DRUPAL-7

Tip of the day: patching legacy Drupal 7 projects with Composer

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Some late Drupal 7 projects use Composer for project structure and tooling, even though they don't use Composer for the Drupal requirements proper. In that case, the normal Drupal 8/9 patching process using cweagans/composer-patches is not available, since dependencies are not handled with Composer. So is there a way to apply patches cleanly from Composer ? Sure there is! Let's see how.

Drupal tip of the day: how to display time and memory use for Drush commands

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

When you use Drush, especially in crontabs, you may sometimes be bitten by RAM or duration limits. Of course, running Drush with the "-d" option will provide this information, but it will only do so at the end of an annoyingly noisy output debugging the whole command run.

On the other hand, just running the Drush command within a time command won't provide fine memory reporting. Luckily Drush implements hooks to make acquiring this information easily, so here is a small gist you can use as a standalone Drush plugin or add to a module of your own:

Drupal tip of the day: how to drop the Simpletest collections when using Drupal with MongoDB

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

The problem

When running tests on a server using the recent versions of the MongoDB module for Drupal, and more specifically the MongoDB simpletests, the simpletest runner may leave droppings in your MongoDB Drupal database, which have no business remaining there. How to remove them while keeping the good collections ?

The typical case will be after a failed test runs, looking like this:

Logging for MongoDB

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

One nice thing during Drupal 7/8 development is the ability, thanks to the devel module, to get a list of all SQL queries ran on a page. As I've been working quite a bit on MongoDB in PHP recently, I wondered how to obtain comparable results when using MongoDB in PHP projects. Looking at the D7 implementation, the magic happens in the Database class:

<?php
// Start logging on the default database.
define(DB_CHANNEL, 'my_logging_channel');
\Database::startLog(DB_CHANNEL);

// Get the log contents, typically in a shutdown handler.
$log = \Database::getLog(DB_CHANNEL);
?>

With DBTNG, that's all it takes, and devel puts it to good use UI-wise. So is there be an equivalent mechanism in MongoDB ? Of course there is !

The Drupal Block system from drop.org to Drupal 8: video from DrupalCon Prague

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

So DrupalCon Prague is almost over, and I can now share with you the video of my session about the history of the Drupal block system, from drop.org to Drupal 8, just as recorded on wednesday.

The session page is available on https://prague2013.drupal.org/session/blocks-drop.org-drupal-8-and-beyo… where you can also rate it. Please to it over there, or add your comments here: it is very useful for me to see what needs to be adjusted for upcoming presentations. Based on the overall feedback, it seems that:

When Drush Make fails to apply patches...

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

The issue

These last few days, I had noticed a problem with Drush Make and patches: some patches, be they rolled by our team or from elsewhere, would apply without a glitch, but some others, which worked normally according to the test bot on Drupal.org, would fail to apply without any obvious reason.

I had mostly put it out of my list of pressing issues when I really had to use an old version of OpenLayers, 7.x-2.0-alpha2 to be specific, AND apply a patch fixing one of the bugs in that module: behaviors plugin not being located correctly (http://drupal.org/node/1898662 if you want details). So I rolled the patch, tested it locally, the qa.d.o bot applied it and did not report more errors than expected for that old version.... and my Drush Make install refused to apply it.

Here was the relevant excerpt:

projects[domain] = 3.7
projects[domain][patch][] = "http://drupal.org/files/domain-foreach_argument-1879502-1.patch"
; ...snip...
projects[openlayers] = 2.0-alpha2
projects[openlayers][patch][] = "http://drupal.org/files/0001-Fix-the-path-file-declaration-for-behaviors.patch"
The Domain patch applied normally, but the OpenLayers patch would't apply. What could be wrong ?

Developing to the Views 7.3 API - slides from DDDB

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Now that Drupalcon Chicago is over, I found some time to fix the slides from my session at the Drupal Dev Days in Brussels. It took some time because neither Google Presentations nor Slideshare apparently like the MgOpen font family.

The presentation is now on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/fgm-osinet/drupal-views-development.

The progressive code samples are attached to this blog entry, as a tarred Git repository.

Optimizing strings in PHP ?

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Every so often, I get asked about whether it is really worth it to chase double quotes and constructs like print "foo $bar baz", and replace them with something like echo 'foo', $bar, 'baz', or even to remove all those big heredoc strings so convenient for large texts.

Of course, most of the time, spending hours to fine comb code in search of this will result in less of a speedup than rethinking just one SQL query, but the answer is still that, yes, in the infinitesimal scale, there is something to be gained. Even with string reformatting ? Yes, even that. But only if you are not using an optimizer.

Just don't take my word for it, Sara Golemon explained it years ago with her "How long is a piece of string" post, in 2006.