Insights by Mark

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 16: Unofficial Drupal 7 Security Team

Mark and Chris are joined by Klaus Purer to discuss his proposal to create an unofficial, community-driven Drupal 7 security team!

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 15: What Does Drupal 9 EOL Mean for Drupal 7 EOL?

Mark and Dave discuss how Drupal 9’s end-of-life status relates to Drupal 7 as well as recap some of the Drupal 7 end-of-life discussions that have happened at GovCon.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 14: Acquia Migrate Accelerate

Mark and Chris discuss the recent release of Acquia Migrate: Accelerate and how it can help folks with the content migration piece of their journey from Drupal 7 to Modern Drupal.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 13: Retrofit for Drupal with Matt Glaman

Matt Glaman returns, joining Mark and Chris to discuss Retrofit for Drupal’s launch and future. Previously known as Drupal Bridge, Retrofit helps ease the transition out of Drupal 7. Matt outlines the power of Retrofit and its limitations, and explains the best way to incorporate it into your workflows.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 12: How to Write a Great D7 Upgrade RFP

Writing a great “request for proposal” is often the first step on your journey to successfully migrate your Drupal 7 sites. Mark and Dave sit down to discuss some essential points to include in your RFP so that you can close the trust gap between you and a potential partner, and pave the way for a successful transition.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 11: Adopt Your Important Drupal 7 Modules Now!

Chris is back from sabbatical! Mark and Chris outline a series of processes to help determine which modules are most at risk so that you can take action accordingly. Use our linked PDF to audit your Drupal 7 sites.

Introducing the Orange Logic Digital Asset Management PHP Library and Drupal Module

Our team at Chromatic is excited to announce the release of an open-source Drupal module and PHP Library to facilitate integrating Orange Logic’s digital asset manager Orange DAM with Drupal.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 10: Your Roadmap to Drupal 7 End-of-Life

Fresh from DrupalCon, Mark and Dave debrief Drupal 7's recent End-of-Life date announcement outlining processes to make the transition easier. Between sourcing the right advisors to pitching your transition, it’s key to take action now with End-of-Life 18 months away.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 09: New End-of-Life Date Announcement!

Live from DrupalCon, Mark and Dave discuss Drupal 7's new end-of-life date and its implications. While the official end-of-life date has been extended, changes in overall support come into effect as early as August 2023.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 08: Building a Bridge to Drupal 7 with Matt Glaman

Matt Glaman joins us! Mark, Dave, and Matt examine how Drupal 7’s end-of-life challenges are symptomatic of a widespread approach to development. Matt dives deep into the drawbacks behind software maintenance, and unveils his plans to release Drupal Bridge by DrupalCon 2023.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 07: Building Bridges in Backdrop with Jen Lampton

Jen Lampton joins us! As the co-founder of Backdrop, Jen provides plenty of insight into why Drupal 7’s EOL requires a multi-pronged solution for different customer bases. Mark and Jen dive deep into Drupal alternatives and the challenges behind them, taking a closer look at where Backdrop may fill the gap for some users.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 06: Minding the Gap – What Do We Need for a Successful Drupal Migration?

Drupal 7's end-of-life comes with more questions than answers. Chris and Mark discuss the complexities that come with retiring Drupal 7 and outline the basis of the communication gap between the Drupal Association, the Drupal 7 Soft Landing Initiative, and its users; taking a hard look at the possible steps to come.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 05: Tim Lehnen on Drupal 7 End-of-Life

Tim Lehnen joins us! Tim is the Drupal Association’s Chief Technology Officer and is one of the voices in the room when it comes to decisions around Drupal 7’s End-of-Life. We talk with Tim about that as well as how he thinks about sites still on Drupal 7, modern Drupal’s growth being better than the usage graphs show, and even Drupal.org still being on Drupal 7 (for now)!

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 04: Irina Zaks and the Drupal 7 Soft Landing Initiative

Irina Zaks joins us! Irina is a web developer, open-source evangelist, and the co-founder of the Drupal 7 Soft Landing Initiative. Irina, Chris, and Mark discuss Drupal 7 end-of-life, Backdrop, and how to give Drupal 7 users a soft landing.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 03: Who Should Be Most Worried About Drupal 7’s End-of-Life?

Chris and Mark discuss the wide spectrum of sites still running on Drupal 7 and which characteristics make staying on Drupal 7 more (or less) risky. They then unpack the pros and cons of some Drupal 7 alternatives.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 02: Should Drupal 7 Support Be Extended?

