Drupal

In this lesson we're going to talk about taxonomy. In my experience it's another one of those things in Drupal that uses unfortunate terminology and ends up confusing new users. But the truth is, taxonomy is pretty simple to get your head around and will be a huge help in your site building efforts.

The Lowdown on this Tutorial

We're going to break this topic down by first explaining the concepts. Next we'll take a brief tour of where Drupal keeps all the knobs and switches for managing taxonomy and then we'll wrap it up by discussing some very useful modules that extend the built-in functionality of the Taxonomy module.

If you've been keeping up with this tutorial series, you'll know it uses my free installation profile, Foundation, for the examples. Using Foundation along with the lessons can save some time in getting up to speed on this topic. It includes several pre-configured modules and views related to the topic of taxonomy that serve as good examples of how it can help with your site building. 

Taxonomy Defined

Let's begin by defining taxonomy. You may remember it from your high school biology class as a systematic way of categorizing things. In biology, the classifications involve plants and animals, but in Drupal the categories are for your content.

 

If you're coming from WordPress, this system is very similar to the Categories you'll find in that CMS. In Drupal, however, it's a little more complex - big surprise, right? That's OK. Like I said, it's not that bad. 

To really understand Drupal's taxonomy or classification system, we have to get a handle on both vocabularies and terms. Vocabularies are really just categories. That's all they are. Terms are simply the items that go inside a vocabulary. Let's look a little deeper at terms and vocabularies using an example.

A Hypothetical Vocabulary

By default, Drupal comes with one vocabulary defined - Tags. It's a generic, default way to start classifying your content. But let's say we have a site that provides information about the nutritional content of various foods. We'll probably want to create a new vocabulary (aka category) that we'll call Foods.

Under that vocabulary we'll start adding some terms to break our content down into more specific classifications - terms like Dairy, Grains, Poultry, Vegetables and Fruits. As you might guess, these will end up being not only terms themselves, but also the headings for sub-categories as we continue drilling down to more specific terms. For example, under Fruits we might have Apples, Bananas, etc. You can see that it won't take long before we have a very extensive hierarchy with hundreds, or even thousands, of terms.

Of course the point of all this categorization is to make it easier to sort our content and expose how each node is related to the others. If you think back to the previous lessons on Views, you'll start seeing how these two modules - Taxonomy and Views - work hand-in-glove to provide a way of creating and displaying content relationships in a relatively simple way.

How to Use Taxonomy

Let's kick this section off by looking at where we create and manage our vocabularies and terms. In Drupal 7, under Structure > Taxonomy you'll find a screen like the one below.

You'll see that in this screenshot from Foundation, we have two vocabularies, the default Tags, which I've chosen to use as the blog categories, and a second titled, Utility tags. This second vocabulary/category is used to mark content as special in some way - for example, to be featured on the home page.

I won't go through the steps of creating vocabularies or terms because it's very simple and I'm certain you can handle that without much trouble. But what we are going to look at is how we can make our new vocabularies available for use when creating content. You see, when you create a new vocabulary, it isn't automatically available on your Add content form. We have to add it manually.

To do this, we'll need to add a field to the content types where we want to be able to use the vocabulary. If you're using Foundation, head to Structure > Content Types and then select Manage fields under the Article content type. You'll see something similar to the image below.

Note the big red arrow. What you see is that I've added a field to my content type. It's a term reference and it associates the vocabulary Utility tags with the content type. In this case it allows me to tag an article as one that should be added to the home page (via a view).

But if we return to the example of a Foods vocabulary, this is where we could add it as well. We would simply add a new field and under field type, select Term reference and then set the desired widget (select list, checkboxes, etc.). After we click save, we'll be prompted for the vocabulary name and some default settings for the field.

After we've done this, we'll be able to tag our content with the terms we've defined when we're creating or editing the page. It's pretty simple, but if you want your users to be able to see the vocabulary terms on the page (so they might click them to view related content), we're not quite finished.

Go back to Structure > Content Types and then select Manage display under the Article content type. You'll see something similar to the image below.

You'll notice that in this case we have our Utility tags hidden from our site's visitors. But in the case of our hypothetical Foods vocabulary, we'd want to make sure it was displaying so that our site's visitors could use it to find and perhaps sort related content.

