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Drupal Mountain Camp Program updates admin Wed, 02/20/2019 - 22:08

Hi everyone,

we are excited to share a few program updates on Drupal Mountain Camp as the team behind the scenes is working hard preparing the last bits before the conference in just 2 weeks.

We are extremely grateful for all the quality session submissions people have submitted. The full schedule over 4 days includes 9 workshops, 2 keynotes, 4 featured sessions and 42 regular sessions in 3 different tracks. 

Besides the already promoted keynotes, we would like to highlight the following featured sessions:

• Better Communication to Bridge the Tech-Business Gap by Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire
• Let’s write secure Drupal code! by Balazs Janos Tatar
• Current state of the Drupal Admin UI Redesign by Sascha Eggenberger & Cristina Chumillas
• Optimize your JavaScript by Saša Nikolić

Thanks to the collaboration with the Drupal Recording Initiative by Kevin Thull, we'll be able to provide video recordings for you after the conference.

Contribution is a key topic for Drupal Mountain Camp. Make sure to sign-up for one of the 7 different initiatives or propose your own using our contribution sign-up sheet.

We also updated our social events page so you can start preparing for some fun in the snowy Swiss mountains.

So far, more than 95 tickets have been sold. Regular tickets are available for CHF 120 until 1st of March, afterwards we sell tickets for CHF 140.

We are looking forward seeing you at Drupal Mountain Camp in Davos, 7-10 of March 2019.

Josef / dasjo on behalf of the Drupal Mountain Camp team.

Over the years, as Drupal has evolved, the upgrade process has become a bit more involved; as with most web applications, Drupal's increasing complexity extends to deployment, and whether you end up running Drupal on a VPS, a bare metal server, in Docker containers, or in a Kubernetes cluster, you should formalize an update process to make sure upgrades are as close to non-events as possible.

Gone are the days (at least for most sites) where you could just download a 'tarball' (.tar.gz) from Drupal.org, expand it, then upload it via SFTP to a server and run Drupal's update.php. That workflow (and even a workflow like drush up of old) might still work for some sites, but it is fragile and prone to cause issues whether you notice them or not. Plus if you're using Drush to do this, it's no longer supported in modern versions of Drush!

So without further ado, here is the process I've settled on for all the Drupal 8 sites I currently manage (note that I've converted all my non-Composer Drupal codebases to Composer at this point):

Project: Drupal coreDate: 2019-February-20Security risk: Highly critical 20∕25 AC:None/A:None/CI:All/II:All/E:Theoretical/TD:UncommonVulnerability: Remote Code ExecutionCVE IDs: CVE-2019-6340Description: 

Some field types do not properly sanitize data from non-form sources. This can lead to arbitrary PHP code execution in some cases.

A site is only affected by this if one of the following conditions is met:

• The site has the Drupal 8 core RESTful Web Services (rest) module enabled and allows PATCH or POST requests, or
• the site has another web services module enabled (like JSON:API in Drupal 8, or Services or RESTful Web Services in Drupal 7).

Solution: 

• If you are using Drupal 8.6.x, upgrade to Drupal 8.6.10.
• If you are using Drupal 8.5.x or earlier, upgrade to Drupal 8.5.11.
• Be sure to install any available security updates for contributed projects after updating Drupal core.
• No core update is required for Drupal 7, but several Drupal 7 contributed modules do require updates.

Versions of Drupal 8 prior to 8.5.x are end-of-life and do not receive security coverage.

To immediately mitigate the vulnerability, you can disable all web services modules, or configure your web server(s) to not allow PUT/PATCH/POST requests to web services resources. Note that web services resources may be available on multiple paths depending on the configuration of your server(s). For Drupal 7, resources are for example typically available via paths (clean URLs) and via arguments to the "q" query argument. For Drupal 8, paths may still function when prefixed with index.php/.

