drupal

I just finished delivering my CMS Philly How I am migrating JeffGeerling.com from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 presentation, which summarizes the first 100 days (1-2 hours per week) migrating this website from D7 to D8.

The slides are available from SlideShare:

At the beginning of April, the Drupal Association announced a new #DrupalCares campaign to secure funding to keep the Association's lights on after DrupalCon Minneapolis was mothballed due to certain global events.

Very quickly, many in the Drupal community stepped up, increasing contributions, making one-time donations, or even pledging a generous 2-for-1 match. I decided to pledge $1 for every like on this video, and as of today, it had over 800 likes!

Friend and former colleague Chris Urban and I will be presenting the results of the 2020 Drupal Local Development Survey at CMS Philly—which is now a virtual event—on May 1st. You can find more information about the session here: 2020 Developer Tool Survey Results. I'll also be posting the survey results on this blog soon after.

Chris also coaxed me into talking about my ongoing Drupal 7 to 8 migration saga in a separate session, so if you've missed the first 13 live stream episodes, check out the session How I'm migrating JeffGeerling.com from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 to get caught up—then subscribe to my YouTube channel to see how it all ends 🤪.

It remains to be seen whether Chris and I will be wearing Hawaiian shirts during the session:

Like many of you, my life has changed because of open source software. Drupal, in particular, is the first open source project I became deeply involved in, and my income from Drupal work has supported my family for years.

I've attended local Drupal Camps, many DrupalCons, and even worked for a few great Drupal companies. The Drupal Association has been a major part of sustaining the Drupal community for many years, and due to COVID-19, they're struggling financially this year.

They rely heavily on DrupalCon revenue, and they use those funds to maintain and grow drupal.org, market Drupal, and support community events.

In the official Coder Sniffer install guide on Drupal.org, it recommends installing Coder and the Drupal code sniffs globally using the command:

composer global require drupal/coder

I don't particularly like doing that, because I try to encapsulate all project requirements within that project, especially since I'm often working on numerous projects, some on different versions of PHP or Drupal, and installing things globally can cause things to break.

So instead, I've done the following (see this issue) for my new JeffGeerling.com Drupal 8 site codebase (in case you haven't seen, I'm live-streaming the entire migration process!):

tl;dr: Docker's default bind mount performance for projects requiring lots of I/O on macOS is abysmal. It's acceptable (but still very slow) if you use the cached or delegated option. But it's actually fairly performant using the barely-documented NFS option!

July 2020 Update: Docker for Mac may soon offer built-in Mutagen sync via the :delegated sync option, and I did some benchmarking here. Hopefully that feature makes it to the standard Docker for Mac version soon.

September 2020 Update: Alas, Docker for Mac will not be getting built-in Mutagen support at this time. So, read on.

DrupalCon Minneapolis is two months away, and that means it's time for the 2020 Drupal Local Development Survey.

Local development environment usage results from 2019's survey.

If you do any Drupal development work, no matter how much or how little, we would love to hear from you. This survey is not attached to any Drupal organization, it is simply a community survey to help highlight some of the most widely-used tools that Drupalists use for their projects.

Take the 2020 Drupal Local Development Survey

This website is currently (as of February 2020) running on Drupal 7. Drupal 8 was released in November 2015—half a decade ago. Drupal 7 support has been extremely long-lived, as it will not be end-of-life'd until November 2021. As with all software, once it is out of date, and security patches are no longer provided, it becomes harder to ensure the software is secure, much less running well on the latest servers and PHP versions!

Therefore, I decided it was time to start migrating JeffGeerling.com to Drupal 8. And I figured instead of fumbling through the process all by myself, and maybe posting a couple blog posts about the process at the end, I'd adopt a new mantra: Let's fail together! (Just kidding—sorta.)

tl;dr: Subscribe to my YouTube Channel; I'm going to start migrating this website to Drupal 8 on a livestream every Tuesday at 10 a.m. US Central (3 p.m. UTC).

Ever since Drupal 8 was released, I've been waffling on the decision to migrate/upgrade this website (JeffGeerling.com) to Drupal 8. The site started off years ago as a static HTML site generated by Thingamablog, a really old Java-based static blog generator.

In the years since, I migrated from Thingamablog to Drupal 6, and from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. Each of these migrations also incorporated a complete redesign, and I did another semi-redesign halfway through the Drupal 7 lifecycle, to the design you see today:

Dark mode ftw!

Drupal VM 5.1.0 was just released (release name Recognizer), and the main feature is PHP 7.4 support; you can now begin running and testing your Drupal sites under PHP 7.4 to check for any incompatibilities.

PHP 7.4 includes some new features like typed properties, arrow functions, and opcache preloading which could help with certain types of code or site deployments (I'm interested to see if opcache preloading could help the startup time of Drupal inside container environments like Kubernetes!).