Steven Merrill

Tagged “drupal”

  1. Combining Tasks with Grunt

    I was recently asked to help out with a few build steps for a Drupal project using Grunt as its build system. The project's Gruntfile.js has a drush:make task that utilizes the grunt-drush package to run Drush make. This task in included in a file under the tasks directory in the main repository.
  2. Testing Drupal with Ghosts and Gherkins at DrupalCampNJ

    This weekend marked the second annual DrupalCamp New Jersey at beautiful Princeton University.

    I was happy to fill in when a presenter dropped out and presented a session called "Testing Drupal with Ghosts and Gherkins". In this presentation, I talked about how both CasperJS or Behat could be brought to bear to test a Drupal application and gave some demos of each. The slides are embedded below.
  3. Access PHP, MySQL, jQuery, and Drupal documentation offline on your Mac with Dash

    Wouldn't it be great if there was an easy way to access php.net or other documentation offline or on a plane?

    UPDATE: Sadly, as this blog post went to press, two important updates came out that change the usefulness of this blog post. Dash is now ad-supported, and secondly, it ships with a Drupal DocSet available for download, so that's one fewer step you have to perform to have all the docs that matter to you in Dash.
  4. Coat Your Website with Varnish at DrupalCamp MD

    The Drupal community is exploding! I've had the pleasure to speak at two nascent Drupal camps (New Jersey and Maryland) in as many weeks.

    Today I gave a revamped version of my "Coat Your Website with Varnish" session at DrupalCamp MD. I updated some of the information about Drupal configuration and an overview section going over some of the basics of headers and caching.

    The entire presentation is embedded below and is also available on Prezi.com.
  5. Drush phpsh Integration Demonstration

    I gave a 5-minute lightning presentation at the October 2011 Drupal NYC meetup about Roger Lopéz's phpsh plugin for drush.

    phpsh is a project by Facebook that provides a much more useful REPL (read-eval-print-loop) environment for PHP, similar to Ruby or Scala. The Drush phpsh plugin adds an easy way to generate ctags for code completion in your phpsh (as well as your favorite editor) and a way to run a persistent PHP session with a fully bootstrapped Drupal instance. It's really useful for testing out APIs.

    If you missed it in person, you can watch the video embedded below.
  6. Coat Your Website in Varnish

    Last week at the Drupal NYC meetup, I gave a presentation about the Varnish reverse proxy cache.
  7. Color Me Flexible: New options for colorable D7 themes

    In case you haven't heard: the Bartik theme is now in core and, after some refinement, will be the default theme for Drupal 7. This is thanks to the phenomenal effort of many contributors from around the world.

    I've been happy to help out on Bartik over the past several months and have worked quite a bit on improving the core color module's usefulness to themers who want recolorable themes. Tonight I gave an impromptu talk to the NYC Drupal user group about D7's color.module and Bartik.
  8. Everything Old is New Again

    It's time for my quarterly blogging drive, and to start, here's some information on my ever-increasing need to try out cool web technologies.
  9. Need for Speed

    I've been doing some pretty exciting things recently with website performance. I always disliked doing IT work in the past, but the challenge of setting a server up to be able to withstand crushing traffic is now quite intriguing to me.
  10. Why I Hate Drupal: Friday the 13th Edition

    Now that I'm back from my month-long blog hiatus and from DrupalCon DC 2009, I thought I'd throw up a little post in the same vein as walkah's brilliant Why I Hate Drupal talk.
  11. Scaling Drupal: Not IF... HOW

    What do Fast Company, The Big Money, The Onion, Lifetime Television, SonyBMG, Flex.org, DressupChallenge.com, and NowPublic have in common?

    All are popular sites, some with traffic of a million or more pageviews a day. But there's more.

    They all run on Drupal.

    Some people still ask if Drupal can scale. We say, "It's not a question of IF, but HOW".

    Come and hear how we scale sites like myLifetime.com, TheBigMoney.com, and DressUpChallenge.com.
  12. Version Your Views: D5 Reminder

    In a previous article I extolled the virtues of keeping your Views in code, which lets you deploy or change them as easily as uploading or updating a module on your production site. In the article, I wrote about using Drupal 6 and Views2 to do so.
  13. Back to Blogging

    Welcome to the new (and completely empty) Grenade Sandwich. My name is Steven Merrill, a classical singer and technologist, and I'll be your host.
  14. We're Ramping Up for DrupalCon in DC!

    We're proud to announce that Tree House Agency is a gold sponsor of the upcoming Washington, D.C., DrupalCon in 2009. We've been working to steadily increase our involvement in sponsoring Drupal community events, from being a Bronze sponsor of DrupalCon Barcelona con to a Silver sponsor of DrupalCon Boston, and now being a gold sponsor of both Do It With Drupal and the Washington, D.C. DrupalCon.

    My name is Steven Merrill, and I'm the newest developer on board with Tree House Agency. I initially met Tree House at DrupalCon Boston, so I'll be introducing our plans for the Washington, D.C. DrupalCon. Since DrupalCon Boston, we've done quite a bit, and a lot of that will be reflecting in what we talk about in Washington, D.C.

See all tags.