drupal planet

Another year, another field trip for the Pi Dramble—my 5-Raspberry-Pi cluster! I presented a session titled Highly available Drupal on a Raspberry Pi Cluster at php[tek] 2016, which just so happens to have moved to my hometown, St. Louis, MO this year!

For this presentation, I remembered to record the audio using a lav mic plugged into my iPhone, as well as iShowU to record what was on my screen. Sadly, I didn't have a secondary camera to capture the Pi Dramble itself, but you can glance at all the other 'Let's build a Pi Cluster' videos if you want to see it in action!

Here's a video recording of the presentation:

Drupal VM 3.0.0 "The Light Sailer" was just released, and you can grab it from the Drupal VM website now. We spent a lot of time during DrupalCon New Orleans sprinting on Drupal VM, fixing bugs, and updating ALL THE THINGS to make sure this release solves a lot of pain points for individuals and teams who need a great local development environment.

Let's get right into why this is the best release of Drupal VM EVER!

The fastest and most modern environment

Drupal VM now defaults to Ubuntu 16.04 (which was just released in late April), running MySQL 5.7 and PHP 7. This means you're getting the fastest, most reliable, and most modern development environment for your Drupal 8 projects.

Since a quick Google search didn't bring up how to do this in Drupal 8 (there are dozens of posts on how to do it in Drupal 7), I thought I'd post a quick blog post on how you can modify a user's roles in Drupal 8. Hint: It's a lot easier than you'd think!

In Drupal 7, $user was an object... but it was more like an object that acted like a dumb storage container. You couldn't really do anything with it directly—instead, you had to stick it in functions (like user_multiple_role_edit()) to do things like add or remove roles or modify account information.

In Drupal 8, $user is a real, useful object. Want to modify the account name and save the change?

Another year, another Acquia Certification exam...

I'm at DrupalCon New Orleans, the first North American DrupalCon since the release of Drupal 8. In addition, this is the first DrupalCon where the Acquia Certified Developer - Drupal 8 Exam is being offered, so I decided to swing by the certification center (it's on the 3rd floor of the convention center, in case you want to take any of the certification exams this week!) and take it.

The banana is for scale.

When I originally built the Raspberry Pi Dramble 6-node Pi cluster in 2014 (for testing Ansible with bare metal hardware on the cheap), I compiled all the code, notes, etc. into a GitHub repository. In 2015, I decided to take it a step further, and I started hosting www.pidramble.com on the cluster, in my basement office!

Note: A lot has changed in Drupal 8 and the Search API module ecosystem since this post was written in May 2016... I wrote a new blog post for Faceted Solr Search in Drupal 8, so please read that if you're just getting started. I'm leaving this up as a historical reference, as the general process and architecture are the same, but many details are different.

In Drupal 8, Search API Solr is the consolidated successor to both the Apache Solr Search and Search API Solr modules in Drupal 7. I thought I'd document the process of setting up the module on a Drupal 8 site, connecting to an Apache Solr search server, and configuring a search index and search results page with search facets, since the process has changed slightly from Drupal 7.

June 2016 Update: Times change fast! Already, the migrate_source_json module mentioned in the post has been (mostly) merged directly into the migrate_plus module, so if you're building a new migration now, you should use the migrate_plus JSON plugin if at all possible. See Mike Ryan's blog post Drupal 8 plugins for XML and JSON migrations for more info.

Recently I needed to migrate a small set of content into a Drupal 8 site from a JSON feed, and since documentation for this particular scenario is slightly thin, I decided I'd post the entire process here.

I was given a JSON feed available over the public URL http://www.example.com/api/products.json which looked something like:

As Drupal VM has passed 500 stars on GitHub, and is becoming a fairly mature environment for local development environment—especially for teams of Drupal developers who want to maintain consistency and flexibility when developing many sites, I've been working to get more stable releases, better documentation, and a more focused feature set.

Also, in the past few months, as interest has surged, I've even had the opportunity to talk about all things Drupal VM on the DrupalEasy podcast! Check out DrupalEasy Podcast 172 - The Coup (Jeff Geerling - Drupal VM), which was just posted a few days ago.

And to keep the conversation flowing, I'm going to be moderating a BoF on Drupal VM at DrupalCon New Orleans, Drupal VM and local Drupal development for teams.

For the past few days, I've been diving deep into testing Drupal 8's experimental new BigPipe feature, which allows Drupal page requests for authenticated users to be streamed and loaded in stages—cached elements (usually the majority of a page) are loaded almost immediately, meaning the end user can interact with the main elements on the page very quickly, then other uncacheable elements are loaded in as Drupal is able to render them.

Here's a very quick demo of an extreme case, where a particular bit of content takes five seconds to load; BigPipe hugely improves the usability and perceived performance of the page by streaming the majority of the page content from cache immediately, then streaming the harder-to-generate parts as they become available (click to replay):

tl;dr: Drupal 8's defaults make most Drupal sites perform faster than equivalent Drupal 7 sites, so be wary of benchmarks which tell you Drupal 7 is faster based solely on installation defaults or raw PHP execution speed. Architectural changes have made Drupal's codebase slightly slower in some ways, but the same changes make the overall experience of using Drupal and browsing a Drupal 8 site much faster.

When some people see reports of Drupal 8 being 'dramatically' slower than Drupal 7, they wonder why, and they also use this performance change as ammunition against some of the major architectural changes that were made during Drupal 8's development cycle.

First, I wanted to give some more concrete data behind why Drupal 8 is slower (specifically, what kinds of things does Drupal 8 do that make it take longer per request than Drupal 7 on an otherwise-identical system), and also why this might or might not make any difference in your choice to upgrade to Drupal 8 sooner rather than later.