span data-quickedit-field-id=node/328/title/en/rss class=field field--name-title field--type-string field--label-hiddenHow to update Drupal 8 core?/span div data-quickedit-field-id=node/328/body/en/rss class=clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__itemp dir=ltrLet's see how to update your Drupal site between 8.x.x minor and patch versions. For example, from 8.1.2 to 8.1.3, or from 8.3.5 to 8.4.0. I hope this will help you./p ulli dir=ltr p dir=ltrIf you are upgrading to Drupal version x.y.z/p /li /ulp dir=ltr           x -gt; is known as the major version number/p p dir=ltr           y -gt; is known as the minor version number/p p dir=ltr           z -gt; is known as the patch version number./p/div span data-quickedit-field-id=node/328/uid/en/rss class=field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hiddena title=View blogs by rajamohamed. href=/blog/rajamohamed lang= about=/rajamohamed typeof=schema:Person property=schema:name datatype= itemprop=url rel=author class=usernamerajamohamed/a/span span data-quickedit-field-id=node/328/created/en/rss class=field field--name-created field--type-created field--label-hiddenSat, 03/24/2018 - 10:31/span span class=a2a_kit a2a_kit_size_32 addtoany_list data-a2a-url=http://knackforge.com/blog/rajamohamed/how-update-drupal-8-core data-a2a-title=How to update Drupal 8 core?a class=a2a_dd addtoany_share_save href=https://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fknackforge.com%2Fblog%2Frajamohamed%2Fhow-update-drupal-8-coreamp;title=How%20to%20update%20Drupal%208%20core%3F/aa class=a2a_button_facebook/a a class=a2a_button_twitter /a a class=a2a_button_google_plus/a a class=a2a_button_linkedin /a a class=a2a_button_pinterest /a/span

The key to a successful project is good communication.  Honesty and directness about timelines and scopes of work go a long way to relieve pressure from the development team and avoid frustration from stakeholders, but what about the day-to-day information exchanged between developers, designers, and project managers? This is the grease that keeps the project running smoothly and should not be overlooked.

As teams vary in size, so do the roles and responsibilities of individual team members.  Smaller teams have fewer communication channels, so you may need to switch between your developer hat and project manager hat frequently.  On larger teams your hat rack may be quite sparse, but the number of communication channels, and thus the possibility of miscommunication, is far greater.

Regardless of the size of your team, information about the project must be communicated and documented effectively.  From very large teams to projects where it's just me, I've learned how damaging even minor miscommunication can be.  Conversely, you look like a hero when you get it right.  Stakeholders, project managers, and developers work in very different realms. In this article I'll discuss a few overarching principles that I've learned to help navigate the monsoon of information blustering through a project.  They will help you regain control of your time and create a more productive and successful project.

What is Communication?

Existentialism aside, what do we really mean when we talk about communication?  Communication is an exchange of information between parties.  The parties may be people, but they may also be project management tools.  From video conferences to GitHub notifications, these are all part of the project communication landscape and require different levels of attention.

Forms of Communication

Here are some of the most common methods of communication I've dealt with on projects:

• In-Person Meetings
• Voice conference
• Video conference
• Chat
• Text message
• Direct Email
• Email Notifications
• Project Management Tools
• RSS Feeds
• Twitter
• Mobile Notifications

All these types of communication serve a unique role. We wouldn't use them if they weren't helpful, but the question we really should be asking is, "are they necessary?"  Gone unchecked, many of these tools can overrun each other and tangle the workflow.

For example, Slack is a great tool for team members to quickly exchange information between each other, but numerous tools can also post updates into Slack.  A few may be helpful, but too many can dilute the conversation and the effectiveness of the tool.  So how do you find the balance between effective and over-communication?  We can start by categorizing these forms of communication into two groups: active and passive.

Active vs Passive Communication

I find it helpful to group all communication into two categories: active and passive.

Active communication is a two way street.  The sender is expecting a direct response.  Google hangouts, Slack discussions, and phone calls are all forms of active communication.  There is an immediate reciprocation between the parties involved.  You wouldn't invite someone to a conversation just to read them the backlog of tickets, would you?

