NOTE: Support of Dreditor has been nominal for a while. It's still the preferred tool for enhancing Drupal's issue queue, but keeping track of what the "official" version is can be tricky. For now, we recommend https://dreditor.github.io/. There's also been work happening to incorporate many of Dreditor's features right into Drupal.org itself. See https://www.drupal.org/project/drupalorg/issues/1673278
Dreditor is a great community tool that assists with things like patch reviews, and generally interacting with the Drupal.org issue queue. Dreditor is not a Drupal module, but is a plugin script you use in your browser. In this lesson, Joe walks through how to get Dreditor installed (on Chrome and Firefox), and then shows you how to use it to make your work in the issue queues more efficient.
Additional resources
How to Give a Hug
FreeIn this video Joe Shindelar goes over some important information about giving hugs. He walks through the various facets of hugs, giving some demonstrations throughout on:
- Defining a hug
- Types of hugs
- Cautions
- Technique
As Joe admonishes in the video, don't forget to practice your hugging after watching the video. Practice makes perfect!
In this lesson we take a look at an extremely useful tool for communicating with the Drupal community (and many other Open Source communities as well). We will find out what IRC is, why you would want to use it, how to get connected, and some basic guidelines and tips for talking with people on IRC. We'll also explain what the IRC bot, Druplicon, is and how you can use it.
Additional resources
If you're reading this message, you use Open Source software. The last fifteen years has seen the meteoric rise of tools like Linux, Apache, Firefox, WordPress, Drupal and more; simplyusing Open Source is old hat. When it comes to building your company's web strategy around open source tools, though, the decisions can be fuzzier. The best-known arguments for Open Source are often ideological rather than pragmatic, and fail to account for the different needs of different projects and businesses.
In this Do it with Drupal session, Jeff Eaton will explain the no-nonsense pros and cons of Open Source, covering the big wins as well as the tradeoffs and common pain points. Whether your business is testing the Open Source water, betting the farm on community-maintained software, or open-sourcing its own creations, you'll learn how to avoid common pitfalls and set yourself up for success.
In this lesson we show how everyone can help with the Drupal.org documentation. We take a quick look at some of the links and information that is available to everyone with a Drupal.org account, and then we dive in to make our first edit to an existing page. We run into Drupal.org's spam protection, so we also walk through getting ourselves on the no spam list for the site. After we complete our edit, we then see how to add our own new handbook page, by creating documentation for a contributed module, which doesn't have a page yet. We finish up by creating an issue in the module's issue queue, to get a link to our new page added to the module's project page. You'll see us use the Drupal.org issue queue in this video. For more detailed information about that, see our Getting Started in the Issue Queue video.
In this lesson, we take a tour of the *.drupal.org websites, as there is a lot more than just the main Drupal.org site. After our tour, we'll walk through getting an account, and see how that gives us access to all of the Drupal.org web properties. We'll play with our Dashboard, and join a group on groups.drupal.org, to become more active in the community — the best way to learn and get help. You'll see us use the Drupal.org issue queue in this video. For more detailed information about that, see our Getting Started in the Issue Queue video.
Learn Drupal
Guide
Drupal User Guide
Guide
YAML, which stands for YAML Ain't Markup Language, is a human-readable data serialization format that's been widely adopted in a variety of use cases in Drupal. Anyone wanting to write modules, or themes, for Drupal will need to understand YAML syntax. Even site builders are likely to encounter YAML at least in passing as YAML is the data-serialization format of choice for Drupal's configuration management system. Good thing it's pretty easy to learn even with the most basic of programming backgrounds.
This tutorial will look at the YAML data format and provide examples of how to write and read YAML. Starting with an introduction to the language's syntax and some of the strengths of YAML. Then looking at the difference between scalar data types like strings and integers, and collection data types like lists and associative arrays.
Since YAML in the Drupal world is read into PHP and ultimately becomes a PHP data structure that we can use in our own code we'll also look at how the YAML we write in a .yml file is represented in PHP data types. To do this we'll use the YAML Sandbox module that provides a handy textarea into which we can type YAML and have it parsed into PHP data structures.
Learning objectives
- Explain what YAML is and its strengths as a data serialization format
- Create scalar key/value pairs in YAML
- Create lists, and associative arrays using YAML collections
- Understand how the YAML you write is represented in PHP
Tips
- In Drupal, use the .yml extension and not .yaml
- Ensure your code editing application is configured to use spaces (preferably 2 spaces, as per Drupal coding standards), not the tab character when the TAB key is pressed. If you have tab characters in a YAML file within a Drupal environment, a fatal PHP error will be thrown and you'll see a White Screen of Death (WSOD).
- Copy and paste from an existing YAML file to ensure the formatting is correct, and edit from there.
Additional resources
- http://www.yaml.org
- YAML Sandbox module
- Find other tutorials and external resources related to YAML on our YAML topic page (Drupalize.Me)
