Drupal

A young man who's studying computer science in college asked me for information regarding how to get an internship in the software industry. Here's what I told him :

There is great demand for programmers with a bit of experience. You just need to get a bit of the right (or desired) experience.

I think there are several ways to do this :

I'm looking to start trying out Drupal 8. But I need some themes for display.

Here's a couple good articles on how to handle this :

http://www.undpaul.de/en/blog/2013/06/02/upgrading-busy-theme-drupal-8

http://www.undpaul.de/blog/2013/07/04/theming-drupal-8-conversion-themes...

For my current D7-based themes, looks like I have a couple options :

- Modify "slightly" the PHPTemplate-based themes and use them mostly as-is.

- Run the PHPTemplate-based theme thru "Twigify" at https://drupal.org/sandbox/forest/1974984

Here's a response to Open Source: The New College!

Although I have two bachelor's and one master's degree, I've been blogging for a while about the declining value of a college education.

Attached is a presentation I gave at my local Tri-Valley Drupal Users Group.

It outlines how to perform a minor "point" upgrade of Drupal. For example, updating Drupal (an modules) from 6.12 to 6.26 or 7.14 to 7.15.

Updating Drupal Presentation

I attended a recent BadCamp 2011 event on SEO and learned of the following useful modules :

Alchemy : http://drupal.org/project/alchemy

Content Analysis : http://drupal.org/project/contentanalysis

Keyword Research : http://drupal.org/project/kwresearch

Here are some things I did to customize Drupal QuickStart for me :

Setup to enable SSH / XWindows access into the VM :

- Set network interface to bridged (not NAT)

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Set window controls to right

$ gconf-editor &

"Apps -> Metacity -> General". Edit "button_layout".

Change "maximize,minimize,close" to

"menu:maximize,minimize,close". Exit gconf-editor.

Update Quickstart image per http://drupal.org/project/quickstart

$ cd ~/quickstart
$ git pull
$ bash -x update.sh

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With Drupal moving to the Git version control system, I'm looking at refining a good way to install, update, and customize Drupal installations using Git.

Since Drupal core, modules, and themes will be separate Git repositories, it seems like using Git submodules, or subtrees are worth looking into for module and theme management.

The Drupal UPGRADE.txt file and upgrade handbook page provide a lot of good information and procedures to perform a major upgrade (ex. 6.x => 7.x).

However, if you're looking to manage your Drupal 7 installation using Git, the upgrade guides don't provide Git-specific advice.

Here's a procedure I found useful when upgrading Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 using Git.

First, clone the Drupal 7 git repository using this :

git clone git://github.com/drupal/drupal.git

Here's the process to perform a minor update to a Drupal installation when using a combination of CVS (from Drupal.org) and Git (from your site). This would be used, for example, when updating Drupal 6.18 to 6.19.

This uses the "combined" method of pulling Drupal from CVS but managing branches on the actual site using Git. This method is outlined here :

http://books.tag1consulting.com/scalability/drupal/start/staging

• BACKUP DATABASE AND FILES
• SITE OFFLINE
• DISABLE ADDED MODULES

    $  git checkout drupal-core

Here's a PDF copy of the presentation I'll be giving at DrupalCamp Colorado in June, 2010.

Introduction to Git for Drupal