Kim Pepper
kim.pepper
My blog posts
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.
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.
Secure Government Drupal Hosting with Macquarie Telecom
PreviousNext is pleased to announce a partnership with Macquarie Telecom to provide high grade secure hosting for government sites. Macquarie Telecom provide PCI DSS and ISO 27001 compliant infrastructure, as well as Secure Internet Gateway (SIG), firewalls, logging and monitoring which meet all government compliance standards.
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.
Drupal 8 - The wait is over Australia
For the last five years, tens of thousands of hours have been poured into the the next major release of Drupal: Drupal 8. With the release candidate announced for October 7 at DrupalCon Barcelona, now is the time to prepare your sites and teams for the transition.
Managed Drupal and aGov websites on Microsoft Azure in Australia
In recent months, PreviousNext has been privileged to be part of Microsoft’s APAC Open Source Partner Accelerator program. With Microsoft now providing full support for open source technologies running on the Azure cloud services platform, the partner program has focused on initiatives for PreviousNext to deploy, manage and support customer’s Drupal sites hosted on Microsoft Azure.