Spokane Web Technology Group - Sept 17 - Online

Here is what we talked about at today's meeting:

• Next meeting in two weeks! I'll schedule it after I post this. Note: We still have this left-over agenda item for sometime about Search Engine Optimization. People who want to can create an account on both the Google and Bing search and webmaster tools sites before the next meeting:
  https://www.google.com/webmasters/
  https://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/
• Events:
  - DrupalCon Europe will be in December online: https://events.drupal.org/drupalcon
  - Other regional events are happening online, so you could meet people from all over the world -- check https://groups.drupal.org/events?type%5B%5D=regional for events
• Chrys told us about Webmin https://webmin.com/demo.html
  A system for doing all kinds of Linux things on a local web site, including setting up virtual hosts for your local system. For each host, you can choose the PHP version etc. Can be used to turn your local computer into something like Cloudways or another expensive hosting platform.
• Chrys asked about setting up a site with composer that wasn't originally built with Composer. There's a documentation page:
  https://www.drupal.org/docs/installing-drupal/add-composer-to-an-existin...

  This process is fairly manual and tedious. Chrys wondered if there is some way to automate it -- have a script that would figure out what modules/themes you already have and add them to Composer? No one at the meeting knew... Jennifer suggests either looking for a blog post (web search) or asking in Drupal Slack:
  https://www.drupal.org/slack

• Matt asked about a hack he did... Views was using an H3 tag for some field output, and it was tough to override. So he used the "Rewrite" feature, and put something like this in the rewrite:
  </h3>[markup that he wanted]<h3>
  That is -- closing the unwanted H3 tag, substituting his own markup, and then opening back up the H3 tag. No one at the meeting saw any problem with it, even though it's a bit weird!
• Matt is using the Entity Print module to export various pages to PDF files. But he's running into problems with the PDF generator. Using
  https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf
  but it only uses an old CSS version (2.x).

  Chrys suggests contacting the developer on GitHub and/or looking at their issue list, and seeing if they have plans or if they could be induced to have plans to support later CSS versions.

• Matt has started documenting his site, with a bunch of spreadsheets, to keep track of the pages and views. Good idea!

  He also used Yed to make charts to document his pages and views:
  https://www.yworks.com/products/yed
  Can he make this visualization into a spreadsheet, or go back and forth between a visual and text-based format?

  Maybe you could make the canonical source be the spreadsheet, and then use Yed's import feature to make the charts automatically?

  Maybe consider using Tableau? It does really cool data visualizations (not free):
  https://www.tableau.com/

  Or an open-source alternative?
  https://alternativeto.net/software/tableau/?license=free

  D3.js is another option, for making charts out of Drupal/web data.
  https://d3js.org/
  There are Drupal modules for D3JS that may help:
  https://www.drupal.org/project/charts (uses C3, which is like D3)
  https://www.drupal.org/project/d3 (D7 only)
  https://www.drupal.org/project/charts_graphs (D7 only)

  Data visualization is a big field... trying to get data into a format that humans can understand.

• Finding open-source alternatives to software:
  - https://alternativeto.net/
  - Web search for "like [NAME OF SOFTWARE]" "open source"
• Paul had a question about permissions and roles in Drupal 8/9:
  For the D7 version of FarmOS, they had a custom module that enforced specific permissions for some pre-configured roles. Modules could add to those, and users should not be able to edit them. Jennifer suggested an approach:
  1. The custom module could use a "form alter" to alter the user permissions form, setting the checkboxes for those pre-configured roles to read-only in the form array. Then the Drupal Form API will enforce that and not let users edit the permissions (but they would be able to see the roles/permission on the page). Docs on forms, form alters, and form elements:
     https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core%21core.api.php/group/form_api/9.0.x
     https://www.drupal.org/docs/drupal-apis/form-api
     https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core%21lib%21Drupal%21Core%21Form%21fo...
     https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/elements/9.0.x
     https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core%21lib%21Drupal%21Core%21Render%21...
  2. The custom module could respond to modules being installed or removed. At that time, it would query modules to see if they have added any permissions for any of the custom roles (via a hook presumably?), and update the configuration for those roles. Hooks to respond to:
     https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core%21lib%21Drupal%21Core%21Extension...
     https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core%21lib%21Drupal%21Core%21Extension...

     Individual modules that change their permissions would need a hook_update_N:
     https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core%21lib%21Drupal%21Core%21Extension...

• Making a theme extensible or customizable:
  - Can use the core Color module to let users set colors. The core Bartik theme does this (Drupal 8)
  - Can have other configuration/settings for the theme and customize whatever you want, if you program the theme to respond to those settings.
  - CSS Editor module: https://www.drupal.org/project/css_editor
  - For specific customers, they could have a child theme
  https://www.drupal.org/docs/theming-drupal/creating-sub-themes

  On another note, Matt suggests using the "Barrio" base theme for Drupal 8 (based in Bootstrap).
  https://www.drupal.org/project/bootstrap_barrio

• Matt and Paul discussed SASS and PostCSS for pre-compiling CSS using variables and things like that. PostCSS is being used by the new core Claro admin theme.