Drupal 7's end-of-life has been extended multiple times but is now set for November 1, 2023. Should it be extended further? Mark and Chris break it down and maaaybe change Chris’ mind.

Drupal 7 End-of-Life Ep 01: Why is Drupal 7's End-of-Life a Big Deal?

There’s been quite a bit of talk about what it takes to upgrade to 'modern Drupal,' but less on what it will actually be like to still be responsible for a Drupal 7 site after that date. Chris and Mark discuss that and more on this episode.

Why is Drupal 7’s End-of-Life a Big Deal?

There has been quite a bit of talk about what it takes to upgrade to “modern Drupal,” but less ink has been spilled painting a picture of what it will actually be like to still be responsible for a Drupal 7 site after that date.

How to Add Tugboat Live Previews to Drupal Contrib Modules

It is now dead simple to add Tugboat to Drupal contributed modules.

2022 Q4 Open Source Round-Up

As we wrap up the fourth quarter of 2022 and hurtle headlong into 2023, we have compiled a round-up of our team’s open-source efforts in Q4 2022. Happy New Year!

Recoupling a Decoupled Site

What if your site is already decoupled, and you are beginning to wonder if it was the right choice? The question becomes, does the higher effort required to maintain and iterate on a decoupled site still match your product or business goals?

Leverage Repeatability to Build and Maintain Websites Efficiently and Cost-Effectively

You can leverage repeatability to make website development efficient and profitable while allowing time for innovative custom features. Learn how.

Creating Ready-Made Development Environments Using Lando

Sharing Robo Commands Across Repos

We have been using Robo as our task runner of choice on PHP projects for some time now. Over time our set of Robo commands has grown, and often they are quite similar across different projects causing us to duplicate code and then keep them in sync when changes are made to our commands.

GitHub Action: Platform.sh Database Dump and Sync to S3

Today we are releasing version 1.0 of our Platform.sh Database Backup and S3 Sync GitHub Action that will allow you to take a database dump from a site hosted on platform.sh and sync that database dump to an AWS S3 bucket that you specify. We are utilizing this action with a scheduled workflow on a number of sites to automate database backups without running on any of our own infrastructure. We hope you find this tool useful, and let us know if you encounter any issues!

Preventing Conflicts when Upgrading to Composer 2

Composer 2 RC2 is now in the wild and the official release of 2.0 is quickly approaching. This is exciting for anyone who has complained about Composer’s performance in the past as Composer 2 brings significant performance improvements.

Use Custom Docker Images to Speed Up Tugboat Builds

One of Tugboat’s most compelling features is that it is fast, but that hasn’t stopped us from pursuing making it even faster. We wanted to turn our tugboat into a speedboat.

Announce Your Organization’s Drupal.org Statistics In Slack

A new, open source way to see your organization's rank in the Drupal.org Marketplace.

Chromatic's Development & QA Process

A detailed rundown of our development, review, and QA processes.

Speeding Up Node Dependency Installs With Yarn

At the time of Yarn’s debut, it brought big advancements to npm’s performance and workflow along with the introduction of lock files. A lot of time has passed since then and with the arrival of a native npm lock file, I was under the impression that more recent npm development had rendered the benefits of Yarn obsolete.

Headed to JSConf US 2019

JSConf is less than a week away and a solid contingent of Chromaticians will be headed to sunny California to soak up some of the exciting ways JavaScript is taking shape in the browser and beyond.

Having a Leader on Sabbatical

Chris wrote a couple of months ago about his approaching plans to take time off for a six-week sabbatical. Well, six weeks have elapsed and Chris has returned. We are thrilled to have him back. I am sure he will share his thoughts on what it was like to take a step back for that amount of time, but I wanted to share what it was like to have a business partner take an extended break.

DrupalCon 2019 Seattle Recap

Another DrupalCon is in the books and our team had a fantastic time gathering with so many members of the worldwide Drupal community in Seattle. Getting together in person with a large portion of our team is always a treat, but it makes it all the sweeter when our team has the chance to share their expertise by presenting at DrupalCon.

Saying Goodbye to Travis CI

Chromatic has used Travis CI for nearly five years for our continuous integration needs; building every pull request, checking our changes against code standards, running automated tests, etc. On March 12, 2019, we canceled our Travis subscription and began running our builds elsewhere. Why make a change now? It’s simple, really.

