Wellington meetup notes - Tuesday 1 March 2016

My notes from the second Wellington Drupal meetup for 2016.

The notes roughly follow the agenda (http://www.meetup.com/Wellington-Drupal-Meetup/events/228913000/).

Thanks to Tom for stepping in to facilitate for Alex.

Summary

• Around 15 people attended.
• More modules to test out.
• Some great contributions to the community.
• Great discussions about requirements and Drupal learning resources.

Welcome to new attendees

It was great to have three new attendees at the meeting.

Drupal opportunities

Sparks Interactive is looking for full time experienced developers.

CatalystIT is looking for full time senior developers.

Module highlights

Support (support): provides a basic ticketing system and helpdesk that is native to Drupal, offering complete email integration.

Coffee (coffee): helps you to navigate through the Drupal admin faster.

Also discussed other options for support systems including:

• Use the same system used by Drupal for its issue queue (modules project and project_issue).
• Established bug tracking systems used for free and open source projects, such as Bugzilla and RedMine and GitHub issues.
• GitLab - a great alternative to GitHub, can have free private repositories, can also install yourself (the community edition), has similar issues system as GitHub.
• If you are into agile, then taiga.io may be worth a look.

Community contributions

Dan's and Heike's sprint cards first used at DrupalSouth Wellington 2014, seen at DrupalCon Asia (https://twitter.com/dman_nz/status/701265615940521984).

Everyone was encouraged to update issue queues if you find a solution to a problem - this is a great help to those who have a similar issue.

Requirements gathering

The group discussed some of the good and bad experiences in requirements gathering. Some of the discussion was also about delivering the product.

I'm not sure I captured everything discussed, but here are some of the main points:

• Peer review is important:
  • Interdisciplinary teams work better than siloed groups
  • Code review is important
  • Ideally different teams should sit with each other (for example, front end and back end)
  • Use Drupal coding standards (php code snipper)
• Different site sizes (and budgets) determine what can and can't be done - it can be easy to say something for a requirement, but it can be complex to deliver.
• Bad experience where design and development teams can't talk with each other (where design team not familiar with Drupal) - things had to be in writing, some of the changes could be more easily made by just explaining to the development team about what was required - often easy to fix straight away.
• Agile development:
  • Approach to development can make a big difference - agile vs waterfall
  • Many organisations say they want agile, but really still have a waterfall mindset - transition to agile can be difficult
  • Main elements of agile - iterations, release often, prioritise using user stories
• Important that those involved in requirements gathering understand how Drupal works and the different roles required, for example: theming, developing, server configuration and setup, site building, etc.
• Use a top tasks approach for identifying site features and content, Gerry McGovern - What really matters: focusing on top tasks http://alistapart.com/article/what-really-matters-focusing-on-top-tasks
• Test things with real users.

Drupal learning resources

Some suggested resources:

• https://simplytest.me/ - spin up a temporary Drupal install in the cloud with any modules/distributions (now lasts for 24 hours)
• Drupal guides and documentation - https://www.drupal.org/documentation
• https://drupalize.me/ - high quality video tutorials (paid)
• https://buildamodule.com/ - high quality video tutorials with text (paid)
• http://codekarate.com/ - learning resources for Drupal (videos/blog)
• Programmer's Guide to Drupal: Principles, Practices, and Pitfalls. Actual book that doesn't talk down to you and covers the main differences in code and architecture between Drupal 7 and 8 http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027799.do
• Lynda.com tutorials - free with Wellington Library Card information (see http://www.wcl.govt.nz/blog/index.php/2015/09/26/lynda-com-now-free-with... )
• Tutsplus tutorials - Lots of them are free. Here's one on SASS (not free though).
• http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/courses/14-days-to-learn-sass/lessons/what...
• https://www.ostraining.com/class/d8-beginner/ - Drupal 8 training series (videos) (free)

Questions and discussions

For Drupal 8 are there any alternatives yet available for:

• Backup and Migrate (backup_migrate): drush commands (sql-dump(http://drushcommands.com/drush-8x/sql/sql-dump/) and archive-dump(http://drushcommands.com/drush-8x/core/archive-dump/)) and cron at this stage would be the best alternatives
• Webform (webform): for straight forward forms use the contact module included with Drupal 8 core and contact storage (contact_storage) module, watch the issue for the D8 port (node/2574683) for other ideas or to contribute to the D8 module.

Gold offered to provide a walk through of using features at a future meetup. If you've got other topics you would like someone to present on, the post of Meetup message board or let Alex know.

Are there any usable theme frameworks available yet for D8?

• Omega
• Bootstrap
• Foundation

Lots of positive support for SASS - the better way to better manage your CSS:

• http://www.cssauthor.com/sass-tutorials/
• https://leveluptutorials.com/tutorials/susy-tutorials

Briefly mentioned was Mattermost, as a free and open source alternative to Slack for communication (another alternative is Rocket.Chat).

Tips (thanks Gold!)

To see what is happening in your environment when developing:

• php.ini - change setting for development so that you can see full error messages (see http://php.net/manual/en/errorfunc.configuration.php#ini.error-reporting)
• tail -f /path/to/web/server/error.log - continuously show web server error messages
• drush wd-show --tail - continuously display watchdog messages (http://drushcommands.com/drush-8x/watchdog/watchdog-show/)

Showcase

These two websites were briefly shown:

• promote.kiwi.nz
• jville.nz

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! (and Tom for facilitating today)