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

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
jhodgdon's picture
Posted by jhodgdon on July 19, 2016 at 3:45pm
Start: 
2016-08-11 10:00 - 12:00 America/Los_Angeles
Organizers: 
jhodgdon
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, August 11, 2016, 10 AM to noon
We meet on the 2nd or 3rd Thursday of each month at this time/location. Log in and join the Spokane Drupal User Group (see sidebar on https://groups.drupal.org/spokane-wa ) to be notified of future meetings, events, and discussions (typically just a few email messages per month).
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). However, the meeting could be canceled if the organizer isn't sure anyone is coming.
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!

Comments

Meeting notes

Posted by jhodgdon on August 17, 2016 at 12:07pm
jhodgdon's picture

Sorry, I went out of town for the weekend on Friday, and in the hustle and bustle, forgot to post the notes about what we talked about at the meeting last week! Also forgot to schedule next month's meeting (coming shortly)... Meanwhile, here are my notes:

  • Diane showed us a site she built in the past few weeks:
    http://bitterrootmountainpublishing.com/authors/
    It uses the Nodequeue module
    https://www.drupal.org/project/nodequeue
    to determine the order of the items shown on that page. You could instead use a numerical "Order" field to determine the order, but Nodequeue has a nicer user interface -- you can go to the Nodequeue page and manage the list all in one place, vs. having to go edit each individual content item separately.
  • We talked about Text fields vs. Taxonomy for classifications, like book genres, book age groups, etc. Jennifer thinks Taxonomy is easier to deal with, but you can certainly use a Text field if you prefer. With Taxonomy, you can edit the terms (options) easier, and you get a listing page for free (whether you want it or not).
  • Security updates...

    Notices get published on https://www.drupal.org/security and you can subscribe by email (and probably should!).

    Read the announcements in detail to see if you need to urgently update, or if you can be a bit more calm about it.

    There are two steps in doing any update:

    a) Download the new files and copy them to your site -- make sure to delete the old files before copying in the new files, so that you don't have any old files hanging around that were removed.

    b) Navigate in your browser to example.com/update.php to run the database updates that go with the new code files you put on your site.

    See https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/updating-your-drupal-site for instructions.

  • Updating Drupal Core (7.x)... When you download Drupal Core, you have the following directories and files:
    - A bunch of *.php and *.txt files at the top level -- these need to be copied/replaced on your site.
    - Directories (folders) "modules", "themes", "misc", "includes", "scripts", and "profiles" -- these need to be copied/replaced on your site.
    - Directory "sites" -- DO NOT REPLACE THIS ON YOUR SITE. That has all of your stuff -- your add-on modules, your uploaded files and images, your theme, and sites/default/settings.php with your site database settings.
  • In Drupal 8.x, at the top level you have directories "core" and "vendor". You need to replace these on your site, plus one or two top-level .txt and .php files. Most everything else has been moved into the "core" directory. Again, DO NOT REPLACE THE "sites", "modules", "themes", or "profiles" DIRECTORY ON YOUR SITE.
  • We actually did an update of the 7.x XML Sitemap module on Lisa's site (using the Update Manager user interface), and of Drupal Core 8.x on another of Lisa's sites (manual process).

Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon

Follow-up - Panels security update

Posted by jhodgdon on August 18, 2016 at 4:10pm
jhodgdon's picture

As a follow-up to what we discussed/did last week at the meeting... yesterday there was a security announcement about the Panels and Panelizer modules. This one seems pretty critical to me -- if you're using Panels or Panelizer modules on your site, you should definitely update!

Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon