Kim Pepper
kim.pepper
My blog posts
Faster Hierarchies with Nested Sets and the Entity Reference Hierarchy module.
In Drupal 7 we used Node Hierarchy module to keep track of a hierarchy of pages. Node hierarchy ties directly to the menu system. When getting a list of all ancestors or descendents, it is a O(n) operation, and at least one site we use it on has a lot of nodes in the tree. Performance was terrible. Add to that it has no notion of revisions or forward revisions, so changing the parent and saving a draft can cause all sorts of issues with your menu. When the time came to update the site to Drupal 8, we took a different approach.
Enterprise Drupal Hosting with Skipper
PreviousNext has worked closely with a large government agency on their public portal for the last few years. As one of the most visited Drupal sites in Australia with more than 7 million page views per month, the agency was seeking higher performance and cost efficiency from their Drupal hosting provider.
Join us at the DrupalSouth Code Sprint
The Drupal open source project only exists because of code contributions by tens of thousands of developers and Drupal focused companies around the world. In his recent post, project founder Dries Buytaert blogged that “The Drupal community has a shared responsibility to build Drupal and that those who get more from Drupal should consider giving more”.
Australia’s contribution to Drupal code is significantly underrepresented, with PreviousNext the only Australian company in the Top 100 contributors listed on Drupal.org’s global marketplace. DrupalSouth represents the best opportunity for a wider pool of Australian Drupal developers to change this status by participating in DrupalSouth's official Code Sprint, being held on Wednesday, 26th October.
Monitoring Drupal Site Status at Scale
For many agencies, and large organisations that have tens or hundreds of Drupal sites, it can be difficult to keep tabs on which sites have what modules installed and whether they are up to date or not. Manually crawling through each site can be time consuming and error prone.
In this post, I describe a solution that allows you to keep a dashboard of site status information that you can query to find out precisely what is going on on each of your sites.
DrupalGov Canberra 2014: The new Front-end work-flow from ticketing to building
John Albin Wilkins' session outlines mistakes and introduces basic techniques for CSS layering and using design components, the heart of any front-end CSS project. It also covers ticket structure, project organization, and tricks to implement components when you can't change Drupal's classes.
Drupal 8 for Sitebuilders
Video: Kim's DrupalGov Canberra 2014 presentation.
Using Drupal 8 Condition Plugins API
Although Drupal 8 has had a Conditions Plugin API for a several months, it wasn't until during DrupalCon Austin sprint we managed to get blocks to use the Conditions Plugin API for block visibility.
The great thing about Condition Plugins, is they are re-usable chunks of code, and many contrib projects will be able to take advantage of them (Page Manager, Panels, Rules anyone?)
In this post, I show how you can create an example Page Message module that uses a RequestPath condition plugin to show a message on a configured page.
Drupal 8 Now: Composer dependencies in Drupal 7
One of the key goals of namespaces in PHP is to avoid collisions between class and function names between different libraries. Using namespaces and the PSR-0/4 standard creates a clean and simple way of sharing code across projects. This is a core part of the Drupal 8 architecture.
This approach has been a large factor in the PHP Renaissance and the huge amount of sharing of code across PHP external libraries.
In this post, I will show how we can leverage external libraries in existing Drupal 7 sites, using similar techniques to how it is being done in Drupal 8.
John Albin Wilkins joins PreviousNext
We are excited to announce that John Albin Wilkins will be joining PreviousNext as a Front-End Developer.