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. Sprints unlike regular user groups are an ideal place to flex your code knowledge and get your hands dirty....

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. The format is simple, Drupal developers / themers / builders get to together and work on Drupal core and contrib. My aim is to provide a space where people can get together and get stuck in working on Drupal and giving back to the community in the form of code, all that’s required is a laptop with an development stack and your brain....

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. Technical Debt I first read of technical debt over 5 years at my previous job, the basics of technical debt are that every hack/bodge job will bite you in the ass and you will spend more time fixing things in the long run that implementing it correctly....

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. Edit This Cookie - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fngmhnnpilhplaeedifhccceomclgfbg Excellent tool for checking out cookies on a site, useful when testing SSOs. Link Clump - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lfpjkncokllnfokkgpkobnkbkmelfefj Right click and highlight a bunch of links then open them up in new tabs, more helpful than you’d think when having to test n number of pages during a migration....