Planet Drupal

Joining me for our 14th ToadCast is Chris Trahey where we talk about doing what is right for your clients and the benefits of developers as technical sales. We also discuss notification overload, the anxiety surrounding a desire to know everything, and managing your todo list.

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Exciting news out of DrupalCon Portland! We've got the scholarship recipients selected for this year's event! The Drupal Association scholarship committee received a enormous amount of applications and interest for this year's DrupalCon with an astounding number of applications submitted.

The DrupalCon scholarship program allows Drupal Community members, who would otherwise not be able to attend DrupalCon, to benefit from the DrupalCon experience as the Drupal Community benefits from each scholar's attendance.

Early last year, we discussed a few of the available solutions for building mega menus in Drupal 7. At that time, the method for building a Simple Mega Menu required doing some calculations and applying that logic using CSS. Now we have an even easier method available via the Superfish module.

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Developing a large Drupal site is no easy task and managing all the latest tools isn't getting any easier. Between SASS, Compass, Simpletest, Guard, Behat, Capistrano, Git, and sometimes even Drush itself, you've got alot of commands to master. Trying to remember all the right flags and syntax can be a nightmare that ends up requiring it's own documentation page just to get all of your team on the same page. If you've ever caught yourself or another developer asking someone to paste a command into a chat window, or sharing their shell history via email, it's time to simplify things by writing your own Drush commands.

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Knowing how your email communication performs in terms of ROI can say a lot about whether or not your message resonates with your target audience. Measuring how your email campaigns perform in terms of eCommerce can benefit both you and your customer as you'll learn from these metrics how to be better at providing what your customer wants.

This tutorial shows you how to configure Drupal Commerce and MailChimp to enable you to view Drupal Commerce order related Google Analytics information from within your MailChimp account. Think about these valuable metrics: MailChimp campaign ROI, conversion rate, revenue created, bounce rate, average value per visitor, goals completed, ecommerce transactions, device based metrics - it's all possible for your Drupal Commerce store.

Configure Commerce Google Analytics module

First you need to send your Drupal Commerce order data to Google Analytics. Learn how to do that in this tutorial about configuring the Drupal Commerce Google Analytics module.

Configure MailChimp Analytics360

We need to connect your Google Analytics account to your MailChimp account. MailChimp made that possible with their Analytics360 module. Note that this is not a Drupal module - it's a module on the MailChimp platform. Educate yourself on what Analytics360 is with this video. MailChimp also has a comprehensive tutorial about enabling Analytics360 in your MailChimp account in their tutorial on how to use Google Analytics with MailChimp.

Check the Reports

Make sure everything works like you want it to. Check if Google Analytics data is showing up in the MailChimp reports. You can find them in your MailChimp account at Reports -> [click a campaign title] -> Advanced Reports. An example of what that report looks like is shown below. I called the email campaign 'Test 1 for Dev1'. 

It can take a while before MailChimp can aggregate the ecommerce data from Google Analytics (24-48 hours).

Commerce MailChimp module not required

Tracking MailChimp campaign ROI with Drupal Commerce doesn't require you to configure MailChimp Module or Commerce MailChimp module. However if you like to be able to segment a MailChimp email campaign based on Drupal Commerce purchase activity you should configure them. Learn about how to do 'magic' with MailChimp and Drupal Commerce with these tutorials.

Category: Drupal Planet Drupal Commerce MailChimp Google Analytics

I've recently moved to London and it's been a great experience for me so far. One of my priorities is, as always, get involved with the local community, so after having participated in some sprints and delivering a talk yesterday in the Learning Drupal meetup, it's time to deliver some training for new drupalists!

Next March 15th, Commerce Guys & Code Positive have put together a Drupal training as part of the Drupal Global Training Days initiative promoted by the Drupal Association to introduce new and beginner users to Drupal.

In this session we'll do an "Introduction to Drupal", a full day training on the basics of Drupal. Attendees will leave having successfully built a Drupal site. It is ideal for those interested in exploring Drupal as a career path.

Training will be conducted at the Innovation Warehouse which kindly provides us the space and facilites from 10am to 4pm.

We have a very limited number of seats, so register here for booking yours before we run out of space!

Who should attend

• Web developers/designers willing to get started with Drupal.
• Project managers managing or considering Drupal projects.
• Decision makers evaluating Drupal.