Passive communication, on the other hand, does not require a direct reply.  This is not as easily definable as active communication.  Let's take a look at email as an example.

If Stakeholder Sarah emails you a question about the next deadline, that is active communication.  She is expecting a response from you in a timely manner.  When a Github notification shows up in your inbox informing you that your pull request has been merged, no follow up is required.  This is passive.  Now, if you receive an email from Jira Notifications because the client asked a question on one of your tickets, which category does that fall under?  It's a notification email, so you shouldn't respond to it directly, but the client is expecting an answer.  Ultimately it depends on the ground rules for communication you set for your project.

Setting Expectations

I tend to follow this order of urgency for response, from most urgent to least.  It's important to agree on a set of communication guidelines at the beginning of a project so everyone on the team follows the same expectations.

1. Live Communication If you ask me a question face-to-face, of course I will respond to you right away.
2. Chat Chances are that unless I've set my away message, I'm receiving chat messages in real time.  However, I might be neck-deep in some code or preoccupied in another conversation, so I will respond as soon as I can, but maybe not be right away. 
3. Mentions in Comments Comments in Jira tickets or GitHub pull requests will likely go unread even if they show up in my inbox unless I am specifically mentioned in them.  I get a lot.  The convention to use the @ symbol to mention another person links their account in the ticket and generates more specific notifications for that person.  It the difference between saying something needs to be done and asking someone to do something about it.
4. Email I use a couple of email addresses to keep my interests separate so I use an email client to aggregate them into one management space.  However, I find constant email notifications and alerts distracting, so I don't keep my email client open when I don't need to (more on this later).  If you email me, I will probably get back to you within the day, but don't rely on me standing by my inbox waiting to reply to you.  This rule is so important to us that we actually wrote it into the Lullabot Employee Handbook along with a few other tips.
5. Unmentioned Comments I will likely still get email notifications about activity on repositories, projects or tickets I'm watching or otherwise related to, but if you don't mention me in the comment, it will disappear into tornado of notifications and chances are I won't see it unless I'm reading the backscroll on the ticket.

These are just my rules, but they have worked well for me so far.

Understanding the communication landscape of your project is a necessary foundation.  Setting the proper expectations will prevent miscommunication and keep the project running smoothly.  So far we've identified some of the most common pitfalls and laid the groundwork for a fluid project.  In the next two articles of the series I'll provide advice for managers and stakeholders on how to communicate effectively with the development team and also offer some recommendations and tricks for handling the number one offender when it comes to communication overload: email.

Let’s talk about secret ingredients in menus. Like the right spices, they create special flavours that your guests really enjoy. When it comes to your Drupal website menus, the recipe is simple: just add some jQuery! Using the Superfish Drupal module, which integrates the jQuery Superfish menu plugin, you can create interactive multi-level menus with exceptional usability features. Let’s see how it works on Drupal 8’s example.

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Last month a few of us in the team attended DrupalCon Vienna with fellow Drupal enthusiasts and developers from across Europe and further afield.

Over the three days, my teammates and I hosted several Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions between us. The format is more participatory than a traditional talk, so it’s a great opportunity to engage in discussion and hear other perspectives from within the community. 

Deeson has been delivering digital projects since 2001, refining our agile delivery process over the years from the DSDM Agile Project Framework in combination with other agile practices particularly suitable for an agency environment.

My first BoF session invited other conference attendees to share their experiences (the highs and lows), tips and best practices for making Agile work in an agency. The following is a roundup of what we discussed over the hour.

Starting slow.

We identified that the typical journey sees agencies start off being ‘agile’ with a small a. They have begun to implement some of the process tools around agile, such as SCRUM, standups, sprints and so on, but aren’t yet living by the core elements of the Agile Manifesto.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan.

Agile Manifesto

Including the client.

We talked about whether the client should be an integral part of the delivery team or should be kept at arm’s length. Those who believed they had an Agile workflow suggested that the client should be part of the team and involved throughout. The benefit being that – as part of the team delivering the product – they share the risk with delivery.

