I'm a huge advocate for finding ways to encourage more Drupal participants. Due to the complexity, it's unreasonable to expect people to initially pick up programming-heavy issues. This is the motivation behind the "novice" label, providing a means for identifying potentially low-complex tasks new contributors could safely pick up. The end result is usually one or more commits which are credited to you and/or your organization on Drupal.org. Commit BiasFor those looking to bolster their Drupal expertise, organizations will often look at who has "given back" to Drupal as a means of vetting. The

Since both core caching continues to evolve in Drupal 8 and contrib modules are maturing, I wanted to capture my steps for configuring Varnish 4 to properly work with Drupal 8. Set up the VCLFirst, I am NOT a systems administrator. I rely heavily on the expertise of others in the community to steer my efforts. I set up Varnish to serve up content from the Drupal site, hoping that the VCL configuration I found from Jeff Geerling would do the trick. (Reference: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geerlingguy/drupal-vm/master/provisio…). Under your acl purge IP settings

WhyI am ashamed to admit, for the longest time I used Drupal (heck, even complained about it) but contributed absolutely nothing back. It occurred to me that, not only did I learn technical and marketable skills thanks to Drupal, my Drupal experience directly corresponded to opportunities that supported my livelihood and viability for me and my family. And, all of this occurred without one line of code from me contributed back. A long while back, I decided to make an effort to solve a core issue. At that point, I had stronger SVN experience than Git. I had approximately eight years of

When you are building a tool, how do you measure the success of your efforts? There are data driven approaches around adoption, like number of times your tool has been downloaded or installed. Similarly, success could be defined as how effectively you solved the problem. This could be measured by the number of issues filed, the (hopefully) lack of vulnerabilities, or the number of feature requests created. But, in any measure, success is actually defined by other people. And, as an engineer, it's such a difficult task to put yourself in their shoes. How do you deal with that? Theory People are

As a bit of background, my main objective is to integrate Drupal coding standards into PHPStorm. I would imagine similar steps can be taken with other IDEs. I'm mainly writing this blog post to remind myself of these steps if/when I need to do this in the future. But, it occurred to me others might benefit from this as well. DependenciesComposer is the lone dependency. And, bear in mind, the instructions are for PHPStorm. Installing tools PHPCS is the defacto tool used to do code sniffing. And, Drupal has built in PHPCS libraries with it's Coder tool. composer global require "squizlabs/php

Drupal 8 has been widely praised for improving the developer experience (DX). The "best of breed" adoption of tools (see: Symfony, Guzzle, PHPUnit, Composer, etc) clearly positions Drupal to mature and evolve beyond that which one community is able to do alone. But, there are many different considerations of DX that need explored. And, what lift is required for the community to grasp this new version? And, what is the impact? DX ConsiderationsProbably the number one thing that is praised with Drupal 8 is the technical modernization. Drupal is already challenging to learn effectively. But, if

I'm a big fan of Field Collections. It provides a high level of flexibility in setting up an auxiliary (and potentially shared) data structure that can associate with another entity. As such, it's a highly customizable way to do relational data in Drupal. This shouldn't be confused with Inline Entity Form which helps embed an entity within another entity (and is also an amazing project). One of the major challenges is around the fact that the Field Collection entity is decoupled from the entity in which it is hosted. This complicates practically everything from rendering, Views, and much more