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John Bickar

John Bickar's Blog Posts

Drush "user-list" Command

Submitted by John Bickar on June 26, 2015 - 9:05 am

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.")

Stanford Sites Updates, March 2015

Submitted by John Bickar on March 17, 2015 - 8:00 am

University IT will perform maintenance on all websites on the Stanford Sites Drupal hosting service on the following dates:

  • Friday, March 20, from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.: personal sites hosted on people.stanford.edu

  • Saturday, March 21, from 4 a.m. - 8 a.m.: group and department sites hosted on sites.stanford.edu

  • Sunday, March 22, from 4 a.m. - 8 a.m.: group and department sites hosted on sites.stanford.edu

These changes are significant and include updating Drupal core to the latest release, security-related module upgrades, new modules, and theme updates for both Drupal 6 and 7 sites. See below for a complete list of updated and new modules, and this related blog post for a complete overview of theme updates.

Behat Custom Step Definition: Wait for Batch API to Finish

Submitted by John Bickar on February 13, 2015 - 2:00 pm

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:

The (Wo)Man and the Machine: Automated Testing, User Stories, and Code Refactoring

Submitted by John Bickar on January 20, 2015 - 9:00 am

I gave a lightning talk at the Stanford University IT Unconference on October 30th, 2014, titled, "The (Wo)Man and the Machine: Automated Testing, User Stories, and Code Refactoring".

In five minutes, I outline how (and more importantly why) we use Behat to run automated tests to improve user experience and support large-scale code deployment and refactoring.

Video is below.

Drupal 7.32 Security Vulnerability

Submitted by John Bickar on October 31, 2014 - 2:43 pm

Drupal 7.32 was released on October 15th to fix a critical security vulnerability. All Drupal 7 sites on sites.stanford.edu and people.stanford.edu were upgraded that day. On October 29th, a further Public Service Announcement was released, detailing the severity of the vulnerability and steps to take if you believe that your Drupal 7 site may have been compromised.

Stanford Sites Updates, October 2014

Submitted by John Bickar on October 6, 2014 - 1:16 pm

IT Services and Administrative Systems will perform updates for all websites hosted on the Stanford Sites Drupal hosting service on the following date:

  • Thursday, October 9th, from 4 - 8 a.m.

In this update, the Linux server software will be upgraded from Debian "Squeeze" to Debian "Wheezy".

No downtime is expected.

If you experience issues with your website hosted on Stanford Sites, please submit a HelpSU request. We will respond as soon as possible.

Stanford Sites Updates, August 2014

Submitted by John Bickar on August 6, 2014 - 6:31 am

IT Services and Administrative Systems will perform updates for all websites hosted on the Stanford Sites Drupal hosting service on the following date:

  • Saturday, August 9th, from 4 - 6 a.m.

In this update, the MySQL database software will be upgraded from version 5.1 to 5.5.

Please note:

All websites on people.stanford.edu and sites.stanford.edu will be offline for a period of 1.5 - 2 hours starting at 4AM. Site visitors will be redirected to an outage page while the upgrades are in progress.

Troubleshooting the Field Group 7.x-1.4 Update

Submitted by John Bickar on August 5, 2014 - 7:11 am

In July, 2014, the Field Group module was updated from 7.x-1.1 to 7.x-1.4 on Stanford Sites. This update has the potential to cause issues with CSS, as certain types of markup were removed from the HTML output of the page.

Background

The Field Group module allows site builders to group fields together on the back-end edit form of entities (e.g., nodes, BEANs), and on the front-end display of those entities. The latter is what was affected.

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