Tim Millwood

Last week I presented the plan for the Drupal Workflow Initiative at DrupalCon New Orleans. Please review the ever evolving plan at: https://www.drupal.org/node/2721129.

Single site content staging with Deploy

This demo shows creating content on a stage workspace then deploying it to live. Once deployed an edit is made on the live workspace and an update is done on stage to pull from live.

Cross site content staging with Deploy

Now with RELAXed Web Services installed cross-site deployments can be done. First replicator users are setup with the permissions to replicate content. These users are added to the Relaxed settings on Drupal 1. A remote is added to Drupal 1 for Drupal 2. The live workspace is updated to set the upstream workspace to Live on Drupal 2. Content is created on Drupal 1 and deployed to Drupal 2. A change is then made on Drupal 2, and Drupal 1 is updated to pull the changes from Drupal 2.

This year I have proposed three sessions for the North American DrupalCon based on the topics I have been working on for the last 9 months.

Please take a look, ask questions, make comments, and share.

Building sites with Composer
If you have been keeping up to date with by blog you will notice I have been working a lot with Drupal and Composer. In this session I will share this knowledge and look from a site builders perspective.
https://events.drupal.org/neworleans2016/sessions/building-sites-composer

Managing and staging your content
In Barcelona and Mumbai, Dick Olsson and I, presented on content management and content staging solutions. We have been continuing to work on improving these solutions and wish to give an updated session in New Orleans.
https://events.drupal.org/neworleans2016/sessions/managing-and-staging-your-content

Drupal is a CMS, so how can we better manage content?
This session will discuss many of the same topic as the earlier session “Managing and staging your content” however from a much more technical point of view, and with the goal of, how do we get this into Drupal core. Drupal 8 now has configuration management, it’s time we also focussed on content management.
https://events.drupal.org/neworleans2016/sessions/drupal-cms-so-how-can-we-better-manage-content

As of 1:23pm GMT on Febuary 3rd 2016 there are no dependencies in the Drupal 8.1.x git branch.

Why?

There was no reason to have them there. It makes the repository bigger, and therefore takes longer to download. No one else does it.

What does it mean?

Not much really.

If you download Drupal via the zip file or tarball then the drupal.org packager will run composer so the dependencies will be there for you.

If you submit a Drupal core patch on drupal.org then DrupalCi testbot will run composer install.

It’s only if you clone Drupal 8.1.x or higher directly from git, you will need to run composer install in the Drupal root directory

Top tip: composer install --prefer-source --no-interaction can often be quicker.

Drupal 8 is out, Drupal 8.1 will be out before we know it, but it seems contrib is still catching up. One question that seems to keep coming up is around installing a Drupal 8 module. In this post I will look at the different ways to install a module and resolving dependencies.

Deploy, Search API Solr Search, and Commerce are just a few of the modules with Drupal 8 releases that require dependencies loaded via composer. This means you can’t just download the module’s ZIP file, unzip it in your modules directory, and enable it. You need to install the dependencies.

One simple way to do this is the Composer Manager module. This module has extensive documentation on how to use it. Essentially what it does it merge the composer.json that ships with core and the composer.json files from all the contrib module you have, then downloads the dependencies. You may notice that this will also update core dependencies, but this is a good thing! The core composer.json has been written in such a way that it won’t introduce API breaking dependencies and only uses stable releases. So you will benefit from any bug fixes or security fixes rolled out in these dependencies before they’re rolled out with Drupal.

The two other ways we’re going to look at involve directly using Composer.

Just the dependencies
It’s possible to carry on installing Drupal modules exactly as you always have, download the zip or tarball, then unzip it into your modules directory. As mentioned earlier this will not install the dependencies, therefore you will need to look inside the module’s composer.json file, see what the dependencies are, and install them manually. Let’s take Deploy module as an example, this depends on the dev-master version of relaxedws/replicator. So, go to your Drupal docroot and run the command composer require relaxedws/replicator:dev-master. This will add relaxedws/replicator to Drupal’s composer.json, download it, and put it in the vendor directory ready for the module to make use of. This will not change any other other dependencies you have. Then to update the dependencies you can either run composer update to update relaxedws/replicator and all core dependencies or composer update relaxedws/replicator to just update the relaxedws/replicator package.

The module too
If you install all you Drupal modules via composer, all of the dependencies will automatically be installed too. First you will need to add a new repository, so run composer config repositories.drupal composer https://packagist.drupal-composer.org in your Drupal docroot, this will add the https://packagist.drupal-composer.org repository to your drupal composer.json. Now you can install any module from Drupal.org via composer. So going back to the example of Deploy you can run composer require drupal/deploy:8.1.0-alpha5 in your Drupal docroot and it will install Deploy in the modules directory. It will also install key_value, multiversion, and relaxed, which are all Drupal modules required by Deploy. Furthermore it will install relaxedws/replicator as we know is a PHP package needed for Deploy, and doctrine/couchdb which is a PHP package needed for releaxedws/replicator.

I hope this helps those confused what to do with Drupal 8 modules that have composer dependencies. Now go do the smart thing, rebuild your site using Composer!

For the last 6 months I’ve been helping Dick and Andrei with a number of Drupal modules to enhance the management of content.

Multiversion

This module enhances the Drupal core Entity API by making all content entities revisionable. Revisions are enabled by default and not optional. This means that edits to users, comments, taxonomy terms etc are created as new revisions.

Another ground breaking advance is that deleting any of these entities now just archives it. Delete is a flag in the entity object, and just like any other update, it creates a new revision.

The concept of workspaces has also been added, this allows for a new instance of the site, from a content perspective, can be created. An example use case for workspaces would be to have a dev, stage and production workspace, and move content between them as it gets promoted through the workflow.

Trash

Now that deleting content entities just means a new revision marked as deleted we need a way to recover or purge them. The trash module is a UI on top of Multiversion allowing users to do just this.

Relaxed Web Services

Drupal 8 has always been about getting off the island, Relaxed Web Services furthers this by getting content off the island. It uses Drupal core’s REST API to expose CouchDB compatible endpoints. This means that replicating content is just a case of using CouchDBs replicator. Then creating a decoupled Drupal site is as simple as using PouchDB.

This works really well with Multiversion’s Workspaces, where each workspace is exposed as a separate CouchDB database.

CouchDB Replicator

So that we don’t need to depend on CouchDB for replication, the replicator has been rewritten in PHP. This will allow us replicator content from within Drupal or even via Drush.

Deploy

There is a long history for Deploy in Drupal, but now in Drupal 8 it’s little more than a UI for the PHP based CouchDB replicator. It allows replication of content between workspaces, between Drupal sites, and between CouchDB databases.

Mango

Something we’re currently working on is Mango, inspired by MongoDB and based on Cloudant’s implementation for CouchDB. Mango will allow querying for content entities over the Relaxed Web Services API. This is going to be very interesting to those creating decoupled sites because PouchDB supports the same querying API.

Creating a Content Hub using CouchDB and Drupal via the Deploy module.

I just uploaded a screencast of how to use Deploy module in Drupal 8. It covers a few of the different possible use cases.

Over the last 7+ years working with Drupal, one question always asked by clients is, how do I copy my content from staging to production? Generally the answer has been, “Don’t! Just add it on production”. Another option is to use the deploy module, which allows for the deployment of content between environments.

This was a question I got from a client. So I set to work on finding a solution to alert the team who needed to know when a page has changed.

TL;DR: CacheTags.