Migrating from WordPress to Drupal 8

Overview

Last weekend I came up short with things to do and with a Drupal 8 release right around the corner I decided to get on with moving my blog across from WordPress. TLDR; It went well :)

Migrate API

Pretty old news at this point for most but Drupal 8 now has Migrate in core. Outside of cores needs for an upgrade path there is an easy to use API for migrating to Drupal from any platform. You could even use it to move between two non-Drupal platforms if you so wanted.

Goodbye Magento

You're about to read a highly subjective and somewhat argumentative post which are my own opinions on the shortcoming of Magento and why I no longer enjoy working with the framework. Which doesn't mean I'm totally free of it at work :)

Short Background

I've been using Magento for around 2 years and during that time I have worked with both Magento CC and Magento Enterprise on a range of projects with budgets ranging from $15k - 250k. I've contributed open source extensions, reported bugs to the core issue queue and overall used the platform somewhat extensively.

Gmail Favicon Issues

I woke up this morning and was quite disturbed to have a horrible blue cog with a yellow spanner in the middle as my Gmail favicon. From what I can tell the icon is the same icon used in the admin console but I've no idea what it's doing on my Gmail tabs. Anyway quick fix, in Gmail:

  1. Click the cog drop down and goto "Settings"
  2. Go to labs and search for "Unread"
  3. Enable the "Unread Message Icon"

Here's the horrible icon I described above.

Installing Drush on VentraIP

  1. Install composer
    cd ~ && mkdir bin && curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/home2/YOU_SITE_NAME/bin --filename=composer
  2. Install Drush
    composer global require drush/drush:6.*
  3. php -i | grep php.ini and then copy the default php.ini into ~/.drush - Make ~/.drush folder if it does not exist.
  4. Remove exec and any other functions drush uses from the disabled_func line in php.ini
  5. Ensure the Composer bin folder is in your $PATH.

Magento Gift Extension

A few months back at work we had the requirement for a Magento gift extension which turned out to be more of a hassle than one would think. After weeks of testing the variety of  modules out there the decision was made to write our own.

Lucas wrote the module in his own time and is now marketing the extension via proxiblue.com.au. The extension brings a few nice features not offered by other extensions such as using existing products as gifts and gift quantity limits. The extension is also compatible in multi-store configurations.

Adding a Date Filter to Views When Using Custom Fields

I recently exposed some custom database tables to views using hook_views_data() which as usual was a pleasant experience, until I wanted to use the date filter that the Date module provides. This isn't creating a filter on your field, it's the field in the list that looks like Date (node). The word "node" in brackets is referring to the base table that will be used for the date filter, this allows you to compare multiple dates from the same table. So the hook you're looking for: hook_date_views_extra_tables().