Reported By: 

• Samuel Mortenson of the Drupal Security Team

Fixed By: 

• Sascha Grossenbacher
• Peter Wolanin of the Drupal Security Team
• Samuel Mortenson of the Drupal Security Team
• Daniel Wehner
• Cash Williams of the Drupal Security Team
• Wim Leers
• Jess of the Drupal Security Team
• Lee Rowlands of the Drupal Security Team
• Alex Pott of the Drupal Security Team
• Francesco Placella
• Damian Lee
• Tobias Zimmermann
• Ted Bowman
• Damien McKenna of the Drupal Security Team
• Alex Bronstein of the Drupal Security Team
• Rob Loach
• Gabe Sullice
• Michael Hess of the Drupal Security Team
• Neil Drumm of the Drupal Security Team
• Heshan Wanigasooriya
• David Snopek of the Drupal Security Team
• Wolfgang Ziegler
• Miro Dietiker
• Truls S. Yggeseth

Conference organizers encourage you to take advantage of the free GDC 2019 Session Scheduler to lay out our week at the show in an intuitive, easy-to-navigate fashion. ...

Fresh off the end of the game's public beta, Media Molecule has announced that Dreams will be launching into early access on the PlayStation 4 this spring. ...

The block placeholder module allows content editors to associate block content to a particular block placeholder. Yes, this is very similar to how block regions work, but allows for a much easier configuration deployment process. As block content placement information is stored in configuration, and depends on the block content which may or may not exist yet.

A good proportion of my income in 2018 came from professional GM work. Now, this doesn’t include my work at the Royal Ontario Museum or Level Up Gaming. What I’m referring to is my work as a freelance GM-for-hire. 2018 consisted of 2 private schools and 8 families. At my busiest, I was running 4 games a week – each supplementing the income from my day jobs. From standing weekly appointments to hospital calls and birthday parties, I had the opportunity to play games across the GTA for a modest living.

How did I go about obtaining clients?

• Word of mouth. Many of my initial clients were former students from my museum program. They had “aged-out” and were still interested in having me run games for them. They then assembled friend groups of people who hadn’t worked with me before. This led to them introducing me to their school principals and well, the rest was history.
• Media. Having a webpage, social media presence, and business cards are essential. It lets you communicate to your client that you are a professional and can provide them with valuable information about your services (games you offer, rates, availability, etc.)

So, how do you succeed as a professional GM? How would I keep these clients?

• Know your worth. Don’t undersell yourself.
• Build trust and rapport. Be professional. Send invoices and keep good records. Remember, you are not only operating as a freelancer, but also as an ambassador of the hobby.
• Listen and identify the needs of the client. What kind of game do they want to play? What tone do they want the story? Often, the needs of you client, especially if you’ve been hired by a family, may not match your preferences.
• Remember that the key to a good session as a professional GM is a combination of content, story, and value. Come prepared with reflexive content. Involve the players in the story – give them agency over the experience. Finally, make sure that their tabletop experience is unforgettable. If you have miniatures, terrain, or even maps you’ve drawn, they bring immense amount of value to the tabletop experience. Even if you don’t simple visual aids like the Index Card RPG (see my previous post on this) do wonders for your table.
• Set expectations and employ safety tools at the table.
• The exchange of money for GM services can be difficult for some, particularly those who embody the GM vs Player Character mentality that was all too prevalent in the early stages of tabletop history. Remember that they are paying for your services. Remove your ego, and the tabletop experience will be better for everyone involved. Now, more than ever, it’s about being the PC’s biggest fan. Encourage them to grow.

But there are a couple of things to consider before working as a professional GM.

• This sort of work is precarious. People’s schedules change.
• There is potential for game burnout – the lack of desire to play those specific games. I’ve often found myself turning to skirmish wargames like Gaslands or RPGs I haven’t played with clients. If you think of it this way, this might actually be an advantage. It encourages you to try new games!

Was this the dream come true many hardcore gamers envision? In a way, yes it was. It provided me with a significant amount of secondary income to a) fuel my hobby, b) increase the value of my product, c) allowed me to develop my GM/table management skills, and d) provided me with opportunities to playtest adventures. But this kind of work is volatile. Clients can cancel last minute, leaving you without any work. This kind of work also leads to burnout.

So take care of yourself. GM-for-hire work is incredibly rewarding, just give a lot of thought to why you’re interested in doing it in the first place.

Daniel

 

To add a Webform Counter to a webform:

Provides Webform integration with rangeslider.js.

By using this module user can able to upload a resume.

Admin can able to manage uploaded resume listing. and filter.

Synopsis

This module provides a block that display weather information using the IPMA (Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera, I. P.) API data.

IPMA website
IPMA API

On the block settings page, you are able to chose the location and show or hide the different fields that the API provides.

