drupal

DevOps for Humans - Ansible presentation at DrupalCon Austin

I'm still recovering from an intense week of Drupal here in Austin, TX. I kicked things off by walking around the downtown area, then taking the intensive Acquia Drupal Developer Certification exam. Once the conference started, I attended a few sessions, met a few awesome Drupalists, and learned a lot. On the last day of the 'Con (the last session, in fact), I presented DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory!.

I think the presentation went well, and I heard some great questions at the end which really contributed to the discussion of Ansible and Drupal deployments in general. It was a great way to finish up the official DrupalCon sessions, though it meant I was revising slides for the hundredth time during the rest of the week, instead of relaxing and enjoying DrupalCon!

Before I post a video and slides from the session, I wanted to highlight some resources for anyone who attended (or didn't attend) DrupalCon Austin:

Below is the video and slides from the DevOps for Humans presentation. Please let me know what you think!

Thoughts on the Acquia Drupal Developer Certification Exam

tl;dr: I passed, the exam is better than I was expecting, but I still have mixed feelings about Acquia's Drupal Developer Certification program.

Acquia Certified Developer 2014

When I first heard about Acquia's Drupal Certification Program, I had mixed feelings. For most programming jobs, especially the majority of web-related jobs, a certification doesn't hold a lot of weight. Certifications are often like final exams for a university course—they show that you know a particular set of material, but they don't indicate whether you can actually use that knowledge effectively.* Further, tech-based certifications are less meaningful over time, as technology progresses and the tested knowledge required to gain a specific certification becomes less relevant.

Drupal and Node.js at STLJS Meetup - Thursday, May 15!

STL.JS Meetup LogoI'll be presenting Node.js and Drupal — Working Together at the STL.JS meetup this Thursday, May 15, at The Able Few in St. Louis.

In the presentation, I'll basically be covering how Server Check.in uses Drupal and Node.js to deliver a simple, fast, and stable server monitoring service. During the course of the presentation, I'll touch on why and how Server Check.in was built, how Ansible is used to maintain the infrastructure, and the effectiveness of lightweight marketing, blogging, and 'low end box' servers.

Join me and many JS developers in St. Louis on May 15, and after the presentation, we'll hack on some of the things mentioned in the presentation!

Drupal 8 - A Brief Introduction (DrupalCamp STL.14 Presentation)

I presented Drupal 8 - A Brief Introduction at DrupalCamp STL.14 on April 26, 2014.

Drupal 8 brings a lot of changes. Many standby contributed modules are now included with Drupal Core, and many small changes add up to the most exciting Drupal release yet! This presentation guides you through many of the biggest changes, highlighting how Drupal 8 will accelerate your web development and provide tools to make Drupal the best content management platform on any device.

View the slideshow below, or follow the links at the bottom of the post to view the full presentation and video.

Links for full slideshow/video:

Sessions at DrupalCon and DrupalCamp

I mentioned this elsewhere (see: DrupalCon and DrupalCamp news), but I'll post here as well; I'm going to be speaking at both DrupalCon Austin and DrupalCamp St. Louis this year!

I've submitted a few sessions to DrupalCon Austin in the past, mostly surrounding the Honeypot module for Drupal, but this year, a session I submitted in the DevOps track was chosen: DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory!. I figured since I'm writing a book on Ansible, and I use Ansible to provision servers and do all the deployments for my Drupal sites, I might as well show other Drupal developers how easy it is to get started and how much you can do with Ansible!

DrupalCon and DrupalCamp news + free DrupalCon ticket!

DrupalCon Austin

This week, the DrupalCon Austin sessions have been posted, and I'm thrilled to have one of my session submissions (in the DevOps track) selected: DevOps for Humans: Ansible for Drupal Deployment Victory!.

The session will go over how Ansible can be used to realize faster, easier, and more successful Drupal deployments, as well as Ansible's ability to make sure that every environment is 'like production', so you don't ever have surprises when you deploy code to its final destination.

Meet Phergie, an efficient PHP IRC bot

The Drupal community uses IRC extensively for collaboration and community building. A permanent and ever-helpful fixture of the official #drupal-* IRC channels, and in the Drupal community itself, is the humble Druplicon bot. Druplicon is a Drupal-based IRC bot that was created in 2005, and is still going strong as part of the Bot module for Drupal.

Bots like Druplicon do a lot of nice things—they can remind people of things after they were away for a while, they can store facts, track karma, throw people virtual beers, store and retrieve helpful facts, and relay important information. For example, when a build fails in Jenkins, a bot can post a message in IRC. Similarly, if a server goes down, or is under heavy load, the bot could post a message.

Announcing DrupalCamp STL.2014 - April 26 in St. Louis, MO

DrupalCamp STL 2014 Logo

St. Louis is getting ready for its first-ever DrupalCamp! On April 26, 2014, DrupalCamp St. Louis will open up with a keynote by Brad Nowak, a Business Development Manager at Palantir. The Camp will have sessions covering a variety of topics, like Drupal 8 and how your business can benefit from Drupal's flexibility. It will be held at Washington University's West Campus in Clayton, MO, just a few blocks from a MetroLink station and only a few minutes away from Downtown St. Louis!

Online registration is open already, and for the next couple of weeks, earlybird registration is only $15! For that tiny fee you get:

Multisite Apache Solr Search with Domain Access

Using one Apache Solr search core with more than one Drupal website isn't too difficult; you simply use a module like Apache Solr Multisite Search, or a technique like the one mentioned in Nick Veenhof's post, Let's talk Apache Solr Multisite. This kind of technique can save you time (and even money!) so you can use one Hosted Apache Solr subscription with multiple sites. The only caveat: any site using the solr core could see any other site's content (which shouldn't be a problem if you control all the sites and don't expose private data through solr).

There are two ways to make Apache Solr Search Integration work with Domain Access (one of which works similarly to the methods mentioned above for multisite), and which method you use depends on how your site's content is structured.