If this was what we wanted to do, I would also recommend enabling the Taxonomy term view (included by default with Views) and customizing the display of the pages that site visitors will see when they click on a taxonomy term. It would be in this view where you might expose a dropdown to your users that would let them easily sort through the content associated with the various terms you've defined.

Related Modules

That wasn't so bad, was it? It won't be long before you'll want to do all sorts of things with taxonomy and below are a few modules that will help.

Taxonomy Menu

This module will allow you to turn your vocabularies into menus. In my experience, the module works great so long as you don't try to disable any menu items. I've always had disabled items get re-added after cron runs, but otherwise no problems.

Tagadelic

You know those tag clouds you've seen on some sites? This module is one way you can do that with Drupal.

Taxonomy Breadcrumb

In the example we used in this tutorial, we saw how quickly you can create a deep vocabulary structure. The Taxonomy Breadcrumb module is a useful way of helping your users keep track of where they are.

The Rest...

Finally I'll leave you with the full list of taxonomy related modules - only 372 of them for you to sort through! Gotta love Drupal, huh? 

That's it for this lesson. We're a bit more than a fifth of the way through this series. Stay up to date via the series RSS feed or by subscribing to email updates for the blog. If you'd like to comment on anything in this lesson, you can do so on this discussion thread.

This provides user interface integration for the simple yet powerful Replicate API. Most notably, this provides integration with Drupal actions which means that you can start to replicate things via the user interfaces provides by modules like Views Bulk Operations and Rules.

The way that a DrupalCon comes together is similar to how releases of Drupal are produced by the community. Passionate experts in their subject matter areas volunteer tirelessly to make each DrupalCon grow and exceed the expectations of the past.

Personal blog tags: drupalconcommunity

Field Construction Kit

Using this module Users can combine pre-defined column types to create a single field type with multiple columns.

This series outlines our project process  through the lens of our development of the new 4SiteStudios.com. In this post, we will discuss our process for developing an user experience for our new website.

As we have been planning the new 4SiteStudios.com over the past few weeks, we have followed our typical project process. After I developed the content plan for the new website, I dove right into developing wireframes, taking into consideration things like messaging hierarchy, information architecture, content models, modern design trends, and the lot.

In my mind, our new website is a framework. We are putting into place a foundation to build a great digital experience that can be a showcase to our clients of how we work and how awesome we are at what we do. The site will be a conversion machine. But, it will take time and learning from user behavior to get there. So, we need to start simple.

My goal is to present visitors, with as little content as possible, the following in order of priority:

1. The work we have done (As we say in the agency world: “The work sells itself.”)

2. The spectrum of services we offer

3. Who we are as a company

4. Our thought leadership around creative content and user engagement

If you take a look at the user personas in our content strategy, you will see that our target audiences are looking to make a quick decision about hiring us. They will visit our website to look at our portfolio, get a sense of the services we offer, and maybe read some blog posts or other resources. We need to give the user what they are looking for quickly, with minimal barrier to entry.

Wireframing our New Website

This was a collaborative process...as much as we could make it. I brainstormed approaches and ideas with John and Alexis almost daily. I would have informal powwows with them to get their thoughts on how to structure content regions and get feedback on the wireframes as I was designing them. We whiteboarded, drew out ideas on napkins,, and debated a lot. In the end, we made Jeff Gothelf proud - we were lean.

The direction I took with the homepage was a stacked pane approach, as seen with many modern websites. It made sense for what we wanted to accomplish - create very distinct regions, each communicating a key message.  

Since we don’t have, nor can we produce,  a lot of content for the new website, I made each top-level navigation item a distinct landing page, and each subpage under it a defined region within the landing page. I then used conversational headers and intro text to tie these regions together into a narrative. With our new brand, we want to be more conversational with our content, so this approach makes sense for us.

I am a big fan of repeating patterns within websites so users can intuitively know how to navigate through content. Aside from our main navigation, Sliders are used consistently throughout the website to allow users to scroll through pages where there is content they will want to consume in isolation, such as a service descriptions. Exposed dropdown filters are used to allow users to easily find content within large groupings, like our portfolio and “Insights” page. Galleries will be displayed using a masonry layout, and listings of content in a grid layout.

If you read my last post on the content strategy for the website, you know that one of our major goals is to increase leads generated through the website. You will see webforms consistently incorporated throughout subpages on the new website where we describe what we do and products we have developed. That black circle that appears in the upper right-hand corner of the website will follow people as they scroll down a page. We need to make it easy for you to contact us about your next project, right?

