Tagged “development”

1. Testing Drupal with Ghosts and Gherkins at DrupalCampNJ February 2013

   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.

2. Access PHP, MySQL, jQuery, and Drupal documentation offline on your Mac with Dash May 2012

   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.

3. Coat Your Website with Varnish at DrupalCamp MD February 2012

   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.

4. Let's Be Upfront About Performance at DrupalCamp NJ February 2012

   I just presented "Let's Be Upfront About Performance" as a session at the inaugural DrupalCamp NJ.

   My presentation is embedded below. Go forth and make fast websites!

5. Using HipChat through an IRC client with BitlBee December 2011

   Here at Treehouse Agency, we love IRC, as does the rest of the Drupal community. Still, IRC ports are often blocked, and not everyone is comfortable using IRC. We've recently been using HipChat to set up chat rooms for certain new clients.

   I already route most of my AIM and GTalk interaction through an IRC gateway using BitlBee, and I wanted to hook HipChat up to an IRC client as well. Here's a guide on how to do this.

   (Note that I was having trouble joining channels in my LimeChat last night as I was writing this up, but I might just be missing something. Try it out!)

6. Drush phpsh Integration Demonstration November 2011

   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.

7. Ensuring your Vagrant's box is weatherproof: A quick Veewee tip October 2011

   We'll be doing a screencast series soon on using the Vagrant gem to distribute and manage virtual machines so that your entire team (yes, even Windows folks!) can do development on their local machine with the same software that's on your production Linux servers.Another useful tool in the Vagrant user's arsenal is Veewee. Veewee lets you automate the VirtualBox application to install a full operating system with just the packages you want and need. Veewee does have some built-in validation tools, such as vagrant basebox validate BOXNAME, which will run a set of Cucumber acceptance tests to ensure that the virtual machine should work properly when brought up with Vagrant, as well as with the Chef and Puppet configuration management tools.

8. Version Your Views: D5 Reminder February 2009

   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.

9. Speed Up and Version Your Views November 2008

   Since getting started with Drupal over two years ago, the sites I’ve built with it have naturally gotten bigger and bigger in scope. As your sites get bigger and bigger, you always look for ways to keep your site running as smoothly as possible, and this usually ends up meaning getting rid of queries wherever you can.

   One feature of Views which is often used by module developers is the ability of a module to expose a set of default views. The calendar module, for example, provides a default calendar view in both its Drupal 5 and 6 versions. This is an obvious asset for developers of contributed modules: if your module interfaces with Views, it makes sense to provide a default view that users can modify.

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