development

Transparency in Product Development

Jamie C. Tsui — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 21:05:07 +0000

While Stanford Web Services can be seen as a service provider, often involved with custom projects and closely working with clients, one of our core offerings is also our Jumpstart product. With any product offering company, as adoption and usage of the products grow, more and more customers give feedback and express interest in the future direction of the product. Lately, our group has been contemplating increasing transparency in our product development roadmap, and to what extent.

Drush "user-list" Command

John Bickar — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 16:05:02 +0000

A simple task: list all the users on a site, optionally filtering by role or by status. Difficulty: using drush.

I had searched around a bit for this functionality and my Google-fu had failed me, so I decided to build off of work that already had been done and write a drush user-list command. (The internal monologue went something like this: "Is this a thing? It doesn't look like this is a thing. This should be a thing. Why is this not a thing? Let's make this a thing.")

Behat Custom Step Definition: Wait for Batch API to Finish

John Bickar — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 22:00:00 +0000

If you're using Behat and the Drupal Extension, you might find the following code snippet helpful if you want to add a step to wait for batch jobs to finish.

If one of your Behat scenarios kicks off a batch job (e.g., a Feeds import), and you want to wait for that batch job to finish before moving on to the next step, add this step definition in your FeatureContext.php file:

Hard vs soft configuration: Designing your distribution

Shea Ross McKinney — Mon, 27 Oct 2014 15:30:23 +0000

In this article we are going to talk about what hard and soft configuration is and how to decide between the two when creating a distribution.

pushd, dirs, and popd

John Bickar — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 11:49:32 +0000

If you spend a lot of your day at the command line (as I do), you're constantly on the lookout for new tools and tricks to increase your productivity and efficiency. Today we're going to take a look at the pushd suite of commands that exist in most shells (e.g., bash, tcsh and so forth).

Creating a Static Copy of a Website

John Bickar — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 17:09:13 +0000

The modern Web is a dynamic place. However, sometimes it's necessary (or desirable) to remove the dynamic functionality of a website, while preserving its static content.

Inspired in part by Karen Stevenson's excellent blog post, "Sending a Drupal Site into Retirement," I wanted to outline a few other techniques for accomplishing this.

Reasons you may want to create a static copy of a site:

Create a Page Title From the Views Exposed Filter Term

Caryl J Westerberg — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 15:18:30 +0000

Suppose you're using taxomomy terms in exposed filters, and you want the resulting page to display one of the the terms as a title. Taxonomy term pages will give this to you very easily, but sometimes the taxonomy term page is not the right solution. Here's how you can display the taxonomy term as the title of your views page.

Creating a Menu Position Rule Programatically

John Bickar — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 16:03:28 +0000

The Menu Position module provides a powerful way for Drupal to create "virtual" menu items, and provides a graphical user interface to do so. However, as a developer, sometimes you want to create those rules in code. Here's how.

Stanford Events Importer 7.x-2.x

John Bickar — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 23:14:20 +0000

In November, 2012, SWS released a stable beta version of the Stanford Events Importer for Drupal 7. The Stanford Events Importer integrates with the XML feeds from events.stanford.edu and allows you to "automagically" import events into your Drupal site.

ExploreCourses and the Stanford Courses Drupal Module

John Bickar — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 19:42:54 +0000

In December, 2011, we released the Stanford Courses module for Drupal 6. This is a Features-based module that polls the XML feed at ExploreCourses and creates Course and Course Section nodes on a Drupal website.