Skpr
Sanitised Developer Database Images (External website)
Keeping private data secure in development environments is becoming increasingly important. Sanitised database images can help.
My blog posts
Join us at the DrupalGov 2020 Code Sprint
This year DrupalGov is virtual. The PreviousNext team is sponsoring and helping to run the DrupalGov 2020 Sprint Day on Wednesday 4 November, and there are a few things you can do now to hit the ground running on the day.
How Drupal Contribution leads to Success
I recently had the pleasure of presenting my session 'How Drupal Contribution leads to Success' at Drupal South Canberra 2018.
Drupal adoption is still growing, but can the contributors keep pace? In this session I looked at how organisations can really benefit from contributing to Drupal.
Be Prepared for the DrupalSouth 2018 Sprint
Update: Re-published for DrupalSouth 2018 edition
The PreviousNext team are sponsoring and helping to run the sprint day on Wednesday, December 5th 2018, and there are a few things you can do now to hit the ground running on the day.
Decoupling the model from Drupal
Back in the Drupal 6 days, I built the BOM Weather Drupal module to pull down weather data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) site, and display it to users.
We recently had a requirement for this in a new Drupal 8 site, so decided to take a more modern approach.
Managing Composer Github access with Personal Access Tokens
All PreviousNext Drupal 8 projects are now managed using Composer. This is a powerful tool, and allows our projects to define both public and private modules or libraries, and their dependencies, and bring them all together.
However, a if you require public or private modules which are hosted on GitHub you may run into the API Rate Limits. In order to overcome this, it is recommended to add a GitHub personal access token to your composer configuration.
In this blog post, I'll show how you can do this in a secure and manageable way.
Workflows: A new tool in the toolbox
At DrupalSouth 2017, I presented a session on the new Workflows module, which just went stable in Drupal 8.4.0. Workflows was split out from content moderation as a separate module, and can be used independently to create custom workflows. In this presentation, I gave a demonstration of how to create a basic workflow for an issue tracker.
Skipper: Tooling for DevOps
Over the years we’ve embraced the idea of DevOps within our organisation. That is, bringing the developers closer to operations, and visa versa, to be more collaborative, embrace our agile processes, and become more efficient. When we designed Skipper, our Kubernetes-based container hosting platform, this was the focus of our attention.
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.