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Release management with version control Managing the code on your servers is a very important part of the release process. Over the years we've tried many different ways and have found the below process as a tried and true starting point, but here we'll focus on revision control (Subversion or Git) and the use of tags in each for any given project. Since many of our clients are large traffic websites and need multiple web heads, we also have some standard practices and scripts that we like to use on our projects to help keep the web heads synchronized. So let's take a look.

Blocks vs. Context vs. Panels

As with many facets of Drupal, and coding in general, there are multiple ways to accomplish the same task. A good exmple of this was with the recent additions to the Lullabot team. The expanded team brought together three skilled developers and an amazing designer each with their own methods of site building. On one side we have Jerad Bitner and myself, who for the past few years have been building sites exclusively with Panels module. On the other side we have James Sansbury and Jared Ponchot who also build beautiful sites using the more recent Context module.

Our first collaboration was the redesign of Lullabot.com, since this project was initially designed and scoped by James and Jared, the decision to use Context module was already in place. I was in no rush to learn Context, when I knew the same result could be achieved with Panels. Lucky for me James and Jared are both excellent resources for answering questions and giving great examples. Now that the project is complete I have a better understanding of Context module. This article is intended to identify the similarities, differences, pros and cons of using each module to build a Drupal website.

Angie Byron wrote a nice article on Drupal.org that explains something about how to form_alter CCK fields. At the very end it says:

No, you didn't read that wrong. Sometimes you need to set both ['value']['#value'] and ['#value']['value']. And other times you need to change the field value in $form_state['values']. It seems to be that one controls the value displayed on the form, and the other affects the value sent to the database. You need both to avoid NULL values and "Value is required for field blah blah blah" errors.

If anyone can shed some light on what the heck is going on here, that would be awesome. ;P

In other words, register for the Portland workshops now!

That's right, our upcoming Drupal Module Development Deep Dive workshops week in Washington, DC is now officially sold out. Congratulations to those of you who were fortunate enough to register in time. To those who didn't register, better luck next time (insert sad trombone sound here).

But wait! Speaking of next time, we're continuing our new Deep Dive tradition with another full week of workshops in Portland, OR from August 2nd through 6th. This Drupal Theming Deep Dive week will focus on all things Drupal Theming. We guarantee to turn you into a Drupal theming expert in one week! If you register by this Friday, July 9th you'll save mucho bucks with the Early Bird Discount, so go check it out and register today.

Drupal Theming Deep Dive week in Portland, OR

Our weekend sale is almost over

If you're not on our mailing list or following us on Twitter, you might have missed the Independence Day weekend sale going on in our store. Today (Monday) is the last day to get 25% off all Lullabot Drupal and jQuery tutorial DVDs and high-definition video downloads.

Spend some time this summer turning yourself into a Drupal superhero!

It just keeps getting better. Seriously.

So… Drush. Are you using it yet? If not get drushing!—or whatever you call it. If you're not familiar with it, Drush is a command line interface for Drupal sites. It's the bees knees, if you ask me. You can use it to enable/disable modules, run update.php, get a SQL dump of your site, and all sorts of other magically delicious things.
The problem is, it just keeps getting better. I almost can't keep up with it! The recent release of Drush 3 includes all sorts of goodies, and every day I seem to find more and more. I'm going to take a quick look at a few of them that I'm most excited about.

Drush remote capabilities

One of the awesome new features in Drush 3 is the ability to run Drush commands on a remote server. So, I can run commands on a remote site without having to manually connect to that server. In order for this to work, you'll need to have Drush on the server as well as your local machine, and you probably want them to be the same version as well. You'll also need to be able to ssh to the server using key authentication. Check this out:

drush username@myserver.com/path/to/drupal#mysite.com status

One of the things Drupal core does not do well at all is provide an easy way to switch on a WYSIWYG editor. There is no editor out of the box and setting it up requires some custom configuration of several Drupal core settings, installing and configuring several contributed modules, and also installing one or more external libraries, like the TinyMCE library. The Lullabot book, Using Drupal (O'Reilly), devotes a whole section to describing one way to configure a WYSIWYG editor.

The Problems

It's complicated because there are lots of inter-related parts:

1. You need to set up one or more roles that can edit content.
2. You need to create and configure 'Input formats' to create at least one format that allows users to add the html and css needed to create rich text content.
3. You need to select and install a WYSIWYG editor: install the editor, download an appropriate javascript library and move it to the right location (which varies depending on which editor you are using), and then configure the editor to use the library.

