So at DrupalCon Austin I had a great time at the contribution sprints. I worked on some issues affecting Drupal.org, it was great fun! The issues we worked on over the week range from simple things through to some pretty difficult issues. Although Drupal core can always use more contributors, I would suggest that Drupal.org is also desperately short of contributors too. One of the issues I worked on related to the [tracker page for...
Content (node-level) translation or entity (field-level) translation? It seems an obvious question to ask, but what are you translating? The tools exist to translate just about anything in Drupal 7*, but in many different ways, so you need to know exactly what you're translating. Language is 'a first-class citizen', in the sense that any piece of text is inherently written by someone on some language, which Drupal 7 is built to recognise. Sometimes you want to translate each & every individual piece of text (e.g. at the sentence or paragraph level). Other times you want to translate a whole page or section that is made up of multiple pieces of text.
##Part 8: CasperJS debugging tips You're getting desperate. Your CoffeeScript / Javascript syntax looks OK, but CasperJS doesn't like what you're giving it. Try going through this checklist for a selection of sensible sanity checks and more: 1. Is all your syntax actually correct? If you're using CoffeeScript, are your indents all correct? Like, all of them? 2. Is the page actually there? Is the content actually published? Have a look in a real browser...
##Part 7: When this.mouse.click doesn't work mouse.click and mouse.move are a really helpfuls function in CasperJS, but we have at times found that they just don't work. Mostly, that's been because the element isn't there to click on. Do make sure that it's actually there! Make sure you're using the right selector, too. Try a casper.capture() to see whether it's there, but be wary of timings to ensure that you get a capture for the...
##Part 6: Manually fail a test, but continue script execution We set up an event to take screenshots of failed test pages, by hooking into the onFail event. This made for a problem when we wanted to pass or fail a test based on whether there were entries in the Drupal Watchdog table. Failing a test also would normally stop script execution, but we explicitly need our post script to finish its work! CasperJS fortunately...
##Part 5: Fun with viewports, and THEN some As I described previously, we nicely externalised our list of viewport sizes, making it really easy to set our viewports for mobile, tablet and desktop tests. Our content appearance tests put this to good use, taking screenshots of the content at mobile, tablet and desktop resolutions. The problem we very quickly ran into was that we frequently ended up with empty screenshots, or sometimes no screenshot at...
##Part 4: When TrueType doesn't fix everything #####Two fonts walk into the bar, and the barman says, “Sorry lads, we don’t serve your type.” It was a good day. I'd finished writing up the basic appearance tests for the first batch of content types, I'd road-tested them on my machine, we'd set up Jenkins… all was ready to go for our first run on the server. When we ran it, however, all the tests failed...
Part 3: Using other scripts, datasources and directories Earlier I described a bit about the scope of the project and how careful planning would be needed to keep the project growing smoothly. One result of this is our test template - a basic test script outline which most scripts should stick to - which makes test scripts easier to update because they all follow the same structure (yay standardisation!). The template neatly gets most...
##Part 2: Setting up for a large project When you take on a project it's a good idea to make sure you plan ahead. Testing platforms only remain useful as long as they're considered dependable - if it becomes too difficult to write tests which don't reliably execute you might as well not bother. Here are a few key things I set up at the start to help the project along, which have all been...