fidzu : Drupal

Drupalcon Dublin: Come to the island and get off the island

Single image:

The beach around the corner from our Dublin apartment

28.09.2016 Michael Lenahan

28 Sep 2016 9:02pm GMT

This week is DrupalCon Dublin. And as always, Dries gave the keynote address on the first morning of the event.

This year's keynote was broken into two sections: "Drupal 8 Update" and "The Why".

In "Drupal 8 Update", Dries talks about the technical side of Drupal. From minute 27 to minute 42, Dries talks about what's new in Drupal 8.2, which arrives on October 5th. We've covered those new features in previous posts. Then, from minute 42 to 48, Dries discusses features may arrive in future Drupal versions. If you're short on time, watch those 6 minutes. Scroll down in this post, and we'll cover those 6 minutes in detail.

In "The Why", starting at minute 40, there's a much broader focus on the larger purpose of Drupal. This section of personal anecdotes and stories of Drupal in action.

28 Sep 2016 4:01pm GMT

As a former tech journalist I am well experienced in attending conferences all around the world, so I was very excited to attend DrupalCon Dublin on the behalf of Deeson.

With DrupalCon, it was a great opportunity to learn more about Drupal straight from the mouths of a thriving community. But with the 'Future of Work' approach being one of a number of reasons I decided to join the company, it was a great opportunity to share our message and the way people can thrive at Deeson with its openness, autonomy, flexible working, paid sabbaticals and paid time to contribute to the community.

DrupalCon Europe was very different to the conferences that I've experienced in the past in that instead of the slickness of a warm-up act with sales patter and a costly presentation, I was presented with fun and games from the Drupal community, including a singalong, viking claps, and some Irish dancing. Already I could tell this would be different experience to the tech events I've been used to.

An early morning Irish jig to get us ready for the #DrupalCon Dublin sessions today. #morningexercise pic.twitter.com/r0gQWlCOUQ

- Asavin Wattanajantra (@Asavin) September 27, 2016

This was great preparation for the day, and the first presentation I saw was a powerful keynote by the founder and lead developer of Drupal Dries Buyteart about how wide and far the community stretched, and how it gave opportunities in terms of a career around the world.

Below is a video of the keynote, and is certainly inspiring for anybody thinking of getting into Drupal, whether it's as a developer or non-technical person like me as a marketer, a project manager, or business developer.

This is how the rest of the week will shape up.

28 Sep 2016 11:33am GMT

A day at DrupalCon with Sebastian

Sebastian Siemssen Wed, 09/28/2016 - 12:36

28 Sep 2016 10:36am GMT

It is probably no secret that we are one of the bigger contributors to Drupal (definitely the biggest when company size is taken into consideration). Contribution is part of our daily routine. Every time when we run into a problem that can be resolved in a general/community way we try to do that. Our developers are active in the issue queues on a daily basis. Working in the drupal.org issue queue is as common as checking new messages on our company's Mattermost channels.

28 Sep 2016 8:48am GMT

28 Sep 2016 8:46am GMT

With Drupal 8 now adding new features on a regular release cycle, the Drupal 8 committers identified the need for additional release management. Today I am announcing that Chris McCafferty (cilefen) has accepted my invitation to be provisional Drupal 8 committer.

Chris is a United States-based web programmer at the Institute for Advanced Study who has worked with Drupal and the Symfony framework for over four years. He is also a core mentoring coordinator who has put in uncounted hours mentoring contributors in person and on IRC and has lead major issue triage sprints at DrupalCons in Los Angeles and New Orleans. In addition, Chris spreads the word about Drupal by mentoring at other events, such as OpenHatch Princeton.

Chris makes significant contributions to a wide variety of Drupal core issues. If you have worked in the issue queue in the last few years, you have probably interacted with Chris on topics ranging from front-end to the testing frameworks. He has the attitude and skills needed to foster collaboration among the talented contributors in the Drupal community and to continue releasing Drupal on time. Please join me in welcoming Chris.

28 Sep 2016 5:46am GMT

Being accountable for the planning, execution, and delivery of a project is demanding. Managing people, facilitating communication, resolving conflict, and mitigating risk are prerequisites to completing on schedule, and within an agreed budget. Add to this the often unpredictable nature of these factors and it's little wonder that project managers feel a great burden of responsibility.

28 Sep 2016 1:39am GMT

27 Sep 2016 11:00pm GMT

Drupal form's #tree option

by vannia - Sep 27, 2016 0 Comments

Tag(s)

Form API

Drupal planet

There may be a need to name the form elements in an array structure how the form is built. You can see this in Ubercart checkout pane form's input elements. This is very useful when one has a large multi-part form which can be grouped easily by their POST content's array format.

Eg: panes[delivery][delivery_first_name]

A simple flag on you $form construct array will do the trick. It's the #tree option. For whichever elements you set this #tree option, the element's children will be named with full reference to its parents.

