DEV Community: Ryan McConnell

Defining Drupal - Spinning up a Drupal 8 site

Ryan McConnell — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 17:03:00 +0000

Let’s do this! There are three major ways to spin a up a Drupal 8 site:

Manually, using FTP
Via Composer in the command line
Through a hosting site such as Pantheon, which will do it for you, lickety split!

Let’s walk through each option.

Manually installing Drupal 8

This is the old school way. This keeps you from using the command line to make updates in the future, just FYI, so you’d have to manually make updates to core and modules via FTP.

First off, make sure you have a server with a database and PHP. You can use a service like Pantheon or if you just want to spin up a site for fun, you can download XAMPP and install Drupal on your local machine.

Secondly, download the code! Make sure you unzip it in the root (htdocs or www or whatever the root is for your web server).

Next, create a database for your Drupal installation. As it says in the official instructions:

Take note of the username, password, database name and hostname. (For example, are you installing in http://example.com, or in http://drupal.example.com, or http://example.com/blog?) as you create the database. You will enter these items into fields in your browser when running the installation script.

Lastly, install it! Go to localhost/core/install.php (or replace localhost with the IP address or web address for your site) and follow the instructions.

Installing Drupal 8 via command line

There is a handy resource here for installing Drupal 8 using Composer, a command line interface.

Once you download composer and follow the instructions, it’s a cinch to get your Drupal installation set up. I recommend using drupal-composer/drupal-project so you can use Drush and Drupal Console.

Installing using a web host

Sometimes, like with Wordpress, certain web hosting services will allow you to spin up a site through their service. Pantheon.io does this, for example, and it’s super easy and handy to use. They even make it super easy to make backups and updates! I highly recommend looking into this option if it’s one you can consider.

Congrats! You’ve just installed your first Drupal site! Now, you’ve still got a long road to go down, but honestly, this was probably the hardest bit. So good work!

Defining Drupal - What is the difference between all these different Drupal versions?

Ryan McConnell — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 17:09:11 +0000

There are three different versions of Drupal that you could download and install today: Drupal 6, Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. On top of that, maybe you’ve heard about this Drupal 9 that’s coming out. Which one should you choose? What’s the difference?

First off, Drupal 6, while popular, is no longer being supported by the Drupal community. I would not build a site in Drupal 6, especially since there’s no benefit these days to doing so.

Drupal 7 is the most popular version of Drupal right now and will be supported until November of 2021. Drupal 7 has a lot of things going for it: extensive documentation, lots of public modules, and plenty of support from those who have websites on it. However, it is super difficult to migrate a Drupal 7 site to Drupal 8, so upgrades after November 2021 will be much harder and the site will likely have security issues. In 2019, I don’t recommend building a Drupal 7 site, especially since it will teach you outdated ways of using Drupal and it would be better to start with Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 has less documentation and public modules, but it is currently supported. In addition, when Drupal 9 launches in June 2020, the migration will be as simple as a core update. This means creating a Drupal 8 site may be more difficult up front, but in the long run will be much easier to maintain. As we go forward, I’m going to focus on creating a Drupal 8 site since I believe that is the best bet for building a Drupal site in 2019. If you want to build a Drupal 7 site, then good news! There’s lots of options on the web for learning how to do that. I’d start here: https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/install

Defining Drupal - What is Drupal, anyway?

Ryan McConnell — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 18:53:05 +0000

Drupal is an open-source content management system, similar to Wordpress. It allows you to easily make changes to content on your website, and allows for non-technical users to make these changes too. You can add modules (like a Wordpress plugin) for a variety of user-created features. For the more technical user, you can use Drupal’s API to create your own custom module to add needed features or applications using PHP.

Drupal’s flexibility is key to its success and allows both low-tech users and high-tech users to create highly successful websites. It’s ideal for large corporations, educational institutions and government agencies that have a lot of information to organize and often a number of low-tech employees that manage these pages.

As a Drupal developer, you have direct control over how the site looks, functions and connects with other API. It’s a great way to create, maintain and manage your website.

History of Drupal

Drupal was created by two Dutch students in 2000 as a very basic content framework. In 2001, they released their framework on the web. Since then, there have been 8 significant releases, with two current Drupal versions that are commonly used: Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. You can read more here: https://www.drupal.org/about/history
Drupal 9 is due to be released in June 2020.

Why use Drupal?

Because it’s awesome! But seriously, this is a question I get regularly from people who primarily use Wordpress and find Drupal difficult to use. I won’t dispute that! Compared to the accessibility of Wordpress, Drupal can be tricky to set up and maintain. It doesn’t help that Drupal 7 and 8 are significantly different and it can take a little while to understand how everything works together. But Drupal is also super powerful and customizable right out of the box. As a developer, I also feel like the sites you can create are a lot less cookie-cutter than Wordpress. Ultimately it comes down to what you’re comfortable with. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging about the basics of Drupal, how to set up a site, how to get around the administration menus, some module recommendations, and more. Overall I hope to show you that there’s nothing to fear with Drupal; it’s just one more (powerful) tool for your web developer toolbox.

Three extremely obscure video games that made me a better developer

Ryan McConnell — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 21:49:18 +0000

Video games, like all art forms, can help us reflect, make us think, and often improve our lives in ways we didn’t expect. I’ve found numerous times that qualities such as hand-eye coordination, problem solving and resource management can be developed while playing video games. As a gamer, I have a fondness not just for the big releases, but also games that languish in obscurity. Without further ado, I present three games far outside the mainstream that I really enjoyed and also provided me with insight into becoming a better web developer. Be warned, there will be spoilers, since it will be hard to discuss these games and their relation to web development without them.

