  Downloads: 122,450

  The answer is that the "Update" module (which is part of Drupal Core, but is optional), when it checks for available updates, sends a request to Drupal.org to find out if a later version is available. Drupal.org counts these requests (somehow) to get the statistics. We looked at the code, which is in the update.fetch.inc include file, and it sends, for each module/theme on your site:
  - An anonymous version of your site's base URL, which is hashed with your private site key (so it is really anonymous)
  - The name of the module/theme
  - The version you are using, but only if it's enabled on your site
  - The list of sub-modules/themes within that project that are enabled
  - Presumably, drupal.org can also figure out what IP address this request came from.
  If you don't want this information sent to Drupal.org, disable the Update module. See also https://www.drupal.org/node/329620

  Shawn wants to know if this data is available... Jennifer pointed out the page
  https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/api
  that makes some drupal.org data available via an API, but it doesn't seem to include project usage statistics. But you can go to
  https://www.drupal.org/project/project_module and sort by "Most installed" to find a list of the most popular modules.

• Diane asked about making an event calendar. Useful modules:
  https://www.drupal.org/project/calendar
  This requires Views and the Date API module; see project page for details. You'll make a content type for Events, and then display them in the calendar. The project page also tells you how to make calendars, upcoming events blocks, etc. using Views templates. It's really fairly straightforward.

  There's also the Full Calendar module, which has some drag-and-drop capability, and Shawn says it works well, although it is probably less mature than Calendar.
  https://www.drupal.org/project/fullcalendar

  Another possibility is to make Google Calendars and embed them in pages.

• Shawn asked about the possibility of using Views on some data from a Magento database. Jennifer says yes, you can do it. What you need to do is:
  - Make Drupal aware of the database, in your settings.php database section (it needs to be able to connect to the database tables).
  - In a custom module, implement hook_views_data() to tell Views about the database tables, their relationships (joins), and fields/sorts/filters. Once you do that, the data will be available in the Views UI just like the nodes, comments, etc. that Views already knows about.
  - There is a file called views.api.php in the Views download that explains this hook. There are examples in the modules/*.views.inc files in the Views download (and it's covered in Jennifer's programming book).