What will be covered

• We'll introduce what Drupal is and what it can do, covering content management systems basic concepts and specific Drupal ones.
• In the guided workshop, instructors will demonstrate how to build a site with tips and tricks that can be followed by the students, driving them to have a simple site built using Drupal at the end of the session.
• Once finished with the training, attendees will understand Drupal's potential and where to find further information and training resources.

What do you need to bring

• A laptop.
• Ideally, a basic php environment with Drupal 7 installed using your own local environment, or a pre-built one, for example with Acquia Dev Desktop or Bitnami.

What is provided

• Lunch
• WiFi connection
• Power

Tags: Planet Drupalglobal training daysTraining

Chosen is a jQuery plugin that converts long select boxes into a more user friendly form element. The plugin adds auto-complete functionality to select boxes, and this makes it easier for users to navigate through long select lists. Go to the Chosen homepage to see it in action.

In this article, we'll look at the Chosen Drupal module which integrates the jQuery plugin with Drupal.

If you include the work that I have done in the theatre as a stage manager - I've been engaged in project management since 1989. 24 years is a long time to think about and practice a craft. I wrote a bit about how technical theatre seems to impact software project management. I've been writing about technology and project management since 2004/05 and I've been managing the builds of complex database driven systems since 1999. All of this has led to my using many different project management styles and tool sets.

I've submitted a session in Portland on just this subject.

Learn from my 18 years of Project Management Experience with Technology. I've done it all - cowboy, waterfall, extreme, and agile scrum.

Learn why...

• Waterfall doesn't always work
• Agile has a place, but isn't the holy grail
• Cowboy can kill the relationships you have with your stakeholders
• How "Fixed Scope" is a lie
• That a combination of approaches is the answer

Project management requires a blend of techniques and tools to effectively shepherd projects from ideation to release. We'll explore and discuss different tools and methodologies that can help make your project successful.

drupaldrupalcon portlandsessionProject Management

When doing performance assessment for large and complex sites to assess why they are not fast or scalable, we often run into cases where modules intentionally disable the Drupal page cache. Depending on how often it happens and for which pages, disabling the page cache can negatively impact the site's performance, be that in scalability, or speed of serving pages. How to inspect code for page cache disabling

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Episode Number:  111 Post Topics:  Drupal Drupal 7 Module Development Drupal Planet Javascript

Learning module development in Drupal is not easy, but this Daily Dose of Drupal episode provides a very simple but practical module development video tutorial to use when learning about Drupal Module development. If you have a complex form on your Drupal websites, whether it is a Node creation form or perhaps even a webform, you may want to warn users before they navigate away from the page. This can help inform users that if they navigate away from the page before submitting the form, they may lose the contents of the form.

DDoD Video: 

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It's a simple problem, but a serious one. You've put your content editors in front of Drupal for the first time, and they can understand the node form without any problems. They understand taxonomy terms, grok menus and node references… but they get nervous when it's time to save their work. "Will... will this be published as soon as I click 'save?'" Normally, there's no good way to make the distinction between saving and publishing a piece of content explicit. Site builders can set a content type to be unpublished by default, then give editors the broad "administer nodes" permission, but that's clumsy solution that forces editors to dig for what should be a simple action: publishing or unpublishing a post. That's where the Publish Button module comes in.

For those who are interested in the hypermedia part of Web Services, I wanted to call attention to a discussion posted in the WSCCI group, Proposing an alternative to application/vnd.drupal.ld+json.

This webinar covers the basic questions around contributing to Drupal.org. Who should contribute? Why should users give back on Drupal.org? Joel Moore, Theming Specialist at Mediacurrent, walks listeners through the basics of contributing and provides practical examples that you can start using today. 

Drush is a Drupal developers Swiss-army knife. Of course there are the favorite commands that you probably use every day: drush sql-cli, drush pm-enable. Drush pm-download and drush pm-update are probably pretty commonly used as well. I'm going to use their aliases for the rest of this blog post: drush dl and drush up. drush up is actually a combination of drush pm-updatecode (drush upc) and drush updatedb (drush updb). In my examples I'll be using the Views module, but the same applies for any module or theme.

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I recently evaluated the Bakery Single Sign-On System aka Bakery SSO aka Bakery on behalf of clients. This article describes how I moved from finding a small weakness in version 2.x-alpha-3 to an exploit.

