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Review of Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide

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(Disclaimer: The book for review was provided gratis by the publisher.)

Tom Geller's new book Drupal 7: Visual Quickstart Guide is a concise, dense sitebuilder/administrator's guide to Drupal 7. It provides a pretty decent task-oriented overview of D7 sitebuilding and administration. It's a manageable size for almost anybody, about 210 pages of primary content.

Overall summary: The book does well what it sets out to do, which is provide a user-interface task-oriented introduction to Drupal 7 for sitebuilders and administrators (in a reasonable size package). That approach has innate drawbacks, but so does every other approach, right?

Reference (cache) repositories to speed up clones: git clone --reference

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Update: Please read this update on my experience before using the technique in this article.
Update: See the drush implementation of this approach in the comment below.

DamZ taught me a great new piece of git trivia today. You can use a local repository as a kind of cache for a git clone.

Let's create a reference repository for Drupal (and it will be bare, because we don't need any files checked out)

git clone --mirror git://git.drupal.org/project/drupal.git ~/gitcaches/drupal.reference

That makes a complete clone of Drupal's full history in ~/gitcaches/drupal.reference

Now when I need to clone the Drupal project's entire history (as I might do often in testing) I can

git clone --reference ~/gitcaches/drupal.reference git://git.drupal.org/project/drupal.git

And the clone time is on the order of 2 seconds instead of several minutes. And yes, it picks up new changes that may have happened in the real remote repository.

Resetting Drupal Passwords in Drupal 7 with Drush or Without

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Sometimes, whether in testing or other situations, you need to reset a password (often the admin password) for a Drupal site.

Edit: The shortest answer is that two wonderful options are built into drush!

# Get an admin login link
drush uli
# Set the password for any user
drush upwd admin --password="newpassword"

(More info on drush uli below.)

Now for the long version

In Drupal 6, you could just reset the admin password with:

cd <drupal_root_directory>
drush sql-cli   # or mysql -u<user> -p<pass> <drupal_db>
UPDATE users SET name='admin', pass=md5('drupal') WHERE uid=1;

and then log in with username 'admin' and password 'drupal'.

But no more. Drupal 7 has a unique hash for each site, which means you can't just use the md5() trick any more. However, there is a script in the scripts directory that will do this.

A Rebase Workflow for Git

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Update October, 2014: Lots of things have gotten easier over the years.
These days, the easy way to fix this set of things is with the Pull Request workflow, which is essentially the Integration Manager workflow discussed here (probably).

  • Use github or bitbucket or somebody that makes the PR workflow easy
  • Delegate a person as integration manager, who will pull or comment on the PR
  • Require contributors to rebase their own PR branch before pulling if there are conflicts.

Update: Just for clarification, I'm not opposed to merges. I'm only opposed to unintentional merges (especially with a git pull). This followup article describes a simple way to rebase most of the time without even thinking about it). Also, for local development I love the git merge --squash method described by joachim below.

Differences Between the Drupal Community and The Microsoft Kingdom

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Last week I had the wonderful opportunity to spend a few days learning Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology (and catching up on lots of Windows Server technology too - it’s been a while). Now, admittedly, this was unfamiliar territory for me as I’ve been away for a few years. You may laugh, but I had a serious case of culture shock as I experienced the difference in empowerment and support between the two environments.

In the Microsoft world,

  • if you have a problem there are ways to get support, but most of them require knowing a bunch of forum-type websites or paying money to somebody.
  • If you need free support, how do you find out where you would get it?
  • If you discover a bug, what do you do?
  • If you know how to solve a bug, how do you get the solution committed?
  • If you know how to improve a product, how could you have any confidence that you could influence it?

In the Drupal world,

Avoiding Git Disasters: A Gory Story

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Edit 2015-08-30: The bottom line years later: Use the (Github's) Pull Request methodology, with a responsible person doing the pulls. You'll never have any of these problems.

I learned the hard way recently that there are some unexpectedly horrible things that can happen to a project in the Git source control management system due to its distributed nature... that I never would have thought of.

Content Translation (field translation) in Drupal 7: First steps

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Edit: Please follow Gábor Hojtsy's excellent series on translation in D7, if you're not already following it. It's more up-to-date and more authoritative. You'll probably be interested in Drupal 7 Multilingual: What's new in I18N.

Drupal has long been a leader in the ability to present a website in multiple languages. In Drupal 7 we continue that tradition: Field translation or "content translation" made it into Drupal 7, but it's not obvious from a plain Drupal 7 install how you would use it.

This article is fundamentally about content translation, not about interface translation, which is a completely different thing in Drupal (and always has been). Interface translation is about prompts, labels, menu entries and the like, all of which are handled by the core locale module and various contrib modules like i18n. I will explain how to import basic interface translation files, however.

Review of Drupal 7 Module Development

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Drupal 7 Module Development (Matt Butcher et all, Packt Press, December, 2010) is a great step forward for Drupal 7. It packages up key D7 information about theming, the render system, entities, fields, the Form API, node access, and the File API all in one place. Summary: If you're doing D7 module development, either for the first time or switching moving from Drupal 6, you need this book.

Some parts of the book were more familiar to me, and as a result less impressive, so I'll focus on the parts that were most useful to me:

Starting work for Commerce Guys!

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I'm thrilled to announce that I'm going to work for Commerce Guys starting tomorrow. Yes, a real job! I'm looking forward to working with some great people on some fun projects, and of course Commerce Guys is well known for promoting contributions to Drupal and the Drupal community.

My first act will be to participate in the Drupal Commerce code sprint in Paris next week, and wow, am I looking forward to that.

Woohoo!

Stashing data in the D7 User Object (or... no more magical fairy cruft saving)

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A unique and surprising feature of the Drupal user object up through Drupal 6 was that you could throw any crap into it you wanted and then run user_save() and it would be there. So in Drupal 6:

user_save($account, array('some_random_stuff' => 'surprisingly random');

Well, that always seemed way too easy and it was. After a security problem was discovered with this in way early D7 alpha days, it was decided to make this far more explicit and deliberate. Now you have to have implement hook_user_presave() to actually move your data into the right place and prove that you really wanted to do it.

Best practice says that we're going to save settings into the user object keyed by the module name. So if my module is named 'mymodule' in Drupal 7:


...
$stuff = array('some_random_stuff' => 'surprisingly_random');
user_save($account, array('mymodule' => $stuff);

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