Wellington meetup notes - Tuesday 2 February 2016

My notes from the first Wellington Drupal meetup for 2016.

The notes roughly follow the agenda (http://www.meetup.com/Wellington-Drupal-Meetup/events/228220802/).

Summary

• Around 15 people for the first 2016 meetup.
• More modules to test out.
• Some great contributions to the community.
• A presentation on initial attempts to migrate a D6 site to D8.
• A lessons learned 'horror story'.
• Great discussions about managing client sites and scaling, and payment gateways.

Welcome to new attendees

It was great to have four new attendees at the meeting, and to hear what they are using or planning to use Drupal for.

Drupal opportunities

Chris and Hugh are looking for work.

CatalystIT is looking for full time developers.

Module highlights

Enabled modules (enabled_modules): shows a list of enabled modules for a site (I'm not sure I've found the right module that was discussed).

Field group link (field_group_link): makes everything in a group of fields clickable, rather than clicking on individual components. Also good for accessibility.

Simplify (simplify): hides fields in the user interface - this helps makes editing forms more user-friendly for content editors.

Drupal remote dashboard (drd): manage and monitor multiple Drupal installations.

Wanted - ideas on the best way to extract and update jpeg exif metadata. Discussed options, including command line tools such as image magic. More ideas welcome.

Community contributions

Shout out for the three 2016 Catalyst Academy students working with Sean on Drupal (@catalystacademy). They contributed six patches to core, one is now committed and five are RTBC. (I also hear that there were contributions to the beer_o_clock module!)

Marco raised an example of how raising an issue on drupal.org can be extremely helpful to others. No one had posted about the issue, once Marco did others commented that they were having the same problem. End result is that he wasn't alone in having the issue, and the work arounds posted are helpful to others in the future, even if no change is made to Drupal itself.

Git workflow for development teams

Brief discussion about git workflows for development teams, especially those new to Drupal. Development involves managing the code as well as the configuration that lives in the database. Using the features module was highly recommended (D7 and below).

Sean recommended searching for the article on 'successful git branching' (A successful Git branching model - http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ - hope this is the right one).

Using the git flow extension (creates aliases for git commands) was also recommended.

A useful presentation is Emma Jane Westby's DrupalCon Los Angeles 2015 presentation 'Avoiding the Git of Despair' https://events.drupal.org/losangeles2015/sessions/avoiding-git-despair , as well as her gitforteams.com resources.

Presentations

I did a quick presentation about initial attempt at migrating a real D6 site to D8. Main issues experienced were custom date fields not migrated, node input form displays summary and body separately by default for migrated content, node revisions are migrated but not displayed, URL aliases migrated but not recognised (patch available), and format filters need manually updating. Significant number of contributed modules required for the D6 site are no longer required for the D8 site - the main one still required is pathauto. Slides are available at https://goo.gl/DNqEGN

Thomas shared a lessons learned 'horror story'. A site was handed over to the client on an 'as is beta/proof of concept basis', client managed to WSOD the site, after investigation it turned out that the site administrators (who were still new to Drupal) enabled a module that wasn't removed and this caused the problem. Lessons learned - uninstall and remove the 'loose wires' (modules not required), and always have a last known good backup! (Hope I got this right).

Questions and discussions

Managing client sites and scaling

Discussed ideas on how to better manage and update client sites (around 100). Managing smaller client sites and scaling sustainably is difficult. A linear increase in clients, and trying to manage updates individually can quickly become unsustainable. It might be manageable at 30, but at 100 it is more difficult.

Various approaches were discussed, including:

• Using something like Aegir, Panethon and Acquia Cloud
• Using multisite (having one core to update)
• Using a distribution for 'cookie cutter' type websites, but providing some UI options for changing, for example colours
• Using drush and drush up

Payment gateways

Discussed various payment gateways for ecommerce sites, options included DPS (for NZ based payments) and Paypal (especially for handling any currency). Braintree was also mentioned.

Amazon like recommender module

A question was asked about a recommender type module like Amazon, but no one had any immediate ideas. For example, 'people who bought XYZ also bought ABC'.

Thanks!

A big thanks to our awesome sponsors and organiser:

• CatalystIT (http://catalyst.net.nz/) - for the venue
• Sparks Interactive (http://www.sparksinteractive.co.nz/) - for the beer and pizza
• XEquals (http://www.xequals.co.nz/) - Alex Matthews for getting us organised!