9th District Court Rules that ADA applies to Websites — Our Take

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned a lower court ruling by affirming that websites are covered by the ADA and stating that Dominos could be forced to comply with WCAG 2.0 as a way to resolve existing ADA non-compliance issues on their website.

Changing the Tires at 60 MPH: How Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Migrated to Drupal

Spend More Time Surfing: Custom Entities & Entity Tools

Perspectives from the experts at Chromatic

May the GIT--FORCE Be With You

Manufacturing Serendipity with Slack

Spec Developer Conference: Manufacturing Serendipity with Slack

Last week, I attended and spoke at Spec, Slack’s first developer conference. Spec was a really compelling event that mixed sessions from Slack employees sharing feature announcements and technical guidance with talks from leaders at organizations like Twilio, HubSpot, and ZenDesk about what they are building on the Slack platform.

A Testing Environment for Every Pull Request

Making the review and approval process fast and efficient is key to successful agile projects. Tugboat helps this tremendously.

Using `composer outdated` to Manage Drupal Dependencies

Managing Drupal sites with composer brings a number of benefits. However, when installing Drupal dependencies from source (an option offered by composer), you also lose the functionality provided by Drupal core’s “Available Updates” page. Thankfully Composer will allow you to keep tabs on the available updates for all of your project’s dependencies, including Drupal core/contrib.

Customizing Slack To Match Your Team Colors

Slack makes it super easy to create and share your own theme's Here's the Chromatic theme some of us use internally.

Contributing to Drupal's json_feed

After a few weeks of work and testing, the JSON Feed module now has an official release. Version 1.0 allows Drupal users to add a JSON Feed display to any view and map Drupal fields to the attributes defined by the JSON Feed specification.

Squash Your GitHub Pull Requests

With squash and merge, the master branch is updated with a single commit that includes all of the changes originally committed in a feature branch.

Managing DNS Records In Version Control

dnscontrol is an open-source tool written in Go by the fine folks at Stack Exchange that allows us to configure our DNS records in a JS file that can be committed to version control and published on demand. With this configuration in git, we can now easily review changes through our normal pull request workflow, as well as getting a full log of any changes made over time.

An Upstream Crisis Averted

How to reference a forked/patched npm package.

Announcing fastly-cli

fastly-cli is a command-line interface (CLI) for the Fastly CDN written in node.js.

Recurly 8.x-1.0 Released

We are excited to announce the first official release of the Recurly module for Drupal 8 (8.x-1.0).

Configuring Redis Caching with Drupal 8

How to install and configure Redis caching for Drupal 8.

XOXO 2016 Discoveries

The very best part of attending the XOXO Festival is the earnest humans you get the chance to meet and interact with, but a welcome byproduct is learning about the compelling projects they have worked on.

Drush SQL Sync Alternative: SQL Sync Pipe

Using Drush to sync databses (drush sql-sync) is a valuable tool, but it is not always an efficient choice when dealing with large databases (think over 1GB).

May the Git --FORCE Be With You [Advanced Git Webinar]

A master class in the git version control system.

Chromatic Site Launch Guide

At Chromatic, we wanted to produce a repeatable site launch process that we could share not only amongst ourselves, but also with the community.

Civil Comments Drupal Module

Civil Comments brings real-world social cues to comments sections via crowd-sourced moderation, and Chromatic has brought Civil Comments integration to Drupal with a new contrib module.

Import a database using Drush

I have been using the same command snippet to import a database using drush for a long time, but it recently broke when switching to an alternative shell. Below is an update to an old classic.

Recurly for Drupal 8 – Dev Branch Posted

We are excited to announce that after a great deal of team effort, we have pushed a dev branch of the Recurly module for Drupal 8 to Drupal.org.

How to Write a Great Commit Message

A great commit message should tell the reader all they need to know about the what of the commit. They should only have to look at the actual diff of the commit to see how it was accomplished.

How To Manage Your Drupal Patches with 'Drush Patch File'

You find an issue on Drupal.org and if you are lucky, there is a viable patch. Hopefully this patch will one day make it into a release, but this won't slow you down. You apply the patch, it fixes the bug and all is well with the world ... for now.

Outside Magazine Gear Channel

It is always an exciting day when we finally get to see our hard work shared with the world and today is one of those days. We have the pleasure of partnering with Outside Magazine on a newly redesigned and re-architected Gear channel.