Those who felt they still had some way to go in becoming Agile were more wary of this approach, believing the client either couldn’t take on these roles or wouldn’t want to. These agencies were more likely to retain full control of the project and client, and accept all the risk as a result.

Handling changing requirements.

There was a discussion about the time taken up with dealing with change, and how clients don’t always appreciate the efforts involved in managing their changing requirements. I described how we deal with this at Deeson with our Dual board in Jira.

This process separates new ideas neatly from refined and signed off units of work ready for development. The client can see their backlog of new ideas and what state each is in, and knows that effort will be involved in taking those ideas from concept to ready for development.

We also considered the need for developers to be able to highlight to a client when an idea is completely new, and to prevent them from trying to squeeze additional functionality into a sprint which already had been signed off.

It’s good to have a SCRUM master or some level of leadership position in the team so developers don’t have to make these decisions themselves and can defer to someone else if they are unsure.

Questioning sprints.

Someone raised the idea that sprints were a waste of time in a truly agile project. They suggested that nirvana could be achieved with Kanban alone; there is only work in progress and with an engaged client and team you would be constantly refining the backlog so new work could constantly be pulled in and worked on. This works well in a model where the client has you on retainer as their technical team for a long period of time (rather than to deliver a specific thing, like a website). 

So there’s always a finite amount of WIP (work in progress). If stories are always refined to the point that they are about half a day's effort for one person, and are complete (finishing them can be tested and, in theory, released) then you can calculate the velocity and the time remaining on sections of work fairly accurately.

We invest heavily in agile training for our staff and clients, and we’re currently hiring for multiple roles including a Delivery Manager.

Before delving into the how of automation testing using Selenium, let me talk about the why.

Over the past couple of years, the demand for automation has increased at an unprecedented speed and scale as it indispensably minimizes the testing time, eliminate repetitive human tasks and make life easier. The advent of an open source automation testing tools, such as Selenium, has significantly reduced the demand and scope of manual testing.

Needless to say, every testing has its own quirks and best practices! However, there are certain standard best practices that generally apply to most automation, too. Let’s review the best practices of automation testing. You…

SEO for Drupal Series, Part 1: Project Discovery and The Google Algorithm SEO for Drupal Part One - Project Discovery and The Google Algorithm In this new, fortnightly ‘A-Z of Drupal SEO and SEM’ series of Appnovation blog posts, we’ll see what it takes to turn a Drupal site into a traffic magnet, driving traffic growth and providing better Call to Action fulfillments without us...

Matt and Mike talk with Drupal core committter Lauri Eskola, Drupal JavaScript maintainers Théodore Biadala, and Matthew Grill, and Lullabot's own Senior Technical Architect Sally Young about adopting a front-end JavaScript framework, specifically React into Drupal core.

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In a recent project we were outputting CSV and wanted to test that the file contents were valid.

Read on for a quick tip on how to achieve this with Drupal 8's BrowserTestBase

by Lee Rowlands / 20 October 2017

Basically, the easiest way to validate and parse CSV in PHP is with the built in fgetcsv function.

So how do you go about using that inside a functional test - in that instance we're not dealing with a file so its not your ordinary approach for fgetcsv.

The answer is to create a stream wrapper in memory, and use fgetcsv on that.

The code looks something like this:

$response = $this->getSession() ->getDriver() ->getContent(); // Put contents into a memory stream and use fgetcsv to parse. $stream = fopen('php://memory', 'r+'); fwrite($stream, $response); rewind($stream); $records = []; // Get the header row. $header = fgetcsv($stream); while ($row = fgetcsv($stream)) { $records[] = $row; } fclose($stream);

There you have it, you now have the header in $header and the rows in $rows and can do any manner of asserts that you need to validate the CSV generation works as expected.

Tagged Drupal 8, Testing, Functional Testing

Posted by Lee Rowlands
Senior Drupal Developer

Dated 20 October 2017

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On 28 September 2017, the Drupal Association held its third open board meeting of the year where community members listened in via zoom and in person. You can find the meeting minutes, board materials, and meeting recording here.