The user experience is not complex. We want to keep the new website simple and clean; prioritize visual communication over written content (with the exception of our thought leadership content); and build a conversion machine. We will be improving the website over time, testing out landing pages and improving the design and copy based on user need, so we did not want to over-engineer anything.

The Review Process

Now, I know I make the process of creating the user experience sound like it was easy, but it was kind of painful. Creating a content strategy isn’t hard - much of it is conceptual and you don’t know what you get until you start building it. People respond more to visual queues, so the amount of feedback on a project increases exponentially the more people get to see what a website is going to look like.

Although wireframes are meant to communicate content structure and page layout, people easily get hung up on the details.

“Can we change that word to {blank}?”

“Are we going to have a slideshow on the homepage?”

“It would be REALLY COOL if {blank} did {blank}?”

You have probably heard at least one of those questions before...

It took work to get our team’s consensus on the wireframes. The key was to make people feel as though their feedback was important,, but allow them to give “just enough” feedback to gather the requirements you need and build buy-in amongst your stakeholders. Perfection is the enemy of good.

Setting parameters around what I needed feedback on and how long people had to provide their feedback was extremely helpful. Changes and feedback at the end of the process were minimal because I spoke with people throughout the process, allowing them to give feedback along the way.

It is also important to stress to people that project planning is an ongoing process. Just because you reach a point where you stop collecting feedback on wireframes doesn’t mean changes cannot be made at a later time. Planning documents should be living documents that are updated throughout the development process as requirements change.

Things I would have done differently

Looking back on the process, I feel like I spent too much time on the wireframes. Part of the challenge with wireframes, as with design mockups, is that people cannot easily visualize how things will look and behave in the browser. Spending hours making really nice, static wireframes is counterproductive. It won’t allow people to interact with the concept and get a true sense of the functionality. The feedback you receive will be incomplete because the experience will be incomplete in the mind of the reviewer.

There is an argument to be made for high-fidelity wireframes. Interactive wireframes and prototypes communicate function well, but not form. There needs to be a balance. The compromise for me is “mid-fidelity wireframes” - wireframes that include just enough design aesthetic so the viewer gets a sense of the design page layout and form, but does not dictate the design direction.

We have already begun to refine our process to incorporate interactive wireframes and/or prototyping. There are a few ways to approach this, and we are planning to either create interactive wireframes within Mockflow, our preferred wireframing tool, or go right into prototyping using Drupal, depending on the project.

Take a look at the wireframes for our new website below and let us know what you think.

New 4SiteStudios.com Wireframes from 4sitestudios

This is little introduction into one of the simpler, and more user-friendly ways of controlling spam in Drupal (as opposed to other also-helpful methods, like Mollom, CAPTCHA, etc.).

The Honeypot Method
Honeypot is aptly named because, just like Pooh bear is drawn towards honey jars, spam bots are drawn towards form fields—especially form fields they think will give them the ability to link back to their own websites. So, the Honeypot method basically inserts a hidden form field to Drupal (or other) forms with a field name like 'homepage' (you can set it to whatever you want). End users don't see the field, so they don't fill it out. But spam bots (usually using prewritten scripts) do see the field (usually), and add something to it. The Honeypot module detects this and blocks the form submission if there's something in the field.

Additionally, the Honeypot module adds in a timestamp-based deterrent. Usually, forms take at least a few seconds to fill out when a human is entering data into them—especially surveys, user registration forms, etc. Spam bots try to fill out as many forms as they can in as little time as possible, so they will often fill out a form within a couple seconds at most. The Honeypot module requires at least 5 seconds to pass (by default - you can adjust this too!) before a form can be submitted.

The Honeypot + timestamp form protection method is a very good defense against spam bots, but not so good against actual humans who fill out forms for spammers although there are now some ways you can configure the module to deter 'real' spammers; see honeypot.api.php). If you start having serious spam problems, you might need to add in Mollom or another more intelligent spam prevention service to the mix. The greatest advantage of the Honeypot method is that the user is given no extra obstacles to completing a form. In my opinion, it's the most user-friendly way of preventing spam, even if it's not the most effective in every situation.

