Drupal

After using Ansible as a personal DevOps tool for a couple of months, here are some impressions.

Context

• Outside of work (web development) I look after six Drupal 7 and WordPress sites on shared hosting
• My local development is done on a MacBook using apache (with some dabbling in Lando/Docker). I've done some wildcarding with dnsmasq and vhosts to streamline local dev site configuration. CMS code is in git repos.
• My Ansible work is a personal project and I'm the only stakeholder
• I learned Ansible doing this work

I'm experimenting with Drupal 8 and some its new features like migration and configuration management. A reset script is a convenient timesaver and many people have shared their techniques for doing so. Having benefited from other's generosity I wanted to return the favour by sharing my current work-in-progress.

This script:

At our April 2017 meeting Renée Stephen gave the Vancouver Drupal User Group (VanDUG) an encore of her Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit (PNWDS) presentation: No more performance anxiety! The presentation walked us through the formal process of server load testing.

New versions of websites often have new content organizations with new URL patterns. When old content is assigned a new URL it's almost always desirable to redirect traffic from the content's old URL to its new URL. The redirect preserves external links to the site content (i.e., prevents "link rot") and helps maintain search engine page ranking.

The Drupal 7 Redirect module gives a site the ability to redirect from one URL to another using a proper HTTP redirect status (e.g., 301 - Permanently moved). In addition to the user interface there is a programmatic method for entering redirects.

The aptly named redirect_save function takes an object containing the details of the redirect and creates a redirect for the URL.

Like many web types I have a number of small websites I look after, and I've never been happy with my backup solution. Until today.

My requirements are simple, create a backup of the database and files and save it on a local backup drive. The sites don't warrant anything fancy (like a cloud based solution that costs money). The procedure until now involved multiple, fussy steps. It turned out a single script solution is simple once a few key technologies are in place.

A Drupal upgrade between major versions rarely means doing the upgrade procedure once. A new configuration, changing content, or needing to test different module versions typically means redoing the upgrade from scratch a number of times, a tedious, error-prone and time consuming process. Fortunately there's a solution: automation!

Scripting was always possible, but Drush has made it so much simpler. What follows is a review of the Drush commands I used via script to upgrade my Group 42 website to Drupal 7. The hand full of shell commands are basic and covered many other places on the net. The full upgrade scripts are at the end of the post.

If you're familiar with Drush I recommend jumping directly to the scripts.

Replacing files during a Drupal upgrade can be tedious, especially for those of us who have to worry about SVN files in every directory. The following script automates this part of the Drupal upgrade, making it much faster and less error prone. I've been using the script in its current form for almost a year and it has served me well. And though most of my other bash scripts have been replaced by Drush commands, this script has proven better suited to my workflow than its Drush equivalent.

Overview

The script does the following:

1. Deletes the current Drupal distribution files while preserving:
   • directories
   • SVN files
   • all files in the /sites directory tree
   • all files in /files directory tree
     (I have a number of sites using the old file directory location)
   • the Komodo (.kpf) project file
2. Downloads and expands the Drupal distribution tarball if it has not already been done
3. Copies the new Drupal distribution files to the target directory
4. Removes the unrequired text files. e.g., CHANGELOG.txt, INSTALL.mysql.txt

The steps for programmatically creating a node are:

• Create a PHP object representing the node data
• Save the object using the node_save() function

While the mechanics are simple, there is an important responsibility involved. The Drupal work flow does data validation before calling the node_save() function; node_save() does no validation. By calling node_save() directly your code takes the responsibility for providing valid data.

Drupal 7 Changes

A quick note for those of you familiar with Drupal 6. You'll notice two changes in Drupal 7:

Body Field Is No Longer Special

In Drupal 6 the body field was special. Specifically, it had a different data structure than other fields and it always existed, even if it wasn't used. With Drupal 7 the body field is a standard field provided by core and is truly optional.

Language

Language specification is required for the node and some fields.

Filter Format

The format of the text field filter is now specified by machine name, not integer. For example: full_html, filtered_html, or plain_text. This is great news for moving contents between different Drupal systems.

Basic Node Creation

The following code assumes an unchanged Drupal 7 Standard installation and will create a Drupal 7 article node.

Blocks in Drupal 6 (and 5) always felt a little less loved than other portions of Drupal. While the node and theming APIs offered straightforward and often elegant methods to modify behaviour without modifying other peoples' code, blocks weren't so fortunate. Lacking API support, working with blocks often meant writing ugly code. Last week helping with the Drupal Block API documentation I discovered this has changed in Drupal 7. I thought I'd share what I learned.

The information I'll discuss is a summary of the block information from:

• Converting 6.x modules to 7.x (http://drupal.org/node/224333)
• Converting 6.x modules to 7.x - Categorical (http://drupal.org/node/394070)
• Block API Documentation: block.api.php
• Examples Module: block_examples.module (From: Examples for Developers project)