drupal

Drupal 9 readiness is as easy as cleaning up deprecations for your Drupal 8 project. SimplyTest is well positioned to help with this. Deprecation ReportingYou can generate a report of the deprecations by performing the following steps: Go to simplytest.meUnder “Enter a project name:”, start typing the name of your project and select itSelect the relevant 8.x branch (not release, as this will also scan unreleased commits)Expand “Additional Options”Click “Add Additional Project”Start typing “Upgrade Status” and select itClick “Launch Sandbox”Go to “admin/reports/upgrade-status”Select your

On the evening of September 13th, SimplyTest.me launched a major new release of the product. The product release achieved three major goals:Replacement of the backend with TugboatQAA new one-click demo frameworkA new development environmentAll efforts could not have been possible without the generous sponsorship from TugboatQA (a product created by Lullabot), Centarro, and Linode. And, community time offered from Hook 42.The rest of this post outlines the release and its significance.TugboatQA BackendHow did we get here?The backend infrastructure of SimplyTest.me was one server running as a

SimplyTest.me is a project I continue to lead and volunteer my time to. I’m driven to help lower the barrier to entry for people in our community to contribute, use Drupal, and be a part of our community.For me to be effective, I need to keep my eyes open for unique ways to help the project. Much like our larger community, we must be opportunistic to remain sustainable. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is just that. I previously participated as a mentor, helping students port security-related modules to Drupal 8. I was approached by Matthew Lechleider (slurpee) to see if there would be a fit for

Last year, I read Jim Birch’s blog post outlining his Aaron Winborn nomination of (now) award winning Kevin Thull. As a community, we need to do our best to celebrate accomplishments and I love that this award exists. We need to tell more of our stories regardless of who gets the award. I see no reason not to share my nomination for this year’s award publicly. Contribution takes many different forms. Our community recognizes many aspects of contribution, but I believe the spirit of the Winborn award is to “think bigger”. Community members find creative ways to have impact well beyond just

Last year was spent primarily learning about SimplyTest. We did make some progress, but I think “keeping the lights on” for a system of this complexity was quite a feat after the project transfer. It’s a unique and fairly complex endeavor that bridges all elements of an open source project, a completely free service, and underlying infrastructure. I see all of the good and the bad that comes from each aspect: system maintenance, feedback from community members, customer service (Slack, Twitter, etc), system outages, and more. I recognize how valuable this service is to the community and I

Introduction Drupal 8 is a great platform for storing structured data and exposing web service endpoints. This offers Drupal a competitive advantage when creating a decoupled application or building Drupal as part of a larger enterprise of systems. Core offers many complementary out-of-the-box features to publish web services and configure them in different ways. This includes roles/permissions, Rest Web Services, Serialization, Views, and more. Since Drupal is so robust out of the box, it often minimizes the need for custom development. But, Drupal’s framework has support for any customized

It’s a classic computer science concept: Static versus Dynamic. This fundamental concept is what separates content management systems from static HTML, as a practical example. But, how does this apply to design systems like Pattern Lab and any system(s) that consume Pattern Lab artifacts? The key point to understand is around anticipated changes. What aspects of a pattern can change either based on application, anticipated updates over time, or their conditional placement? Understanding what changes are possible help drive decisions on the use of static or dynamic. Bear in mind, each pattern

We are about to start another quarter of the Drupal Coffee Exchange. Personally this has been a lot of fun to see this start from humble beginnings and an off-the-cuff idea posted to Twitter to now have a growing membership and have been running for over a year now. We now have international participation and are looking to expand that. For me, it’s yet another reminder our community goes well-beyond the commits. Now we have a way for community members to stay caffeinated and share our favorite coffees between community enthusiasts. It’s unique, it’s fun, and it’s become a creative and

IntroductionHere we are. It’s been over a year now that our community has explored design components (integration of design systems, pattern libraries, etc) and Drupal. The community has shared different tools and solutions, presentations from many individuals representing different companies and perspectives, and processes/workflows that enable the different teams and disciplines. I would classify the time spent to date as research, exploration, and innovation. While this is expected for something new, we need to define best practices. The purpose of this blog post is to help us start a

The purpose of this blog post is two fold: 1. To be clear on what and how we plan to address issues with the current system. 2. To address where the service is going.The service has a bright and promising future ahead as an open source platform that will serve people well and give people a chance to learn through contribution. The service will remain free and will be community sponsored. Before I begin, I want to start with an acknowledgement. I’m totally in awe over how far ahead of it’s time the SimplyTest service was and this is a testament to PatrickD’s efforts throughout the years. As an