Other Niceties
You can also bypass the Honeypot protection for certain user roles—say, for instance, site administrators, who just might be able to fill out a form in less than 5 seconds—and you can set which forms on which Honeypot protection will be enabled. You can also tell Honeypot to protect all forms on the site. Finally, you can use honeypot protection in any of your own forms by simply including a little code snippet inside your modules hook_form_alter.

honeypot_add_form_protection($form, $form_state, array('honeypot', 'time_restriction')); Tags: spamdrupalplanet Tweet

A content filter that allows to render music notation directly on the browsers, using the VexFlow / VexTab JS library.

To install:
* Clone and build VexFlow and VexTab into folders of your choice.
* Create sites/all/libraries/vextab with the following symlinks in it:
- vexflow-min.js -> /your-vexflow-folder/build/vexflow/vexflow-min.js
- tabdiv.css -> /your-vextab-folder/doc/tabdiv.css
- tabdiv-min.js -> /your-vextab-folder/build/support/tabdiv-min.js
- underscore-min.js -> /your-vextab-folder/build/support/underscore-min.js
* Enable this module
* Add "VexTab music notation" to your "Filtered HTML" text format
* Enclose your VexTab snippet within [vextab]...[/vextab] tags

Enjoy!

Is your admin full of tall tables? Tired of trying to make sure you're clicking on the right row? Table ruler provides some visual clues to the position of your cursor in admin tables.

Node to DOCX allows you to generate word documents (DOCX format) of any node.
It uses the community version of PHPDocX library to generate the DOCX documents out of the content stored in a node.

By now everyone hopefully made it safely home from DrupalCon (if you're still there, it ended more than two weeks ago so you might want to head home), and while the dust settles we wanted to say thanks to all who helped make DrupalCon Portland a success, and also share some highlights from Lullabot.

The Lullabot Party

With CleverReach Module you can import your CleverReach groups into drupal and make Blocks (with Forms) for Newsletter subscription. You can select CleverReach attributes and use it as Fields in the block form and many more.

This is a port of the https://drupal.org/project/hosting_remote_import module to provision 2.x

!!ATTENTION!! Using this fork will change all cache id's! Make sure you backup the database (before you run the updates) if you don't know if you'll keep using this fork!

Fork of Cache Actions that contains some bugfixes and enhancements.
Addressed issues:

• #2010660: Fatal error on panels display save when a RulesContainerPlugin is present
• #1815052: Editing a panel which has cache_actions caching does not flush panel cache
• #1869846: Add Panelizer support

This is about Views Contextual Filters.

No don't run away yet…. give me a sec… please.

I am well aware that even seasoned site builders fear to tread into that hidden-by-default upper right-hand corner of the Views UI configuration page labelled "Advanced". Most of us have opened it once, seen the heading "Contextual Filters" and gone "Mwaaah… what's that cr@p and what good is it to me?"

Well quite a lot of good, actually. If you can just hang in there, I'll get straight to the point.

You need contextual filters instead of, or in addition to, normal filters when:
1) you want to pass arguments to a View that has no exposed filter UI or that needs its UI bypassed initially, e.g. from links elsewhere on the same or another site, or in an email or newsletter
2) you want to do funky stuff with Panels and the like, which we won't discuss here
3) you want to pass a filter argument to many different Views at once, residing as pages and in blocks, all from a single UI widget, which you can place as a little block anywhere on your site -- the picked once, operates site-wide (POOS) filter principle.

That last quality facilitates UX enhancements many continue to ask for and for good reason.

Here's a few use-cases:
o a visitors lands anywhere on a site, be it one for real estate, events or travel and enters state, city or postcode of interest; instantly all relevant pages on the site filter on the region entered, without the visitor having to re-enter their selection again, unless they wish to change it
o a user visits an online gift ship, enters maximum spend and... *poofff*... only sees applicable merchandise on any of the pages they visit
o same for date ranges, music genres... any taxonomy terms, any field occurring in more than one View on your site

So how do you give your plain contextual filters the far-ranging wings of point 3) ? Views Global Filter, that's how. Try it.

And if after that you still dislike contextual filters, write to us -- you'd be the first to complain.

                                                                                 * * *

Note re point 1) above: if you want to contextually pass to a View filter ranges, e.g. 50--150, rather than single values, check out Views Contextual Range Filter

File under:  Planet Drupal

Simple Sticky Footer is a lightweight module, it allows to promote/advertise on your drupal website as a sticky footer (always on top div).