Continue reading →

27 Sep 2016 5:08pm GMT

Attachments:

Configuration-Management-Theory-and-Practice.pdf

27 Sep 2016 4:23pm GMT

This is the fifth post in a series about coding standards. In this post we'll talk about how to use translation functions in both Drupal 7 and 8. This is so essential that it deserves its own post!

Other posts in this series:

1. Drupal Code Standards: What Are They?
2. Drupal Code Standards: How Do We Implement Them?
3. Drupal Code Standards: Formatting
4. Drupal Code Standards: Documentation
5. Drupal Code Standards: The t() function
6. Drupal Code Standards: Object Oriented Coding & Drupal 8
7. Drupal Code Standards: Twig in Drupal 8

What is the t() function?

The t() function allows for localization and translates a given string to a given language at run-time. When coding, you wrap your user-facing strings in this function so that they can be translated.

When do I use it?

In just about every user-facing string. This ensures that your site can be localized! When in doubt, translate everything. You might be thinking "oh, this string will never need to be translated," but 2 years later, when you're trying to find this string that's showing up untranslated on the site, and your shareholders want it changed, you'll be much happier if it's already ready to translate. I may be speaking from experience here.

What does it do?

Firstly, t() translates text at runtime if you have more than one language enabled. Depending on which placeholder you use, it runs different sanitization functions.

The t() function takes 3 parameters, 2 of which are optional. The first is the string to be translated, the second is the array of replacements, if any. The third is an array of options. From Drupal.org:

$options: An associative array of additional options, with the following elements: * 'langcode' (defaults to the current language): The language code to translate to a language other than what is used to display the page. * 'context' (defaults to the empty context): A string giving the context that the source string belongs to.

String context (or translation context) is a way to organize translations when words have 1 to many translations. From the handbook page:

What is string context?

When translating Drupal's user interface to other languages, each original (English) string can have only one translation. This is a problem when one English word has several meanings, like "Order", which can mean the order of elements in a list, to order something in a shop, or an order someone has placed in a shop. For many languages, the string "Order" needs a different translation for each of these meanings.

You can read more about string context here.

Using Placeholders

Placeholders come from the format_string function, which is called by t().

The most common placeholder is probably @variable. This placeholder runs check_plain() on the text before replacing it. Never pass a variable through t() directly - only string literals. The short explanation for this is that the string to be translated needs to be available at runtime, and a variable may not be available and may change its value. You can find an in-depth explanation here.

You use a placeholder to insert a value into the translated text, like in this example from the Advanced Forum contrib module:

$block->title = t(
  'Most active poster in @forum', array('@forum' => $forum->name)
);

You may also use %variable, which runs drupal_placeholder() on the text, which both escapes the text and formats it as emphasized text.

In Drupal 7, !variable inserts your value exactly as is, without running any sanitization functions, so you would never want to use this on user-entered text, and only on text that has already been properly escaped.

In Drupal 8, !variable is deprecated, replaced by :variable.

In Drupal 8, :variable is escaped with \Drupal\Component\Utility\Html::escape() and filtered for dangerous protocols using UrlHelper::stripDangerousProtocols().

So now you might be wondering what to do in Drupal 8 if you do not want to escape your text at all, now that the !variable placeholder is gone. There is a way! In the placeholderFormat() function, there's a default case. Let's take a look at the code:

default:
        // We do not trigger an error for placeholder that start with an
        // alphabetic character.
        if (!ctype_alpha($key[0])) {
          // We trigger an error as we may want to introduce new placeholders
          // in the future without breaking backward compatibility.
          trigger_error('Invalid placeholder (' . $key . ') in string: ' . $string, E_USER_ERROR);
        }
        break;
    }

So if we use a placeholder that starts with an alphabetic character, it won't trigger an error, but it also won't trigger any actions. You can use any alphabetic character(s) you like for your dummy placeholder. Something easily identifiable, like TT is a good idea - and comment your code!

When don't I use it?

In Drupal 7, there are some instances where t() is not available.

During the installation phase, t() isn't available, so you must use get_t(). You can do something like this:

$t = get_t();
$t('my string');

Translation is also not used inside of hook_schema() or hook_menu().

In Drupal 8, t() is always available, so you can always use it.

t() and links

There are a lot of times that you may want to translate the text in a link - there are lots of ways to do this, and most of them aren't the best. Here are some bad examples, and a good (and simple!) one.

Bad:

$do_not_do_this = t('Do not ')."" . t('link ') . ""  .t('to something like this.');

$bad = t('This is not a good way to make a @link.', array('@link' => ''. t('link') .'')); 

$dreadful = t('This is a dreadful way to make a link pointing to the Drupal API t() documentation.'); 

$awful = t('This may seem good, but it's an awful way to link to this @doc.', array('@doc => l(t('documentation'), 'https://api.drupal.org'));

Good:

$good = t('Read about the t() function here.', array('@api' => 'https://api.drupal.org'));

Here's an example from Drupal 8 Core, in the function install_check_translations() in install.core.inc:

// If the translations directory is not readable, throw an error.
    if (!$readable) {
      $requirements['translations directory readable'] = array(
        'title'       => t('Translations directory'),
        'value'       => t('The translations directory is not readable.'),
        'severity'    => REQUIREMENT_ERROR,
        'description' => t('The installer requires read permissions to %translations_directory at all times. The webhosting issues documentation section offers help on this and other topics.', array('%translations_directory' => $translations_directory, ':handbook_url' => 'https://www.drupal.org/server-permissions')),
      );
    }

In this code you can see that the tags are inside the t() function, and the url is escaped using the :variable placeholder.