The board meeting was kicked off by an update from Dries Buytaert, followed by an Executive update from Megan Sanicki, Executive Director, and a Drupal.org update from Tim Lehnen, Director of Engineering. We also thanked and celebrated Tiffany Farriss, Vesa Palmu, and Jeff Walpole whose terms on the board end in November.

Dries Buytaert moving from Chairman to Founding Director position

One of the key announcements made during the meeting came from Dries Buytaert, who announced that in response to the Community Discussions findings, he is stepping down from the Drupal Association Chairman position. He will remain on the board in the Founding Director position.  This will go into effect in November when board seats expire and Adam Goodman will step into the role as interim Chairman, which is also in response to the community’s request for a neutral, outside expert to lead the board. To learn more about the Community Discussions, go here.

Adam Goodman is a leadership professor from Northwest University in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He's advised the Drupal Association on and off for the past 8 years, helping us evolve from a volunteer board to a strategic board. In this role, Adam will further evolve the board so it can orient itself around a new chairman structure.

Since Adam is a paid consultant, the Drupal Association needs to change its bylaws to allow Adam to sit on the board and be paid for his service. In addition to this change, we are doing a general update of the bylaws to include:

• Eliminate non-existent committees like the HR committee

• Modernize the tools we can use for online voting. Today we can use teleconferencing, but we also need to be able to use video conferencing.

To learn more about this board meeting, please watch the recording and stay tuned for an update on other improvements we are making in response to the community’s input.

Our community does amazing things together and they deserve to have the best working environment for collaboration. At the Drupal Association, we strive to create these open and collaborative environments at DrupalCon and on Drupal.org.

We recently became aware that a community member violated our speaker agreement at DrupalCon. The Drupal Association removed the video from the DrupalCon event site and the Drupal Association YouTube channel and we are determining additional actions. The community member acknowledged that they broke the speaker agreement and is cooperating with the Drupal Association as we take action.

We apologize that this content was shared. It didn’t create the best environment for our community to thrive and we will do better. We are looking at ways to enhance our process to avoid situations like this from happening again.

We also heard from the community discussion findings that were provided this summer, that the community needs a better understanding of the roles and responsibilities for volunteers that work on Drupal Association programs. The Drupal Association is working to define what is expected of each role and policies for managing situations when expectations are not met. We are working on developing a clear outline of these and you can expect to see them finalized by February 2018.

open_in_browser Pulling Salesforce Data in as Taxonomy Terms in D7

Salesforce Suite is a group of modules for Drupal that allows for pulling data from Salesforce into Drupal, as well as pushing data from Drupal to Salesforce. The module api provides some very useful hooks, including the _salesforce_pull_entity_presave hook implemented by the Salesforce Pull module. In this blog post, we’ll look at using that hook to pull three Salesforce custom fields (select lists) into Drupal as taxonomy terms in three vocabularies.

Christina October 19, 2017

Mediacurrent’s commitment to innovation has been clear since our founding ten years ago.

It is not uncommon to propose to filter contents according to dates, and in particular depending on the year. How to filter content from a view based on years from a date field? We have an immediate solution using the Search API module coupled with Facets. This last module allows us very easily to add a facet, to a view, based on a date field of our content type, and to choose the granularity (year, month, day) that we wish to expose to the visitors. But if you do not have these two modules for other reasons, it may be a shame to install them just for that. We can get to our ends pretty quickly with a native Views option, the contextual filter. Let's discover in a few images how to get there.

Elevated Third Wins 2017 Acquia Engage Award Elevated Third Wins 2017 Acquia Engage Award Ayla Peacock Wed, 10/18/2017 - 12:04

At the 2017 Acquia Engage Conference, our enterprise web project for Pinnacol Assurance won the Financial Services category. As an Acquia Preferred Partner and sponsor of the Acquia Engage conference, we are thrilled to have been ranked beside the world's top Drupal websites. 

Pinnacol.com launched in December of 2016. As Colorado’s leading workers compensation insurer, Pinnacol Assurance needed a Drupal website design that reflected the company’s commitment to first-class service.

