Drupal

The Internet in the 90’s - a much simpler place.

We’ve done several migrations for clients who need their old, legacy content imported into Drupal from a collection of static HTML files. In this post I’ll outline the procedure we use to migrate, and provide some solutions to common problems related to encoding, line endings and parsing HTML with QueryPath. Code snippets are provided inline, and complete source code is provided as a Github gist.

1. Setup a Migration source

Today starts a new month and a fresh beginning for Drupal. After many discussions over many drinks at DrupalCon Denver, we’re proud to announce a strategic inflection point for the Drupal community. As of today, the following companies will be merging into one company — a new formidable force in the Drupal community:

• Lullabot
• NodeOne

Today, Varnish Software released The Varnish Book, an effort they’ve been working at since 2008. It’s available under a CC license as a PDF download and online reference from their website.

In 4K Labs, (our own version of google “20% time”) we’ve built a web-based, Drupal-powered version of those “magnetic poetry” kits you may have seen on someone’s refrigerator. Drupal Poetry is a web version of “magnetic poetry,” complete with a touch-and-drag interface for tablets/phones and includes several Drupal-centric word packs. After you’ve crafted your masterpiece, log in to Twitter, and share you poem with other Drupalers and the world!

SXSW Interactive talk: OMG your RFP is killing me

When: Friday, March 9, from 2–3:00pm
Where: Austin Convention Center, Ballroom BC
Add this session to your SXSW schedule

One of our clients came to us with a performance issue on their Drupal 6 multi-site installation. Views were taking ages to save, the admin pages seemed unnecessarily sluggish, and clearing the cache put the site in danger of going down. They reported that the issue was most noticeable in their state-of-the-art hosting environment, yet was not reproducible on a local copy of the site — a baffling scenario as their 8 web heads and 2 database servers were mostly idle while the site struggled along.

Drupal is a great platform, but it can’t do everything. As your site grows, you’ll likely encounter use cases that Drupal can’t or shouldn’t do. Some examples include interacting with third-party APIs while preserving good page loads, or performing repeated actions (polling, etc) that result in site updates. Fortunately, separating these kinds of problems from Drupal and moving them to specialized “sub-stacks” within or near your Drupal stack is easy to do.

With DrupalCamp Austin coming up this weekend, the web chefs have been working overtime to make things a bit easier on everyone at the camp. We’ve relaunched the website so that it works on everyone’s mobile devices while they hustle about between sessions. Instead of building a separate app, we’ve baked this mobile friendliness straight into the website using responsive web design.

It’s about that time again! Although it’s six months away DrupalCon Denver is ramping up, and session submissions are ready to be voted on by the wonderful Drupal community members. There are almost 600 submissions this year covering every aspect of design, development, mobile, and business strategy. Read on for the informational feasts prepared by the Web Chefs for Denver 2012:

Connecting a Github private repository to a private instance of Jenkins can be tricky. In this post I’ll show you how to configure both services so that pushes to your Github repository will automatically trigger builds in Jenkins, all while keeping both safely hidden from the general public.