Drush, the brilliant command-line tool for Drupal, is capable of giving you its output in several ways. Its global --format parameter can be set to a type that you can use in useful ways. Most recently, I found this incredibly useful when I had made some configuration changes through Drupal's admin pages, and needed to then script those changes to automatically apply to hundreds of sites on a platform we manage. I simply asked Drush...
Update: this article's suggested method has serious shortcomings, use other methods when you can! For example, run the following with drush to just upgrade drupal core code (leaving database updates to be run separately): drush pm-updatecode drupal --check-updatedb=0 If you've got a Drupal site, which you need to update quickly (for example, to address last night's security advisory!), here's a tip. Run this from the command line: curl 'https://github.com/drupal/drupal/compare/7.59..7.60.patch' | patch -p1 This assumes your...
The new GDPR laws are here, hurrah! Having a number of developers handling databases from a number of client sites could easily be a nightmare, but we at ComputerMinds spent quite some time thinking about how to get and keep everybody safe and squeaky clean on the personal data front. Here's a quick run-down of the key things to be aware of - and a pretty poster to help you keep it all in mind...
Occasionally there's something you need to achieve, which would be really easy if only you could have it performed via Drush - some script that could be run on the server during an update or migration process, perhaps. But it all looks a bit too scary, right? "The task is tricky enough already, let's just do it some other way"? Well, it's actually surprisingly easy to write your own Drush commands, and it's totally something...
[Aegir][aegir] is a very clever Drupal hosting system built using Drupal and Drush. It is divided into two parts: the frontend and the backend. The frontend is essentially just a standard Drupal site that stores its data in the database and then some drush scripts that manipulate the data. The backend (provision) is just a collection of drush scripts, and it stores its data in [Aegir contexts][aegir_contexts] which are essentially just arrays of data stored...
[Aegir][aegir] is a very clever hosting system for [Drupal][drupal] that sites and provisions them on various servers and does lots of clever things. One of the clever things that it has had for a while is a task queuing system. You can ask Aegir to lots of different things all in one go, and Aegir will queue them up and run them at its own pace. This provides a really good separation from the front-end...
These three tools ([drush make][drush_make], [Aegir][aegir] and [Dropbox][dropbox]) have come together to produce a release system that means I don't have to ssh into a remote server to deploy a new version of site. This means that I can do releases really, really simply, and actually with nothing more than a web browser[^1]. Let me explain: ### Drush make If you aren't using [Drush make][drush_make], then you should look into it. Essentially you specify a...
Views is the king in Drupal land when it comes to making lists of your data, rightly so, it does a wonderful job of making it easy to choose the data you want to list. It also allows you to render your list in various forms, lists, tables. RSS feeds or even jump menus. So if you want to make a list and render it as CSV or XML, then you naturally turn to views...
We're not sure what to do with these: we've written two simple Drush scripts for exporting content types and views. Saving us from having to navigate a few pages and precious seconds. Download them and pop them somewhere Drush can find them, a good candidate would be in ~/.drush Then you can run them by typing: drush export view <view_name> or drush export content type <type_name> You should now either have an error message or...