If you haven't updated all your sites to Bakery 2.0-alpha4 (6.x, 7.x), go and do so now.

So lately I’ve been coming across a lot of jQuery plugins and also some interesting Drupal modules that integrate them. It is more and more commonplace to see websites sporting all sorts of cool looking jQuery magic. Drupal is no worse I gotta tell you.

Besides fundamental changes in the backend of Drupal 8 (i.e usage of several Symfony 2 components) a new theme engine called Twig is also introduced to Drupal.

In the course of further development of Drupal it is necessary to look beyond our community boundaries and to be open to new ideas and technologies. This is the only way to ensure a sustained and stable growth of the community. With the introduction of the Symfony 2 components Drupal took a major step forward to the PHP community.

In addition to PHPTemplate themers can use Twig as a new theme engine in Drupal 8. This helps lowering the entry barrier for new developers since learning PHP for theming Drupal is no longer necessary.

In our multi-part blog post on Twig we want to explain the fundamental changes of the new theme engine and show new possibilities in theming introduced by its implementation in Drupal Core.

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14 locations so far!

Illinois USA, Michigan USA, Brighton UK, Langport UK, Hamburg Germany, Canberra Australia, Sacramento CA USA, Stockholm Sweden, Berlin Germany, London ON Canada, Sydney Australia, Chennai India, Ohio USA, Milano Italy, ... Check the list of small local groups gathering together to sprint on either March 9, 2013 or March 10, 2013 for the most up-to-date information and links to specifics. Drupical shows a map if organizers created events on groups.drupal.org.

snapshot:

Preparation

Sprints will welcome people. Preparing ahead of time is optional, but can help people get the most out of the experience.

• The first lessons on the Drupal Ladder are good for ramping up.
• Create an account on http://drupal.org
• Install irc. Even in person, irc is super helpful during a sprint to share links and it's a good chance to get practice with irc that will be helpful after the sprint. Since contributing to Drupal is addictive, sprinters love to keep doing it. It's also useful for people who cannot get to a sprint in person.
• Set up a local development environment (WAMP, MAMP, LAMP, etc.)
• Install git.
• Use git to get Drupal and install it locally.
• Run tests locally. If they do not all pass locally, or you have trouble getting something set up, try a search to see if there are instructions for setting up drupal on your specific system, or a solution for the error you are getting. If no solution is found, open an issue on drupal.org and tag it d8 dev environment.
• Warm up for the sprint by attending Core Office Hours any Tuesday 02:00 UTC or Wednesday 16:00 UTC in #drupal on irc.
• Watch webchick's Sydney session on contributing. I love the stick figure part that talks about using the Drupal issue queue.

On the day(s)

I find sprints exhilarating. I'm so looking forward to the day!

• Food: Check for a blog, event signup, or meetup.com link from Sprint Weekend List. Local events have linked to more information. Some may provide coffee or lunch; alternatively, for some sprints bringing lunch or snacks might be a good idea.
• Outlet strip: consider bringing one with. Power is good. Some sprint locations might be at an office with lots of power, some might be more rustic.
• Laptop: bring your computer!
• Check #SprintWeekend for tweets of announcements.
• irc: With locations all around the world, in many timezones, irc will be hopping! Also, people not able to get to a location in person, can participate remotely on irc. Participates can check-in in #drupal. Mentors will be there off and on when they can be the whole weekend to help support people. Sprinters can coordinate issues they are working on, and ask questions in irc also.

No sprint near you yet?

Look for a meetup group near you by searching on Meetup.com or search for a geographical group on groups.drupal.org. Contact an organizer and ask about getting a local sprint near you started.

Support for Sprint Organizers

Weiterlesen

The Features module allows site builders to export Drupal components like content types, fields, views, variables, etc. The module has become a vital part of my development workflow and I wouldn't build a site without it.

In this video, we'll cover the following:

• An overview of the UI changes in version 2.x

Episode Number:  110 Post Topics:  Drupal Contrib Drupal 7 Theme Development Drupal Planet UI/Design CSS

The Drupal 7 Style Guide module is a very simple module that helps you when building a Drupal theme. The module provides a single page displaying how your Drupal theme renders common Drupal elements, form elements, and other HTML elements. By having all of these elements rendered in one page, it makes it much easier to ensure your theme covers all the basics.

In this episode you will learn:

• How the Drupal Style Guide module will help you build better Drupal themes

DDoD Video: 

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