Drupal Planet

On the 22nd October Manchester saw it’s very first Drupal Sprint, this was run in parallel with London Sprints. Regular sprints are now becoming a great way to help out with Drupal Core and Contrib. In the UK there are now two sprints covering London and Manchester. In India there are 3 user groups all sprinting regularly. No doubt there are some in the US and in other countries.

For me the the Drupal community is amazing, it’s always felt like a family, one you can rely on to help and support you. It’s time for a call to arms, people need to support their local and regional Drupal user groups and events. A lot of these events are volunteer run, it takes time and energy to run meetup after meetup and big events. The people that organise and run these events are quite something, 9 to 5 days don’t exist for them.

I’m proud to announce Drupal Sprints Manchester (UK). Last year at Drupal Camp NW I spoke with various other northern Drupalers and decided that we should get together and attempt to emulate Drupal Sprints London.

As part of my increased like of agile development and the control it gives you over your estimates and deliverables I’ve become increasingly aware of the horrible fact our code coverage sucks. There’s no real way to sugar coat it we don’t do proper testing, it’s bugged me for years.

Here are some really handy tools for when you have to deal with Drupals admin interface: Autofill - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nlmmgnhgdeffjkdckmikfpnddkbbfkkk Automatically fill out forms, great for testing node/add forms with specific sets of data, can store profiles for use on multiple sites.

While building my Drupal 7 profile I started playing around with Jenkins CI. My reasons for doing so were two fold: Code Quality I believe in code quality, there are multiple tools out there that will analyse code and report back using various different metrics. CI allows me to run these metrics on a repeatable basis, if my code changes then the quality changes. This makes me a better developer overall. Repeatable Tasks Jenkins can do anything you throw at it, why not throw at it all your boring repeatable tasks? Installation # sudo apt-get install jenkins

I’ve been using Tumblr for a few months now as a simple way of sharing the images I find interesting and beautiful (can be found at ayil.co.uk). I found it was lacking in a few features that would be nice, being a Drupal developer I thought hell why not try and recreate it in Drupal 7.

I decided to move to Ack for searching as it has nice switches like –php and –nosql. By default ack doesn’t recognise .module, .install or .inc files so you have to add them. Create a .ackrc file in your home directory and add the following:

It’s that time again now that I’m well and truly full of drupalflu. This years pickings were slim to none, not that there wasn’t anything great out there but I just didn’t have the time to go out and grab any. My time was spent attending sessions and talking to potential new clients on our booth (which was awesome!).