Built on Drupal 8, we launched a brand new enterprise content management system, created a one-of-a-kind knowledge hub, and revamped the site’s user experience interface.

“The Pinnacol project was lengthy and complex, we had very specific problems that required creative solutions. Elevated Third developed a high performing, enterprise-level website that continues to exceed our expectations.”

- Hilary Miller, Brand and Marketing Director, Pinnacol Assurance

This year, five of our Drupal websites were finalists in the annual Acquia Engage competition. Partners and customers submitted more than 200 nominations across 17 categories to the program. Our Drupal work ranked in the following categories. 

Powdr Corporation, Digital Experience Finalist

Denver Botanic Gardens, Nonprofit Finalist

Comcast Technology Solutions, Brand Experience Finalist

Firewise USA, Community Finalist

Pinnacol Assurance, Financial Services Winner

“Winning sites set themselves apart in how they grabbed our attention and made us want to learn more,” said CMSWire’s Dom Nicastro, one of the award program jurors. “The first thing I looked for were search and commerce capabilities. It's a Google and Amazon world that we live in. No one comes to a website just for a pretty design, and no one remembers a red call-to-action button versus a blue one. Sites that deliver excellent search and easy transactional experiences won for me.”

Congratulations to all the 2017 Acquia Engage winners!

Over the years, Zivtech has worked on many different types of existing Drupal websites and web applications. These projects have ranged from sites that were built with Drupal’s best practices to those built by developers with little to no Drupal experience. At Zivtech, we typically call a website that follows little to none of Drupal’s best practices a “lemon.” Our CTO, Jody Hamilton, did a great two part blog series called Lemon: Drupal Diseases and Cures if you would like to know more about what a Drupal lemon is.

If your site fits into the category of a lemon, it likely requires too much work to fix and should probably be rebuilt. In many cases though, our developers find that we can “rescue” the site to get it back into a secure and maintainable state after a site audit. We perform a site audit to identify the issues that can be fixed, and then provide an informative report about what problems have been found and how we can resolve them.

Our extensive experience with site audits has helped us identify common mistakes that Drupal sites are often guilty of. In this post we’ll outline the common mistakes and configuration issues that we find on most lemons. Some of these issues are even common on sites that have mostly followed Drupal’s best practices.

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Take the Amazee Agile Agency Survey 2017

As part of my new role as Agile Consultant with Amazee Labs Zurich, I'm running a global survey to assess agile practices in our industry. Anyone working in an agency environment is welcome to fill out the survey!

• Take the Amazee Agile Agency survey​
  https://tinyurl.com/amazeeagileagencysurvey2017

Josef Dabernig Wed, 10/18/2017 - 13:57

Do you / does your agency work using defined agile methodologies such as Scrum and or Kanban? How do you fit theory into practice when it comes to working for different clients with different levels of understanding with regards to Agile practices at the same time?

Thank you for taking the survey before October 31 - I’m looking forward to report the findings in an upcoming blog post.

We've stepped into the last quarter of the year, but in Drupal community is still much going on. We've made a list of DrupalCamps and summits that are still available to attend. Drupal events are bringing together Drupal developers, themers, end users and those interested in learning more about Drupal for talks, sessions and collaborative discussions.  Drupal Summit Tokyo  Fukurasia Shinagawa Crystal Square, Tokyo, Japan 19. October 2017 9:00-19:00 Largest Drupal event in Japan will host more than 15 strategies and technical sessions, starting with a session of a formal digital director of… READ MORE

Sometimes you would like to import a huge volume of data from a CSV file into Drupal. Maybe from another CMS. Maybe from a spreadsheet. But there is no such functionality in Drupal 8 core. 

To import your data from a CSV file, you need to install and enable the contributed module "Content Import". In this tutorial, you are going to import five content items of the content type Customer.

A checkout is a pretty fundamental part of a commerce system. So the fact that Commerce 2.x has a checkout is not really news. But it’s what you can do with the checkout that makes 2.x special.