Installation

First of all activate the module.

Step1: Go to the Simple Sticky Footer module configuration page

Step2: Add the content for the sticky footer, set the width of the sticky footer in pixels.

Step3: Define additional CSS rules like: rounded borders, gradient background, shadows, etc ... Do not use { }, just enter the css properties ex: background:gray;border-top:1px;

Step4: Save it, clear cache (optionally) .

Have fun!

PS: If you have useful feature tip related to this plugin please write in the plugins support section.

FAQ

Why I can't see the bottom part of the page ?
Sticky footer has a fixed position. It's recommended to define padding bottom for your body with the height of the sticky div. Eg: Sticky footer height is 160px. You might define in your themes style.css : body {padding-bottom: 160px;}

How can I customize 100% ?
If it is not enough the customizaton options from the administration panel, you should add extra CSS properties in your style.css from the active theme directory. Of course you can add interactions in your theme's javascript file. Sticky footer has 2 divs:

container: #simple-sticky-footer-container

content: #simple-sticky-footer

Last Wednesday, I felt an urge to carefully write out a list of all the possible characteristics that would make communications technology genuinely free. I felt this was important for a number of reasons: for example, to follow up on my earlier claim that free software does not always provide free communications, it is necessary to be able to measure the shortcomings against a perfect (although possibly unachievable) benchmark.

Then something happened

Just hours after my blog was live, The Guardian, a leading British newspaper (and contributor to open source) started publishing explosive allegations about the extent of US Government monitoring of communications. They kicked off a dramatic four days of coverage of this topic with the story that one of America's largest phone companies, Verizon, is secretly passing details of all customer phone calls and approximate locations (metadata) to the NSA.

I've published further blog entries about this subject in the meantime. One thing I want to make clear: real friends tell each other the truth. There is no need to flatter America with gratitude for inventing the Internet when discussing these fundamental privacy failings. Anybody who has tried to generalise any comments about the NSA scandal as `anti-American' is themselves failing to respect America's own principles of free speech. A doctor doesn't make up fairy tales for a patient diagnosed with cancer, he puts the facts on the table as that is the first step in making progress.

The winds of change

Activity on all my free communications web sites, especially Lumicall and OpenTelecoms.org has doubled. Google Play reports that the rate of Lumicall installations have also doubled - hopefully it is getting closer to the point where Metcalfe's Law kicks in and everybody will have federated SIP on their phone.

What next

One thing is clear: this situation provides a huge opportunity for anybody promoting free software, not just for communications. As I mentioned, web sites on the subject of free and private communications are attracting significant interest and I hope this rubs off on other projects. While I have contended that free software does not always provide free communications, there is a compelling argument for the case that you can't have free communications without having genuinely free software.

Some of the developments that are coming up in the very near future:

An upcoming release of DruCall, initially packaged for Debian and leveraging the libraries API packaging scheme, is going to make it much, much easier for the vast majority of web sites to offer a secure calling facility, without any third-party browser plugins required. Other CMS vendors such as xWiki are also working on WebRTC support.

DebConf13 is aiming to feature a half-day track on Free real-time communications with a focus on the way free operating systems, particularly Debian (and it's derivatives like Ubuntu) are fundamental to rolling out an alternative to the status quo.

Federated VoIP is also a confirmed feature of the upcoming Fedora 19 release and will eventually work it's way into EPEL. This is another great way for people who work in an RPM environment to start getting more active deploying SIP as a standard service in their environment.

The real-time communication (RTC) quick-start guide is currently being updated and will include a convenient web-checker to help people test their federated connectivity.

Can you help? Not sure where to begin?

Come and join us on the Free RTC discussion list that has been sponsored by the FSF Europe or join the discussion list of one of your favourite free RTC applications.

Drupal has become a hugely popular framework for building big websites and is becoming more and more widely used in government and public sector.  The likelihood of these organisations wanting to offer SSO to their users is pretty big also.

The Drupal Lightweight Directory Access Protocol or “LDAP” module allows, for organisations that hold their user data in an Active Directory installation, their users to login to the Drupal site using those credentials.

The setup of an Active Directory instance is a little outside the scope of this blogpost but there is a fantastic knowledge base article by Rackspace that guides you through the setup perfectly (http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/installing-active-dire...).

