Kim Pepper

The time has come to close the book on our government Drupal distribution, aGov. We are no longer actively developing sites using aGov, and instead are focussing our efforts on the new GovCMS Drupal 8 distribution. Here’s a short history of aGov and how we got to this point.

I recently had the pleasure of presenting my session 'How Drupal Contribution leads to Success' at Drupal South Canberra 2018.

Drupal adoption is still growing, but can the contributors keep pace? In this session I looked at how organisations can really benefit from contributing to Drupal.

Update: Re-published for DrupalSouth 2018 edition

The PreviousNext team are sponsoring and helping to run the sprint day on Wednesday, December 5th 2018, and there are a few things you can do now to hit the ground running on the day.

Back in the Drupal 6 days, I built the BOM Weather Drupal module to pull down weather data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) site, and display it to users.

We recently had a requirement for this in a new Drupal 8 site, so decided to take a more modern approach.

All PreviousNext Drupal 8 projects are now managed using Composer. This is a powerful tool, and allows our projects to define both public and private modules or libraries, and their dependencies, and bring them all together.

However, a if you require public or private modules which are hosted on GitHub you may run into the API Rate Limits. In order to overcome this, it is recommended to add a GitHub personal access token to your composer configuration.

In this blog post, I'll show how you can do this in a secure and manageable way.

At DrupalSouth 2017, I presented a session on the new Workflows module, which just went stable in Drupal 8.4.0. Workflows was split out from content moderation as a separate module, and can be used independently to create custom workflows. In this presentation, I gave a demonstration of how to create a basic workflow for an issue tracker.

Over the years we’ve embraced the idea of DevOps within our organisation. That is, bringing the developers closer to operations, and visa versa, to be more collaborative, embrace our agile processes, and become more efficient. When we designed Skipper, our Kubernetes-based container hosting platform, this was the focus of our attention.

In Drupal 7 we used Node Hierarchy module to keep track of a hierarchy of pages. Node hierarchy ties directly to the menu system. When getting a list of all ancestors or descendents, it is a O(n) operation, and at least one site we use it on has a lot of nodes in the tree. Performance was terrible. Add to that it has no notion of revisions or forward revisions, so changing the parent and saving a draft can cause all sorts of issues with your menu. When the time came to update the site to Drupal 8, we took a different approach.

PreviousNext has worked closely with a large government agency on their public portal for the last few years. As one of the most visited Drupal sites in Australia with more than 7 million page views per month, the agency was seeking higher performance and cost efficiency from their Drupal hosting provider. 

The Drupal open source project only exists because of code contributions by tens of thousands of developers and Drupal focused companies around the world. In his recent post, project founder Dries Buytaert blogged that “The Drupal community has a shared responsibility to build Drupal and that those who get more from Drupal should consider giving more”.

Australia’s contribution to Drupal code is significantly underrepresented, with PreviousNext the only Australian company in the Top 100 contributors listed on Drupal.org’s global marketplace. DrupalSouth represents the best opportunity for a wider pool of Australian Drupal developers to change this status by participating in DrupalSouth's official Code Sprint, being held on Wednesday, 26th October.