Happy Pixels - drupal

Upgrading large & complex sites

Florian — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:45:38 +0000

Upgrading Drupal websites from one major version to the next is painful. Most people solve the problem by sticking with the old version, and I've seen a lot of people give up after trying for many days. I've myself done a good amount of (successful) upgrades from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 in the past year and decided to share my experience and hopefully help some people get through with it. My presentation Upgrading Drupal takes a look at what issues make those upgrades so damn problematic and what solutions we can implement to solve them. I'll be giving the presentation for the third time at DrupalCamp Spain this coming week-end, and I proposed it as a session for DrupalCon SF (please vote!).

The two main problems with upgrades are complexity and time: a lot of operations need to be performed in a specific order within a short period of time to minimize downtime. Any solution that addresses these two problems will need to be automated, and the best way to do this that I found involved a VCS, drush and some minimal shell scripting. The presentation is about the WHY's, and this article is about the HOW's, with more implementation details that wouldn't fit well in a presentation.

Upgrading Drupal

Florian — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 07:13:50 +0000

Here are the slides for my presentation Upgrading Drupal at DrupalCamp Vienna and the updated version for FOSDEM.

DrupalCon Paris 2009

Florian — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:55:44 +0000

Right after I got my new appartment in Munich, I'm going to head off to Paris for DrupalCon. I'll be getting there a few days early to visit the city and meet with a few people, so let me know if you'll be around and want to pre-drupalize. I won't be presenting this time, so I'll have more time for everything else!

Drupal Media Camp Switzerland

Florian — Sat, 09 May 2009 09:37:42 +0000

Drupal Media Camp Switzerland took place this week-end, less than a year after the idea of a Swiss DrupalCamp was introduced at a Drupal user group meeting in Zurich. This event was full of good presentations, exciting moments and networking opportunities, and I believe it was very successful in increasing the adoption of the Drupal CMS on the Swiss market. It was particularly interesting to have the Swiss-german Radio DRS and the news publisher Edipresse provide yet another example showing that Drupal can support large amounts of traffic and also generated some great conversation on various topics surrounding high-traffic websites.

Test Automation

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:10:42 +0000

SimpleTest has brought a technology to Drupal, but also a methodology, both of which have greatly enhanced the Drupal development process. The test automation methodology is common to all testing frameworks. It is the topic of this article and will also serve as an introduction to the Intro to SimpleTest session this Friday at DrupalCon DC.

Modifying the header in the HappyPixels theme

admin — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:00:45 +0000

A user of the HappyPixels theme asked me how to modify the header image, and I thought I would share the response here.

Triggering the creation of imagecache derivatives programmatically

Florian — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:14:25 +0000

I was recently faced with the same problem in two different projects: forcing the creation of an image derivative with imagecache so that it is available in the submit handler of the same form in which the image was uploaded. By default, imagecache generates images on demand triggered by an HTTP request, which is ideal for most cases. However, this design doesn't make it possible to trigger the generation of images programmatically, which is why I created the following code snippet.

What's in Drupal?

Florian — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:23:02 +0000

I was wondering what it would look like if you put all of Drupal's code into wordle. It turns out that Drupal has a lot of arrays, functions and forms, which is not too surprising. What's more interesting is a comparison between different versions of Drupal, and developers shouldn't take long to find some key differences... take a look!

SANDCamp Retrospective

Florian — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:49:55 +0000

With an attendance of 80 to 90 people, and participants from all over the United States and even Ecuador, the first SANDCAMP (San Diego Drupal Camp) was a success.

2 topics, 2 camps, 4 presentations

Florian — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:25:39 +0000

The year 2009 is starting pretty strong with a lot of events in the Drupal community. The first one for me will be DrupalCamp Germany in Köln this coming week-end, closely followed by DrupalCamp San Diego in a week. DrupalCamp Germany will be the first national Drupal event in the country, and got a lot of attention from being mentioned on Dries Buytaert's blog. DrupalCamp San Diego is also starting its first edition with a nice schedule of presentations and a documentation sprint hosted by add1sun!