The configuration screen (found at admin/config/people/ldap) is split into a number of tabs.  We will firstly be concerned with “Server”, this tab allows us to define our connection credentials to our Active Directory instance. Multiple server configurations can exist and we can even define multiple server configurations for a single physical LDAP server for things like, alternate base DN’s (Distinguished names) or alternate service accounts with different privileges.

Connection Settings

The connection settings screen is pretty self explanatory, fill it out with your server credentials, I would normally leave ‘Enabled’ un-ticked until you verify that everything is working correctly.

After the server connection details are entered, this is where things get a little more complicated.  The following fieldsets, Binding Method, LDAP User to Drupal User Relationships and LDAP Group Configuration all ask for DN’s or attributes belonging to LDAP objects.  I found the best way to navigate around the LDAP server was by using a third party piece of software called ‘Apache Directory Studio’.  It is available free on OSX, Windows and Linux!  Here are a few common terminologies used in LDAP.

• DN - Distinguished name
• DC - Stands for domain component and is used to specify domain or ap‐ plication partition objects
• CN - Common name
• O - Organization name
• OU - Organizational unit name C Country name
• DC - Domain component
• UID - User ID

Binding Methods

The LDAP.module suggest using a Service account to allow for searches and to determine user objects and their groups memberships.  Within our LDAP instance we created a service account ‘Code Enigma’, we can use the Apache Directory Studio to drill down to that user object and determine its DN.

From the screenshot above we can see that our Code Enigma user has a Distinguished name of

CN=Code Enigma,CN=Users,DC=windows,DC=codeenigma,DC=com

We use this DN to populate the following section of the form, along with its password to allow it to authenticate to the Active Directory server.

Our base DN for users, groups and other entities can be found in the same way.  Our Base DN for our users for example is CN=Users,DC=windows,DC=codeenigma,DC=com which exists one level above our Code Enigma user.

 

LDAP Group Configuration

Name of Group Object Class
We find the name of the group object class in the same way, we drill down the LDAP tree and find the groups under CN=BuiltIn.  In this instance our group object class is named ‘group’.

Attribute in User Entry Containing Groups
This value is taken from the attribute that lists a users group memberships.  In our instance this is memberOf, from the screenshot below you can see that the user ‘mark’ is a member of both Administrators and Users.

Once you have your connection setup and working, we can move onto setting up how the site will interact with the LDAP server.

LDAP to OG group Configuration

The Drupal LDAP module comes bundled with “LDAP Authorization - OG (Organic Groups)” module that allows us to automatically join users to Drupal groups dependant on their LDAP groups.

The workflow for achieving this is to inspect your LDAP server and make note of the groups you want users to automatically join as an Organic Group.  The LDAP module does not provision these Organic Groups for us, therefore we need to create the Organic Groups and map them from LDAP to Drupal. 

Using ‘Apache Directory Studio’ we can find the DN to our individual groups, such as for Administrators.

CN=Administrators,CN=Builtin,DC=windows,DC=codeenigma,DC=com

The mapping of LDAP to OG group is in the format, DN|Organic Group Title:Member Type.  Using the screenshot above as an example, I created an Organic Group called 'Administrators' and used the following code in the "Mapping of LDAP to OG group (one per line)" textarea.

CN=Administrators,CN=Builtin,DC=windows,DC=codeenigma,DC=com|node:Administrators:member 

The help text here is great and explains things very well, note that once you save, the module appears to append a shorthand version of your definition in the format (raw: node:1:2).

This format can be helpful if your Organic Group's title contain a : in the title, you can then use the alternative definition format DN|Organic Group ID:Member Type.

LDAP to drupal role Configuration

The role configuration is much the same as the Organic Groups settings.  We simply discover what our Role DN's are in LDAP and map them to Drupal roles using the form provided.

The above configuration will map an Administrators group in Active Directory to an Administrtors role in our drupal install.  The common name (CN) of the group and the role name do not have to match here, we are simply mapping one onto the other.

The "Create drupal roles if they do not exist" is an important setting that is hidden under "Part III. Even More Settings.", without this ticked any roles will not be created and only existing roles will be mapped.  This may be the setup that you wish but it is without doubt a gotcha to look out for.

 

I hope this helps get your site up and running with Drupal, Active Directory and LDAP!

