Steven Merrill

Tagged “phase2blog”

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Let's Be Upfront About Performance at DrupalCamp NJ

    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

    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. Vagrant and NFS

    One of the most useful features of Vagrant is that it has the ability to share files with the VMs it manages, which lets your team work with the tools they're used to while still getting the benefits of running the full production stack.It can share those files from the host (the machine running VirtualBox and Vagrant) to the guest (the virtualized Linux machine) via VirtualBox's built-in file sharing on Mac, Windows, or Linux. When run on Linux or Mac hosts, it can also share files to the guest via NFS. NFS performs much better for sharing large numbers of files on a Linux or Mac host, which is well documented in the excellent Vagrant documentation. In addition, remember that the directory with the Vagrantfile in it will be shared with VirtualBox's built-in file sharing, so we probably don't want to put our docroot right in that directory.
  7. 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.
  8. End "Works on My Machine" Surprises with Vagrant

    How many times have the following issues happened on a project you've worked on?

    • Notices (or worse) appeared on production because of a PHP version mismatch between a developer's machine and the production web servers.
    • A new PHP extension or PECL extension had to be installed on production because it was installed in WAMP or MAMP?
    • A team member ran into difficult setting up their local environment and spent many hours stuck on something.
    • Team members didn't set up SSL or Varnish on their local machines and issues had to be caught on a dev server.
    • A team member would like to switch to Homebrew, but can't set aside the many hours to redo their setup until a project is done.
  9. Ensuring your Vagrant's box is weatherproof: A quick Veewee tip

    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.
  10. Coat Your Website In Varnish, by Steve Merrill

    The full presentation is embedded below.
  11. Coat Your Website in Varnish

    Last week at the Drupal NYC meetup, I gave a presentation about the Varnish reverse proxy cache.
  12. Fix Common Windows Segmentation Faults with Drupal

    At Treehouse Agency, we often work with internal development teams, and enterprise software being what it is, they often run Windows. This has been the primary driver behind some of our technology choices (using Mercurial rather than Git on these sorts of projects) and it also occasionally necessitates some extra debugging when something doesn't quite work right on Windows.

    In work on a recent project, the client developers were using WampServer, but upon the site reaching a certain size, developers on Windows noted that their Apache processes were quitting after a cache clear. We debugged and tracked the errors down to occuring during CSS preprocessing. The Apache processes were segmentation faulting, resulting in an error dialog.

    In an initial assessment of the problem, it appeared that others were having the same problem, such as in http://drupal.org/node/424136. We advised the developers to add a line to their settings.php to disable css preprocessing, like so:
  13. 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.
  14. Updated SimpleTest Hudson Script for SimpleTest 6.x-2.9

    The fine folks at ComputerMinds recently posted a modified SimpleTest run-tests.sh script for running SimpleTests from the command line. Their script added an --xml option to allow the script to run tests and output results in JUnit's XML format so that Hudson can automatically run all SimpleTests in your project.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Speed Up and Version Your Views

    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.
  18. 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.
  19. Theming Discussion Tonight

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