Save the Date: Futility and Hacks

An experimental freeware game for the PC, I’ll wager that very few people have heard of Save the Date, let alone played it. I saw a recommendation for it while unemployed (and therefore unable to purchase new games) and tried it out. To my utter surprise, it was incredibly thought provoking. The basic premise is that you’ve got a date. You’re given a few options on where to take her, and inevitably it goes horribly wrong, such as getting caught in a shootout and your date dying horrifically. You get sent back to the start and make a different choice, but something new happens, like a monster attack that leaves your date drowned. Eventually, after a lot of attempts to save her life, you get to the ending, and realize that maybe you can’t save the date after all. A meteor hits, and you’re back to the beginning again.

I love ambiguous endings in games, and I love ones that examine the idea of futility. No matter how hard you try to “solve the problem” you are hit with new challenges until you realize that maybe you can’t win. This is a life lesson that absolutely resonates with me as a web developer. I do not like to admit defeat. Sometimes, though, a project fails, whether its your fault or a total accident, and learning to accept failure is a big part of life, let alone web development.

Here’s a really big spoiler: if you go into the code of the game, there’s a secret ending. A readme explains the very tiny code change you have to make to enable it. It’s a hack. You get a secret ending, one that ultimately is laughable and silly (think a flying unicorn that saves the day out of nowhere) and not fitting at all. But it doesn’t fit because it’s literally a hack. Sometimes in web dev, no matter how hard you try, the answer is to use a known hack. In CSS, if you use a border-radius on an element with a double border, you’ll get color bleed. This is well known, and the hack to fix it works…if you don’t want a border. So it’s not an ideal hack! But sometimes less than ideal is what you’re stuck with, and that’s true in life as well as web development—and in Save the Date.

Elsinore: Making Sacrifices

Elsinore, recently released on PC, is my favorite game from 2019 so far. You play as Ophelia, the character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Ophelia wakes up on the first day of the play to find she’s trapped in a time loop. You can let the play run it’s natural course, or you can intervene and make small changes that alter the fabric of the play altogether. Eventually you can control time better, restart the play when you want, and learn more about the world and the characters. There are over ten different endings, and when you decide to finally make your choice, the game makes it clear that your decision is indeed final. In fact, once you decide and hit the button that selects the ending, your save file is deleted! Elsinore states unequivocally that there is no perfect ending and that there will always be consequences for our choices and sacrifices that must be made.

In web development, I haven’t found a project yet that didn’t require some sort of sacrifice. It’s very tempting to try and find a "golden ending" but often the best you can do is to gather all the requirements, see the logical outcomes of the choices you can make, and then forge ahead with a decision. If you get hung up on trying too many options or trying to fit everything in, then you’ll either run out of time, run out of resources, or end up with a half-finished project. We’re lucky in our field that “final choices” often don’t have to be final. I can upload the new website I just built and if something small is wrong, I can likely fix it really quickly. But sometimes we do have to live with our choices and hope that the sacrifices we made were the right ones, and Elsinore reflects that beautifully.

Earthbound Beginnings: Patience and Asking for Help

As a massive Nintendo fan, I had to have one of their games on here. Maybe you’ve heard of Earthbound, the Super Nintendo RPG set in the 1990s? Well this is the originally Japan-only prequel on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989 that eventually got released in the wider world on the Wii U in 2015. Talk about obscure! But this game, as old and somewhat antiquated as it, has plenty to teach us as web developers.

Earthbound Beginnings stars a crew of elementary aged children, Ninten, Ana, and Loid, as they explore world with exploding robots, gangster zombies, a fantasy land made of clouds, and a creepy alien who is kidnapping people. It’s a big game, especially for an NES game, and it follows classic Dragon Quest style RPG mechanics. One of the most notable things about the game is the reliance on grinding as a function of the game. The end part of the game is so notoriously unbalanced that to get through it you have to battle enemy after enemy in order to get strong enough to beat the game. This is a legitimate flaw with the game, and one that has turned many people off of it. Grinding, however, is often what is done day to day at work. We even call work “the daily grind.” In web development, often I can find myself throwing myself at a project again and again trying to get it to work, or fit the requirements. Some days it’s pure data entry—fill out this page in Drupal, make it look like this, create a form with these capabilities, etc. These are the days that most feel like a grind. And like grinding in Earthbound Beginnings, I find myself often listening to podcasts or music and just pushing through.

One of the other quirks of playing an old NES role-playing game like Earthbound Beginnings is that often the key to move forward from one area to another can be totally obtuse. Or maybe the dungeon you entered is a literal maze. Or maybe you have to have someone in your party before you can move forward. There a plenty of secrets and a massive world to explore, so sometimes you need help. Starmen.net has a fantastic guide to the game that I used liberally in making my way through. I would never have had the patience to make it through the game without using that guide. Similarly, there have been plenty of times that I needed a guide while working. If I didn’t have the Drupal Form API documentation available, I never would have been able to craft a custom module solution for my employer. Without CSS-Tricks or Stack Overflow, I’d be still stuck on basic problems that plenty of others have solved. Even Drupal Themes are easier to build if you have another one to build off of. There’s no shame in using resources at your fingertips to make a task easier—even if that task is a forty year old video game! I did end up finishing the game, and while it’s not my favorite in the series (that’s Mother 3, the unreleased Earthbound sequel) it still gave me a lot to think about and also had fantastic music.

So was this all an excuse to discuss some of my favorite and underappreciated games? Perhaps. But it’s also important for me to look at my hobbies and the media I find meaningful and see where some of the things I’ve learned or taken away can apply to other areas of my life. If you have a game that inspired you in some way, let me know below!