It's okay to put a little html in your t() function to simplify like this. The element can easily be moved around if the translation requires it, without needing to know any code other than which word is being linked. Our next section will talk more about keeping your text translatable.

Translation Best Practices

Writing your code and content to be translatable isn't just a best practice, it may very well be used to actually translate your site, so sometimes you need to think from the point of view of a translator. Try not to abstract out pieces of content too much. Here's an example. In English, you may have a blog title "Bob's Homepage." You could want to abstract that into the following:

$username . "'s " . t('Homepage.');

What's the problem here? In other languages, this phrase may be re-arranged. For example, in French or Spanish, it would be "Homepage de Bob." The above example would require a translator to change code. We don't want that. So we write this:

t('@user's Homepage.', array('@username' => 'Bob'));

Now, this string can easily be changed to:

t('Homepage de @user.', array('@username' => 'Bob'));

Concatenation Dos and Don'ts

In the example in the previous section, we showed where concatenating a translated string with another string can make trouble. There are some other things you want to avoid.

Don't concatenate strings within t(). For example, don't do this:

t('Don't try to join' . ' ' . @num . ' ' . 'strings.', array('@num' => 'multiple'));

Even if you think you have to, there is a better way.

And don't concatenate t() strings and variables - you don't need to!

Don't do this:

t('This is a complicated way to join ') . $mystring . t(' and translated strings');

Additionally, the above would give you a codesniffer error because you should not have leading or trailing whitespace in a translatable string.

Do this:

t('This is a simple way to join @mystring and translated strings', array('@mystring' => 'whatever my string is'));

This is how the t() function is designed to be used! Going around it defeats the purpose of using it at all.

Drupal 8 & Twig

In Drupal 8, the essential function and its use are the same. Wrap text in your module code in t(''), with the same optional placeholder and options arrays. As noted in the placeholders section, !variable has been deprecated and replaced with :variable.

With Drupal 8, we have the introduction of the Twig templating engine, and with that, new ways format our text for translation.

The simplest way is to pipe your text through |t. Here's an example from the Devel contrib module:

In the above code, we can see the text in the table headers piped into the translation function, just as it would be passed through t() in Drupal 7. You can also use |trans interchangeably with |t. You can use a {% trans %} block to translate a larger chunk of text or use placeholders. These blocks can also handle logic for plurals. Here's an example from Drupal 8 Core:

{{ view.label }}

Here we can see that the template appropriately shows the translated text for "Display" or the plural, "Displays."

From Drupal.org:

Values are escaped by default. The 'passthrough' filter can be used to skip escaping. The 'placeholder' filter can be used to form a placeholder. The default behavior is equivalent to @ in t(), while 'passthrough' matches ! and 'placeholder' matches %.

This comes from Twig, and is not yet commonly used in Drupal, but its usage with placeholders is similar to t(). Here's an example from Drupal 8 Core:

 {% set includes = includes|join(', ') %}
  {% if disabled %}
    {{ 'Includes:'|t }}
    

• {% trans %} Enabled: {{ includes|placeholder }} {% endtrans %}
• {% set disabled = disabled|join(', ') %} {% trans %} Disabled: {{ disabled|placeholder }} {% endtrans %}

  {% else %}
    {% trans %}
      Includes: {{ includes|placeholder }}
    {% endtrans %}
  {% endif %}

In the above code, we can see the use of the placeholder in Twig. The set lines set the placeholders to be used later in the code. The |placeholder filter indicates that a replacement is to be made.

Wrapping Up

This post has a lot of what not to do, but you'll run into a lot of creatively incorrect code when it comes to translation, and now you'll know it when you see it. Simple is best. Remember that this function exists to give translators a list of strings to translate, and you'll be in the right frame of mind when assembling these strings to keep them flexible and translatable!

Have some questions/comments/concerns? Experience you'd like to share? Talk to us on Twitter: @ChromaticHQ!

Keep an eye out for our next post in our Drupal Code Standards series, on Object Oriented programming in Drupal 8!

27 Sep 2016 2:16pm GMT

27 Sep 2016 2:10pm GMT

SRI relaunches with new site design and content architecture to drive content marketing and lead generation tony Tue, 09/27/2016 - 08:33

27 Sep 2016 12:33pm GMT

27 Sep 2016 11:42am GMT

A day at DrupalCon with Corina

Corina Schmid Tue, 09/27/2016 - 12:21

27 Sep 2016 10:21am GMT