Spokane Day-time Learn/Co-Work Group June 16

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jhodgdon's picture
Start: 
2016-06-16 10:00 - 12:00 America/Los_Angeles
Organizers: 
Event type: 
User group meeting

We hope you can join us for the next meeting of the Spokane Day-Time Drupal Learning and Co-Working Group!

When
Thursday, June 16, 2016, 10 AM to noon
Note that we normally meet on the 2nd or 3rd Thursday of each month. Log in and join the Spokane Drupal User Group to be notified of our meetings.
Where
Spokane County Library - Argonne branch, 4322 N. Argonne Road, Millwood. We are currently meeting in the small conference room at the library. From the hallway, go into the library proper, past the checkout/information desk, take a right and you'll see the room on the right.
To be reminded, sign up!
To receive an email reminder closer to the date of the meeting, log in and click the "Sign up" button; log in and click "Cancel signup" at a later time if your schedule changes and you can no longer come. There's no obligation to come if you sign up (but we hope you will!). There's also no obligation to sign up in order to come (it's up to you if you want a reminder or not).
What
Learning and "co-working" time - bring your laptop, or just watch on the projector screen. Come with a project you're working on, a desire to improve Drupal in some way (documentation, programming, design, marketing etc.), a question about Drupal you would like to get an answer to, or a desire to help others with their projects and questions. Or just come and listen and observe.
Who
Everyone is welcome -- the only prerequisite is having some interest in Drupal. This group is usually 5-10 friendly people, with experience levels ranging from novice to expert, so you'll fit right in. Because of the size of the group, you will have time to share something you've learned, or get your questions answered, or both!

Note: If you'd like to have a meeting at another time that is more convenient for you, please feel free to organize it! See http://groups.drupal.org/node/161584 for a Wiki where people have listed when would be convenient for them to have meetings.

Comments

Wish I could attend..

myke's picture

Wish I could attend this one... my twin boys turn 2 that day.

-Myke

Happy birthday to them!

jhodgdon's picture

Maybe we'll see you at the next one then...

Meeting notes

jhodgdon's picture

Here is what we discussed today:

  • John asked about being able to edit images online in SVG format. There is a JavaScript library he knew about called "SVG Edit":
    https://github.com/SVG-Edit/svgedit

    We searched for Drupal modules that use SVG edit and found:

    Full projects:
    https://www.drupal.org/project/imageeditor
    Seems to be fairly active, and is available for Drupal 7

    Sandbox projects:
    https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/piontekmedia/1344924 (not modified since 2011)
    https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/josegaert/1511596 (not modified in last 3 years)

  • Evaluating modules:
    - Look at when commits were started, how many have been made, when the last one was (upper right corner of project page).
    - How many open bugs (Issues section on right sidebar) -- you might look at what the open bugs are
    - Usage graphs and usage stats (bottom of project page)
    - When the last release was
    - Is there documentation, and is the Project page filled out with lots of info
  • Sandbox modules on Drupal.org:
    - These are experimental, no security reviews, use at your own risk, probably do not work yet or may be unstable.
    - You can get the code for a sandbox module via Git -- click on the Version Control tab on the project page (not Github)... if you know how to use Git at the command line.
    - You can browse the code by clicking on the "Browse code repository" link in the right sidebar (near the bottom).
    - You can search on drupal.org for modules, and choose to include or not include sandboxes (Project Status field in module search).
  • Contacting a module developer:
    - The module page will have a link to the developer (or developers) user profile
    - If you log in to Drupal.org, you should see a tab to Contact the person (send an email via drupal.org form). Most people have this.
    - There are also Twitter and other social media links on profiles for some people
    - If there is a problem or feature request for the module, add an issue instead of using contact form
  • Rules module https://www.drupal.org/project/rules
    This is a generic engine for having the site respond to "events" under certain "conditions" with "actions". Very powerful. Can do anything. Almost.

    Question was about Drupal 8 progress... we looked at the Rules project page, and saw that Drupal 8 development is happening on Github:
    https://github.com/fago/rules
    And we can see there that the latest activity was June 8, so it is still in active progress. Not done yet.

  • Github vs. Git...
    - Git is a project source code collaboration tool (source code version control) (revision history). Other similar tools: Subversion (svn), CVS, RCSS, Mercurial, ...
    - GitHub is a web site that provides "projects" a space for using Git. "Public" open-source projects are free. Private projects can be hosted there too, for a fee. It also has issue lists.
    - The Drupal project officially doesn't use Github. It has its own Git repositories for each module, theme, and distribution project.
  • Pull requests in Git
    - Git has a feature that lets one collaborator on a project "request" that the manager of the project "pull" his/her changes into the project. This is called a "pull request".
    - Github supports pull requests. Drupal.org doesn't.
    - If you want to request changes to a project on drupal.org, instead you:
    -- Create an issue
    -- Make a "patch" file that shows the differences between your proposal and the current source code
    -- Set the issue to status "Needs review" so the project developer will review and hopefully accept your changes.
  • Multisite -- running multiple sites from one Drupal installation
    - The documentation is not good, so it's hard to set up
    - Jennifer suggests not doing it, due to security concerns, in production -- for instance, if people can install modules from a URL (Update Manager module allows this!), they can inject arbitrary PHP code into their site, which can be used to spill over into other sites in the multisite environment. Danger!
    - Could be good for setting up development environments on your own computer
    - Or if you absolutely trust all of the administrative users on all of the sites (like, it's only you).
  • Combining Drupal with other CMS -- getting Drupal features into another CMS or vice versa
    - Short answer: you can't really combine functionality. Each CMS needs to have control over the URLs and the entire page that it is in charge of.
    - Could have some portion of a site, like example.com/partA be Drupal, and some other part, like example.com/partB be some other CMS, so they're separate, or partA.example.com etc.
    - Could have a form on a Drupal site either:
    -- Send information to a 3rd party when the form is submitted
    -- Redirect to some other URL when a form is submitted
    - Can embed one page in another page using an iframe -- you would need to appropriately design the embedded page so it works well in an iframe

    The reason is that the web server (Apache, Nginx, IIS, etc.) ... when it is trying to respond to a URL request, it will first see if the file exists. If it doesn't (conceptually), it will go up one "folder" level, and see if that file exists. If not, ... until it finds a folder that either exists and has some directive of what to do, or gets to the top level. Both Drupal and WordPress provide these types of directives, saying "If you didn't find the file, load up an index.php file and we'll provide the content for the page". So... You need to have the part of your site that is served up by Drupal separate from the part that is served up by WordPress.

  • We fixed up a Rule for Lisa on her site
  • Scott asked about what to learn in Drupal 7 programming that would still be applicable to Drupal 8. Jennifer suggests the Form API. Also how to use hooks is still applicable (but much less useful because most of the hooks do not exist any more in Drupal 8, they are Plugins instead).
  • John asked about "large sites" -- check out the Enterprise group on groups.drupal.org -- it can be done.
  • What about Drupal 8? Lots of modules and themes haven't been ported yet.