And all of that gets you only to the point where you can edit text. If you want to allow users to upload images and insert them into their text, you also need to identify which of several possible methods of image handling you want to use, and install and configure the modules needed to manage that.

Sam's the man!

Sam Boyer (sdboyer) has been a long time inspiration to and awesome resource for me when it comes to Git. It's really no wonder that he was chosen as the Git Migration Lead by the Drupal Association.

Here are some of his plans and where you can help participate:

Varnish is an excellent high-performance, HTTP accelerator. The technical term for Varnish is a "reverse proxy cache", meaning that it handles the requests when you visit a website acting as a cached layer of content on top of Apache. This means that after a page has been requested once from the web server, Varnish keeps a copy of that file in an ultra-fast storage so that the next time that page is requested, it returns it immediately instead of starting up Apache, PHP, MySQL, and any other technologies your web site may be built upon. If Varnish doesn't have a copy of the file or page being requested, it will request the page from the normal web server.

This article explains step-by-step instructions on how to get started with Varnish on a local Mac OS X sandbox. I personally set it up with the MAMP package, but because it doesn't make any difference what web server you use, you can use these instructions to set up Varnish in front of the built-in Mac OS X Apache or anything else you may have installed from MacPorts or compiled from source.

If you're not familiar with setting up a web server on Mac OS X, you'll need to get that working first. I'd recommend the Lullabot videocast on Installing a local web server on Mac OS X.

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Today is the last day of our Week-of-DrupalCon 25%-off sale. All Drupal tutorial videos and everything in the Lullabot Store is 25%-off this week. And this week ends today!

To be the first to know about upcoming Lullabot sales as well as coupons, news, and updates, be sure to get on the Lullabot Mailing List and/or follow us on Twitter.

I just finished my talk on moving from CCK in D6 to Fields in D7, and promised to post my slides, which are full of references to the relevant issues. There is no place to do so on the DrupalCon session, so I'm posting them here.

For reference, the session description was:

Fields in Core will be exciting and powerful, but we still have some work ahead of us. Now it's time to figure out how to get there from where we are now. Hundreds of developers need to update their CCK-related modules, and thousands of administrators will need to update their data. Plus not everything about CCK made it into core. Which modules and functionality were left behind, and why?

Karen Stevenson, one of the CCK maintainers and part of the team that got this code into core, will talk about the upgrade path and the 'left-behinds', and what those of us who have been using CCK in Drupal 6 will need to do to adjust to Fields in Core in Drupal 7.

We previously mentioned that we're planning a party at DrupalCon San Francisco. Here are the details!

The super-awesome Lullabot party will be held at:

Jillian's
101 4th St.
San Francisco, CA
(right next to the Moscone Center)

On Monday, April 19th
Start Time: 7:00 PM
End Time: 10 (or so)

Google Map Directions

We hope to see you there!

Here's an updated version of the DrupalCon schedule based upon the version currently posted on their website. Some of the session times may still change, but this should be a good way to take a quick look at which sessions are happening concurrently.

There's also the source excel file in case you want to tweak it any way.

If you see any errors, feel free to leave them in the comments.

DrupalCon San Francisco is coming up next week, and I will be roaming the hallways of the Moscone Center doing another round of Drupal Voices interviews.

Of the 89 Drupal Voices interviews conducted so far, 46 of them happened at DrupalCon D.C. last Spring, and the other 43 of were at DrupalCon Paris last Fall.

The intention of Drupal Voices has been to feature the voices and personalities of different contributors to the Drupal Project as well as cover any major announcements and any other general buzz that is happening within the Drupal Community. I'll also be dropping by the Drupal Developer Summit to cover some of the other pre-conference happenings this weekend.

So if you feel passionate about a particular topic, module or general trend within the Drupal Community that you feel like needs voicing, then be sure to wave me down at DrupalCon for a quick interview. Or feel free to just say "Hi" if you've enjoyed listening to the Drupal Voices series on your daily commute.

If you have any specific topic suggestions for me to cover, then be sure to drop a quick comment down below.

(Photo Credit: Jen Lampton)

As Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert has mentioned on his blog recently, Drupal is growing and the demand for high-quality training is growing. Lullabot has been teaching people to use Drupal for over 4 years now and we often feel like proud parents watching so many of our students get great Drupal jobs, go on to create amazing Drupal sites, and become involved and influential in the Drupal community.