This week we talked with Amber Matz, Production Manager and Trainer at Drupalize.me. In addition to these two important roles, Amber is actively involved in a number of projects in the Drupalverse, the current most notable one likely being the program team for the Builder Track at DrupalCon Seattle. Have a read if you’d like to find out more about her journey with Drupal and her insights on its future.

READ MORE

The module provides a service collector and runs them on each hook_cron() and allows developers to not write any code to cron and have simple time controlling functionality.

With growth comes changes and today we're introducing changes to our legal terms and pricing. The basic susbcription remains the same at $78 USD per year and the Professional subscription was bumped from $249 to $360 USD per year. The Enterprise subscription now starts at $3000 with a $1000 USD set-up fee which is needed for the one-time job of collecting brand logos and brand names and setting up our scripts to produce the white-labeled/re-branded products automatically. The Enterprise subscription will now be charged per month rather than per year.

New terms of service: https://www.sooperthemes.com/legal/terms
Services catalog:  https://www.sooperthemes.com/legal/services-catalog

Drupal is becoming more valuable but more expensive

3 years after Drupal 8's release the results are in: Drupal is still relevant but Drupal 8 is more expensive to implement and Drupal's adoption curve has tapered off. I don't think this is necessarily bad. Drupal's leadership made a decision to make Drupal the best Enterprise-grade CMS, not the best everyman's CMS. The result is that Drupal's steep learning curve became steeper yet, and costs of training and hiring Drupal developers increased accordingly. Our price bump is not merely a reaction to a decrease in the volume of Drupal websites in need of our solutions, it is also part of our learning process. 

Sooperthemes is growing but it is not growing enough

Since our Drupal 8 launch last year business at Sooperthemes is better than ever. But with our growing popularity comes a big increase in workload from the customer support forum, customer success tasks, and managing simple tasks like account administration, taxes, sales questions. It adds up to a lot of work. Currently our prices are too low for the increase in customers to pay for new staff to take on the additional workload. We have been investing a lot of effort in training interns but the time has come to move to a more sustainable solution.

Without changes Sooperthemes is not ready for the future. This price increase in the Professional subscription is one part of our strategy for sustainable growth.

Another change is getting better at charging big clients more than small clients. We want to keep our products accessible to the entire Drupal community. While we love our enterprise clients. we don't want to develop an amazing product just for the Drupal elite who can afford hundreds or thousands of dollars per month per site. Therefore we're introducing new licensing terms to charge users based on the scale of their usage of our flagship product Glazed Builder.

We updated our terms for us to be able to charge websites fairly not just by the number of domain (site) licenses, but also by the number of users who are using our Glazed Builder product. Some examples to illustrate why I think this is fair.

1. Freelance Music teacher's website with 1 domain license: $78 USD per year including updates and support.
2. An Drupal agency with currently 10 clients on our products: $360 USD per year.
3. A fast-moving consumer goods enterprise with 40 enterprise domain licenses: ~3000 USD per month.
4. If Tesla.com would use our products for their marketing content, job portal, community forum, online stores, online tools, in 37 languages: $78 USD per year, or 6 dollars and 50 cents per month.

I think the last example illustrates why it makes sense to introduce this new lever to help Sooperthemes grow sustainably.  To learn how exactly our new licensing term works make sure to read our services catalog.  

Provide More Value To Enterprise Clients

In order for Sooperthemes to be successful in the future we will need to work on signing on more Enterprise clients. We're going to work on adding more features that are important to enterprise clients. Starting today we offer better support options and dedicated support developers to cases in the Enterprise tier. If you want to share ideas on what you think should differentiate the Enterprise subscription tier from the other tiers don't hesitate to send me an email here: https://www.sooperthemes.com/contact

I would be especially interested in hearing what it would take for your business to purchase an enterprise subscription.

Photo by Benjamin Voros on Unsplash

A month ago, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic, visited me in Antwerp, Belgium. While I currently live in Boston, I was born and raised in Antwerp, and also started Drupal there.

We spent the morning together walking around Antwerp and visited the Plantin Moretus Museum.

The museum is the old house of Christophe Plantin, where he lived and worked around 1575. At the time, Plantin had the largest printing shop in the world, with 56 employees and 16 printing presses. These presses printed 1,250 sheets per day.

Today, the museum hosts the two oldest printing presses in the world. In addition, the museum has original lead types of fonts such as Garamond and hundreds of ancient manuscripts that tell the story of how writing evolved into the art of printing.