You can now configure the checkout workflow. You can opt to ask for billing information, shipping information, certificates, registration details, etc. There’s lots of different data that can change depending on the type of product you sell. If you sell digital products, for instance, you don’t need shipping information. If you sell course registrations, you might require pre-existing certificates. Maybe you do both, so you need to configure multiple types of checkouts.

And that’s easy to do. For the most part, it’s a matter of dragging and dropping options. You can add or remove pieces pretty easily. If you need something really custom, like if you need to validate a safety certificate against a third party, you might need a developer to build that functionality. But otherwise it’s a fairly simple process.

You can also integrate into any part of the checkout. Maybe you do something when you add to cart, or when you complete the order. Maybe you even go off-site to pay through PayPal or register through Eventbrite and then come back. You can hook into any step you need in order to get those things done.

Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

We're back from DrupalCon Vienna, with updates on what's new from the month of our European event.

Announcement TLS 1.0 and 1.1 deprecated

Drupal.org uses the Fastly CDN service for content delivery, and Fastly has depreciated support for TLS 1.1, 1.0, and 3DES on the cert we use for Drupal.org, per the mandate by the PCI Security Standards Council. This change took place on 9 Aug 2017. This means that browsers and API clients using the older TLS 1.1 or 1.0 protocols will no longer be supported. Older versions of curl or wget may be affected as well.

Drupal.org updates DrupalCon Calendar syncing

In our last update, we teased a new feature for DrupalCon attendees - the ability to sync your personal schedule to a calendar program. We're pleased to report that this feature made it in time for the event, and was used by attendees throughout the week. If you've already synced your calendar for DrupalCon Vienna, you're already set up to use the same feed for DrupalCon Nashville next April!

Keynote simulcast to Youtube

This year at DrupalCon, in addition to live streaming on Events.Drupal.org itself, we simulcast the keynotes to YouTube. We also embedded the keynote on the Drupal.org homepage - to spread the latest news about Drupal beyond DrupalCon attendees.

In fact, if you couldn't attend DrupalCon or just missed the keynotes, you can watch Dries' update on the Drupal project here:

Industry Pages promoted in the front page Call-to-Action

We've also made some updates to how the industry pages are promoted. In addition to the dedicated block with icons linking to each industry, we now also promote the industry solutions landing page in the main CTA under the homepage header.

We hope to further encourage users evaluating Drupal to explore some of the tremendous solutions that are already out there, and take inspiration from their success.

First-in/First-out issue sorting

To make sure that issues are reviewed by maintainers in the order they are received, it is now possible to sort the issue queues by when the issue status last changed. This means RTBC issues can be reviewed on a first-in/first-out basis!

This 'status changed' date field is available on the advanced search view for any issue queue. Here's what it looks like for Drupal core:

Project creation analysis

About six months ago we opened up project creation on Drupal.org to allow any confirmed user to create a full project. We've put together a blog post outlining the impact these changes have had on the contrib landscape. In short, we've seen a tremendous increase in the rate of project creation, and the rate of applications for security advisory coverage, and a modest increase in projects receiving stable releases without yet opting in coverage. We're continuing to monitor project creation and work with the Security Working Group and others on next steps.

Displaying orphan dev releases

In last month's update we talked about a variety of changes we made to project pages, to provide better signals about project quality to evaluators. In response to feedback, we've restored the visibility of dev releases, even when they aren't associated with a tagged release.

This is particularly helpful for project maintainers trying to bring visibility to the next major development version of their modules, such as their Drupal 8 module port efforts.

———

As always, we’d like to say thanks to all the volunteers who work with us, and to the Drupal Association Supporters, who made it possible for us to work on these projects. In particular we want to thank:

• comm-press - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• Code Koalas - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• KWALL - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• ANNAI - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner
• UniMity Solutions - *NEW* Classic Supporting Partner
• Berger Schmidt - Renewing Classic Supporting Partner

If you would like to support our work as an individual or an organization, consider becoming a member of the Drupal Association.

Follow us on Twitter for regular updates: @drupal_org, @drupal_infra