A few months ago we posted a request for trainers. Response was overwhelming. We were amazed by the quantity of high-quality applications we received. After a long time sifting through the applications we chose a group of trainers with deep Drupal knowledge, experience in the Drupal community, and the ability to simplify and communicate Drupal configuration and programming methodology.

Lullabot's current training & consulting team includes Addi Berry, Angela Byron, Jeff Eaton, Nate Haug, Karen Stevenson, Matt Westgate, and me. With the addition of our new trainers, we'll be able to offer more frequent and higher quality public and private Drupal training.

We've assembled a group of teachers who are not only clear communicators with deep and pragmatic hands-on Drupal knowledge and experience, but they're also passionate about Drupal and the Drupal community. Here's the list of new Lullabot trainers:

Jerad Bitner
We first met Jerad when he came to a Lullabot workshop back in 2007. Shortly thereafter he joined up with Sony Music where he led development on Sony's artist multi-site Drupal installation which currently runs sites for over 100 Sony artists. He then moved to Lifetime Television before eventually founding Rapid Waters Development. Jerad has written several popular modules for Drupal including Activity and Flag Friend. He is known as sirkitree on Drupal.org.

Randy Fay
Randy has been developing websites since 1994. He dabbled with Drupal during the 4.6 days. But he began as a Drupal core developer shortly after a 3-year bicycle trip in which he rode all the way from the frozen North of Canada to Argentina and listened to every single Lullabot podcast. (We're still not sure which is more of an accomplishment!) Randy has contributed quite a number of patches to Drupal 6 and 7, is a co-maintainer of the Drupal AJAX subsystem, and developed and maintains a number of contrib modules including the Examples module, a great learning tool for new developers. Randy is known as rfay on Drupal.org.

James Sansbury
James has been lead Drupal developer at Sprocket in Atlanta, GA since 2007. Sprocket, a design-focused, web-development shop has been building sites for the past 6 years, but James helped them to standardize their development with Drupal and they've been building some beautiful Drupal sites. James has contributed to Drupal core development and also released several contrib modules including Follow, Profiler, and Region Manager. He is known as q0rban on Drupal.org.

Joe Shindelar
Joe is an artist, graphic designer, and web developer who has been building Drupal sites and participating in Drupal core development since 2006. He also enjoys snowboarding and is a certified level II and freestyle accredited instructor who teaches for Blizzard MN when the weather permits. Joe is known as eojthebrave on Drupal.org.

Jen Simmons
Jen is a graphic designer and front-end developer who has been creating websites and teaching web development since the mid-nineties. She became heavily involved in the WordPress community pushing the limits of WP and learning to bend it to her will. In 2007, Jen moved her focus to Drupal and quickly became very involved in the Drupal community. Jen has a passion for Drupal and loves to teach. She's taught in the university classroom, at professional conferences, and in community workshops. Jen's theme, Bartik, is slated for inclusion in Drupal 7. On Drupal.org she's known as jensimmons.

read more »

Angie "Webchick" Byron and I will be heading up the TWiT Cottage in Petaluma, CA to do an interview with Leo Laporte on TWiT Live. We'll be talking about... you guessed it... Drupal!

Lullabot helped Leo to get up and running with Drupal on twit.tv back in 2007 and he's been a big proponent of Drupal ever since.

Tune in to the TWiT Live video stream at 12:30pm Pacific time (3:30pm Eastern) tomorrow, April 14th. You can also click the chat room link below the video to participate and send us questions.

Think you might forget? Follow Lullabot on Twitter. We'll send out some tweets to remind you just before we go on.

By now, most of you have probably heard some of the legendary stories from the Lullabot party at DrupalCon DC last year. The combination of alcohol, music, Drupal coders, and temporary tattoos created an awesome night of fun. I'm sworn to secrecy on a some of the stories from that party, but you can certainly find some party pictures on Flickr.

So we're doing it again for 2010, San Francisco style! Save the date – Tuesday, April 20th Monday, April 19th – right smack dab in the middle the first night of DrupalCon. We're still nailing down the details so if you want to know exactly where and when the party is, get on our mailing list or stop by the Lullabot table at DrupalCon for an extra-special invitation.

Better yet, follow Lullabot on Twitter to get the party details. We'll also be Tweeting about Lullabot presentations throughout DrupalCon as well as Lullabot book signings, giveaways, and other goodies. To get Lullabot Twitter updates sent directly to your phone, text "follow lullabot" to 40404 and Twitter should guide you through the rest.

We'll see you in San Francisco!