The old house, printing business, presses and lead types are the earliest witnesses of a landmark moment in history: the invention of printing, and by extension, the democratization of publishing, long before our digital age. It was nice to visit that together with Matt as a break from our day-to-day focus on web publishing.

Manage a sport team content : news, articles, games, palmares, history and more.

Provides per node (and later per entity) google analytics reports. The reports uses views and fields provided by Google Analytics Reports Module displaying them in the page and layout provided by Hidden Tab Module.

The Magic of Zurb Foundation Vasundhra Wed, 02/20/2019 - 11:40

You don’t want people to treat your website as an outcast. You don’t want to be the ugly duckling in this sharp, serious and extremely competitive world. 

Correct?

Thus, owning a professional looking website becomes an important platform for all sorts of business. It doesn’t really matter whether you are planning to make money or not, treating your website just like your employees is a must.

Why?

Well, because it creates an impression of your business, a place where people come to see who you are and what you want. Whether it is a big e-commerce site or a one-pager - a good website would always bring values to you and your company.  

As important as the website is for you, the themes contributes highly to the user experience and functionality of a particular site.

Your theme is the overall look, feel and styling of your website and the very first thing which the audience witnesses. And nothing can beat Drupal in this area.  

Beginning with the Zurb Foundation 

So here is Zurb foundation for you.

Zurb Foundation is the prototype theme that is used to prototype in the browser. It allows you to rapidly create a website or application while leveraging mobile and responsive technology that is well tested. 

The front end framework is the collection of HTML, CSS, and Javascript containing design patterns. These design patterns help the user in persevering time by helping them to dodge boring, boilerplate codes. The sites that are built on this foundation works great when there are multiple screens which include laptops, mobile phone, PC, iPad. The reason is that Zurb foundation has a responsive framework that uses CSS media queries and a mobile-first approach. 

Different versions of Zurb 
 

Zurb Foundation 3

If the primary goal for your website is rapid prototyping then Zurb foundation 3 is for you.  This theme is developed in Sass, which is a powerful CSS pre-processor that helps you to write, clean and organize CSS which can be maintained easily over time. 

One of the biggest advantages of using Zurb Foundation 3 was the shift of development of the framework to Sass and compass rather than pure CSS. 

Sass grants the user with variables, functions and powerful mixin that speeds up the development of framework as well as made the code more coincide. 

Zurb Foundation 4 

This version of Zurb foundation brought many new functionalities and changes in its framework. Started from being a mobile-friendly theme, Zurb foundation 4 supported some complex layouts, grids, and media queries. 

This version brought about flexible and powerful built-in tools with the advantage of it being accessible to different screen size (new, simpler syntax that better reflects how the grid works)

Apart from this, Zurb foundation 4 is all about semantics.  Users were granted with the power of removing and writing all the presentational classes from the markup with built-in sass mixins and extensions. 

Zurb Foundation 4 also presented the users with some splendid plugins that worked well with AJAX. 

Zurb Foundation 5

Fast, strong and a better foundation, Zurb foundation 5 is great for designers and developers that are using it in their workflow. The foundation specifically focused on smart coding that introduced the users with better coding practices. And if it is a team then this would give them an idea to start from a common point. The advantage: It helped them to put together all interactions and workflow in a shorter period of time. 

Zurb Foundation 6

Foundation of site 6 has been designed to give the users with production efficiency in their project. It includes a wide range of modular and flexible components that are not only lightweight but easy to maintain as well. 

Foundation 6 is also half the size of foundation 5, in other words, there was a reduction of 50 % code. All these codes have come with ARIA attributes and roles alongside instructions. 

The base style in foundation 6 act as a coded framework, which makes the work of the user even more easy and flexible. Simpler CSS styles allow the user to easily modify them and fit it according to their needs. 

Zurb Foundation or Bootstrap?

If talking about Zurb and its different version, bootstrap tends to make its way between all this. 

How?

Well, because Bootstrap and Zurb are the major participants when it comes to web designing methods.  Often designers and developers seem to get lost in the mist while battling and choosing between one. 

