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.

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.
   

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().

We do quite a lot of migrations at work and previously I've seen other developers roll many different solutions from using a Feeds and Services combination to rolling their own importers but it was my turn and I decided to carry out some further research.

Comparing the Languages

I recently had to use the Date module in a custom booking form that was constructed using Drupal's awesome Form API. Now I'm sure someone is going to come along and prove me wrong but I couldn't find any documentation on the available widget types, form properties or much of anything to be honest. I did find a few wrong examples that were doing some weird hacks like overwriting #process.

I've been working on a pretty big site restructure this week and as part of the restructure I needed to migrate data from some custom database tables into Field Collections to offer a bit more flexibility. Most of the code documented was available on drupal.org but there was definitely a lot of different ways mentioned and no clean cut function for you to reuse. If you're just looking for a cut a paste, here's the code. I will explain it further below but it's pretty well commented anyway.

These are the steps I went through to get my new install of Ubuntu 12.04 up and running.

Server Setup

http://klau.si/dev - Setting up phpmyadmin, MySQL, PHP and Apache. If you are exposing Apache to the world then I would advise disabling PHPMyAdmin from remote access. Simply add the following to /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

Today I finally decided to install Drush on my MacBook Air and everything was going great using pear to install Drush until I ran into the error: No such file or directory (trying to connect via unix:///var/mysql/mysql.sock)    [warning] environment.inc:518

Luckily it's an easy fix. Simply create a symbolic link in /var/mysql to /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock with the following code.

sudo mkdir /var/mysql
sudo ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock

And your done.

I'm sure many developers like me have worked with the same technologies for quite a few years and then there comes a point when you find yourself having to learn a new technology quick or like me you find yourself in a new and very different role with a handful of new technologies to learn.