Alex Moreno

Amongst other things, I hear this quite a lot on my conversations around the subject, why decoupling Drupal, is not like you are giving away what Drupal is and overkilling with something you could do with other tools? What's the point?

So, I heard you need Drupal and memcached running in Travis, right? But you have this "little" issue that Travis/Drupal cannot connect to memcached, something like:

WD memcache: You must enable the PHP memcache (recommended) or [error] memcached extension to use memcache.inc. 
WD memcache: Failed to connect to memcache server: 127.0.0.1:11211 [error]

Before you jump into docs and tutorials on how to install memcached in Travis, probably it's already there, you just have to enable.

Easy error to fix, once you know what's going on (is not always the case?).

Just upgrade your system from php 5 to php7. Drupal8 requirement.

In BLT, just edit your box/config.yml and change this line

php_version: "5.6"

to this:

php_version: "7.2"

Good old vagrant provision should do the rest of the trick. You are welcome :-)

Last months have been pretty busy here at BBC Worldwide with some of the projects we've been involved in.

In my case, one of the main areas I’ve been trying to improve (apart of the daily busy routine) is our devops / CI approach. The previous approach was using Chef, but it was not really adopted by the developers (which meant that after some months, the system was broken) and we were lacking some fundamental things (like integration with the production system, a real CI flow, etc…).

Typical problem, you have just gained your full project permissions role in Drupal.org, and you make your first mess... you have promoted your so loved first project without changing the Short project name.

Well, you have a problem, but not too big. Drupal.org will not allow you to rename your Short project name, so you will have to create a new one if you don't want to have an ugly url like that: https://drupal.org/project/2062343

Fortunately git can help. You will simply have to:

I always have the same problem when using select forms, and I always forget the solution.

Instead of returning an array, like: return $competitions; you have to return a drupal_map_assoc, like this: return drupal_map_assoc($competitions);

Otherwise, when selecting the form in hook_submit you will get a number, instead of a human readable string.

[gist:5920064]

• http://eureka.ykyuen.info/2012/04/11/drupal-7-dynamic-select-options-for-webform/
• http://designhammer.com/blog/providing-dynamic-select-options-webform-module-drupal

Reading a date in mysql can be frustrating, unless your brain is able to convert Dates from UNIXTIME formats. Let's see for example this scenario in Drupal:

SELECT * FROM `node` ORDER BY `node`.`created` DESC LIMIT 0 , 30

If you need to fetch, for example, when it was the last time that a node was created, this format doesn't help too much.

The solution is quite simple, FROM_UNIXTIME( field_with_date )

For example:

SELECT * , FROM_UNIXTIME( created ) FROM `node` ORDER BY `node`.`created` DESC LIMIT 0 , 30

removing some folders from git, file .gitignore with these contents:

# Ignore paths that contain generated content.

cache/

files/

sites/*/files

sites/*/private

Using symbolic links for /files directory:

namespace:custom do

    task:symlink do

      run "ln -s /var/www/crucerista/sites/crucerista.net/files/ /var/www/crsta/current/sites/crucerista.net/"

      run "echo 'finished'"

    end

end

after "deploy","custom:symlink"

That is what you have when you don't optimize and maintenance properly your Drupal projects. A 4GB database which hits hugely the server performance. Just a couple of "magic tricks" and .... 194MB.

Magic? Not at all. If you have a problem with your server, with hangs up and things going very sloooow, check the cache. sessions and watchdog tables, and clear them.

It works like a charm :-)