  Zurb Foundation Bootstrap Community The community here is smaller as compared to bootstrap but it is growing with decent technical support.  The community here is smaller as compared to bootstrap but it is growing with decent technical support.  CSS Preprocessor Foundation supports SASS Bootstrap also supports SASS but it is a less camp. Customization Minimalist approach to its pre-built UI components giving room to the designers to create new things. Bootstrap consist of basic GUI customizer which most of the time doesn’t allow the users to create something new.  Browser Support Supports Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, opera, android  Supports Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, opera, android, and IE8 Grid System Foundation was the first one to go mobile friendly and adapt to the grid system. Bootstrap has ample of time to bridge the gap in terms of features and functionalities.  Advanced Feature Elements Zurb foundation   of X-y grid, responsive tab, off-canvas etc It is customizable with a variety of designs. Releases Zurb has more releases w.r.t the development requirement. It has 6 releases and the 7th one is yet to come. Bootstrap has 4 release. The  4th  release was on August 19, 2011 Why choose Drupal for Zurb foundation?

When building a website what is the very first thing which the user sees?

Content? Functionalities? Information? Or Layout?

Selecting the theme and functionalities of a website is one of the most primary decisions that a website owner has to make and Drupal is the CMS that can help you achieve this task. It has about 1,316 themes where each theme has a variety of strengths

Out of which Zurb Foundation theme is grid-based, mobile first CSS. When used with Drupal, Zurb provides efficiency to the front end developer. It is a platform-specific method that helps you achieve various functionalities. 

• The foundation XY grid (in timeless condition) allows the user to easily create and layout Drupal content.
• The top bar of the foundation is combined with Drupal’s menu navigation and works well with submenus.
• The off-campus region in the Zurb foundation are available as Drupal blocks and the menu bar that is placed in this region are automatically themed. 

Creating Sub Themes 

It is imperative that the user creates a sub-themes that allow Zurb foundation to apply on any website. 

There are two ways of creating a sub-theme:

Drush: Drush is basically a command line access to common Drupal administrative tasks and configuration. The user can change the directory with the help of Drush.  

Manually: The user can also create sub-themes manually. They can complete the task by expanding the theme folder and then replacing it with starter files. 

Contributed Drupal modules that can be used with Zurb The Zurb foundation aims to do theming without the help of any dependencies but there are many modules that help in theming better. 

Modules like panels, block class, display suite, special menu items. 

Panels: Panels module allow a site administrator to create customized layouts for one or more users. It provides an API that allows the configuration and placement of
blocks into regions. 

Block Class: Block class allows the user to add classes to any block through the block’s configuration interface. 

Display Suite: Display suite allows the users to take control over content fully using drag and drop interface. 

Menu Items: This module allows the user to create dropdown divider and all sort of headers in the navigation menu. 

Case Study on MIT Press CogNet 

MIT Press CogNet is an essential online resource for all the students and scholars that are into cognitive sciences. 

The objective of this project was to provide a completely responsive design in all devices for the users. An organization worked closely with the CogNet team. With the CogNet team, they developed a basic wireframe. custom Drupal theme based on the zurb foundation was built.

Zurb foundation theme and sass for CSS preprocessing were used to rework the already existing theme. To guarantee a seamless experience on any type of screen the developers used jQuery to construct slick navigation, scrolling, and content exploration. 

The results were eye-catching. From being a desktop-only website, MIT Press CogNet was modified into an accessible one where the users were able to view it in any device. The biggest achievement of the whole procedure was that it was done under the budget provided by the organization.  

Future of Zurb Foundation

Zurb is yet to launch another version of the architecture (ITCSS+SMACSS). 

Zurb Foundation 7 separates the view layer from the logic layer to make it easy and reliable. 

It would dramatically improve your freedom to shift between JavaScript frameworks with a super-powerful pluggable JavaScript architecture. In short, there are two major changes that would take place in Zurb Foundation 7 

The first one as mentioned would dramatically let user shift between javascript frameworks with javascript architecture. UI framework today tends to either go in one framework or have different and independent ports for different JS framework.

And yes, the second major change in the foundation is the ITCSS based architecture with the usage of SMACSS. This would make it easier to build and maintain scalable sites and themes. 

Conclusion 

Remember that themes are connected to the protagonist's internal journey. It is not just the visuals but it is also the journey of the user experience that they would have while going through your website.

At OpenSense labs, we understand how important it is to create a website that matches your goals and objectives. Ping us at hello@opensenselabs.com so that we can arrange services to make your website what you have always hoped for. 

blog banner blog image Drupal Drupal 8 Zurb Foundation Drupal theme Bootstrap Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On

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