 

Related Service Areas: ConsultancyDevelopmentSupportTeaser: Mark Davies explains how to configure Microsoft Active Directory and Drupal's LDAP module for Enterprise integration with DrupalCategories: DevelopmentDrupal PlanetSupportPrimary Category: DevelopmentTags: ldapactive directoryssomicrosoftintegration

Having a Drupal 8 site under development with a customer aware of the risk of loosing data I took the risk of fixing a broken Drupal 8 site. Today I did an code update and got the following welcome screen on http://drupal.dev

If you have just changed code (for example deployed a new module or moved an existing one) read http://drupal.org/documentation/rebuild
Additional uncaught exception thrown while handling exception.
Original

Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Exception\ServiceNotFoundException: You have requested a non-existent service "url_generator". in ...

The development site was synchronised using the usual drush commands

drush rsync @drupal.tst:%files @drupal.dev:%files
drush sql-sync @drupal.tst @drupal.dev Test site

So where's the test site standing?

$git log -n 1
commit e99a83e54d99cb5111585a37b954b62886b7c65b
Author: Alex Pott <alex.a.pott@googlemail.com>
Date:   Fri May 31 11:16:37 2013 +0100

So we are 12 days behind.

Dev site

Let's check what happened and can we fix it?

$ git pull
$ git log --oneline  e99a83e54d99cb5111585a37b954b62886b7c65b.. | wc -l
     235

Wow ... 12 days 235 commits ... that's too much. We know it worked once so let's start with that good version. First we tell git we want to find code where it went wrong and which version was right.

$ git bisect start
$ git bisect good e99a83e54d99cb5111585a37b954b62886b7c65b

Now git takes the middle between HEAD and the good version. Checking the front page now shows it's

$ git bisect bad
# check front page again
$ git bisect bad
# now my site is alive a little (menu doesn't look good enough)
$ drush cc all
# still not good enough

Hmmm ... I made a mistake. That version is probably good enough.

$ git bisect good 3fdf6a1c139fd2a36ff8bf12f1b29f31bced8973
You need to start by "git bisect start"
-n Do you want me to do it for you [Y/n]?

So this continues for a while

  583  git bisect bad
  584  git bisect bad
  585  git bisect good
  586  git bisect good
  587  git bisect bad
  588  git bisect good
  589  git bisect bad
  590  git bisect bad

Now the site is working and no more bisect commits left.

$ git log -n 1
commit 9d73599020c282ed79294dcb4121212bb03b782c
Author: Alex Pott <alex.a.pott@googlemail.com>
Date:   Thu Jun 6 09:08:39 2013 +0100

    Issue #2001310 by chx, effulgentsia, Berdir, YesCT: Disallow firing hooks during update.

So the current commit is OK. What happened with the next one?

$ git log origin/8.x
# now search for the good commit 9d73599020c282ed79294dcb4121212bb03b782c
# this is the bad one?
commit b21943922d94261dfa8de34995d206d5e8e9c3d7
Author: Alex Pott <alex.a.pott@googlemail.com>
Date:   Thu Jun 6 09:14:16 2013 +0100

    Issue #1888424 by katbailey, steveoliver, twistor, beejeebus, effulgentsia: Change notice: Make Drupal's URL generation logic available to HttpKernel, and minimize code repetition/divergence.

Well that matches with the error. And the diff shows an interesting change on the core.services.yml

git checkout b21943922d94261dfa8de34995d206d5e8e9c3d7
git show

Now the puzzle is to solve this upgrade path.

• planet
• planet drupal
• git
• drupal-8

Hide some blocks in the page render process and maybe load those with Ajax depending on certain conditions.

Once you install Drupal 8 in a foreign language, you'll have Language and Interface translation modules enabled with the chosen language configured. Drupal 8 has more core modules handling language related features, yet less requirement for contributed modules to be installed for the most important tasks (on my last count, the 4 modules explained here cover functionality of 20+ modules from Drupal 7 and in much better ways).

Why have multiple modules when a multilingual site just needs all the features? Well, there are also foreign language (not multilingual) sites that we aim to support better and multilingual sites can be very different as well. Also, admittedly there are technological reasons to organize the modules by the features they provide.

In Drupal 8 (so far) multilingual is the only group of modules, so you'll find these modules under the other core modules in a neat group.