Cwgordon7's blog

It has recently come to my attention that I was the only one on drupal.org that had "awesomeness" as an interest. My complaints on irc sparked the discussion: what does the word "awesomeness" mean? Is it even a word? And why is Drupal pure awesomeness?

So I compiled a list of definitions of "Awesomeness" from the internet:

Only hours ago, after over three years of work on the SimpleTest module, Dries committed the SimpleTest module to core. This is an amazing achievement. Drupal is looking at getting 100% core test coverage, both unit and functional. A lot of work went into the SimpleTest module today before it was committed. We (the Drupal SimpleTest Sprinters) set up an SVN repository containing a version of Drupal with SimpleTest there as a module, and opened it up for all of us to commit. It was chaos (in a good way). Without the roadblock of patches, code was rapidly sucked into the SimpleTest module; finally Dries had to give us a SimpleTest "code freeze" so as to actually start to get stuff to work.

Current SimpleTest Status

SimpleTest is in core! What can be left to do? Actually, a lot, but first, let's go over what we've done today:

• Got SimpleTest into Core!
• Got all tests except for Trigger and Poll tests actually passing!
• Got PHPCoverage to generate a 500 MB XML file on Rok's laptop! (Though we have yet to find a script that can deal with all that data without crashing).
• Made SimpleTest's web interface pretty with the addition of icons and assertion groups!
• Got the code necessary for testing.drupal.org working!

And then, there are the things that are left to do:

Today we began the SimpleTest code sprint! This is an area of huge importance to Drupal, as one of our weaknesses has proven to be the number of testers we have, particularly how small that number is. Automated testing will provide an easy way to maintain the quality of core— each time a patch is created for core, it will be sent off to a testing server where the patch will be applied to a copy of the Drupal core and all the SimpleTests run on it. If there are failures, the patch would be marked as such and whoever submitted the patch would be forced to hang their head in shame.

What we accomplished today

Today, Dries Buytaert, Rok Žlender, Károly Négyesi, Jimmy Berry, Kevin Bridges, Douglas Hubler, Miglius Alaburda and I got together for 10 hours for the sole purpose of improving automated testing in core. It was great. We bounced ideas off one another, and came up with a great plan for unit testing with mock functions and classes without runkit. We made our test coverage tests work, although they are still running :). We gave a presentation to the people at Drupal Camp Paris on how to write basic functional tests for both core and contributed modules. We talked to Dries about the possibility of getting SimpleTest into core.

Thanks to the amazing Leslie Hawthorn and the awesome Chris DiBona, we can add an additional two sprinters to the list for SimpleTest Sprint, Paris! Both Charlie Gordon (me) and Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) are now going to be at the testing sprint! Let's all thank Google for this awesome act of kindness towards the Drupal community!

SimpleTest is critical to Drupal, not only for quality assurance, but also to postpone the code freeze so we can add more features to Drupal 7 and make it as awesome as possible.

As this beautiful graph clearly shows, after Drupal has made the switch to complete SimpleTest coverage for core, the quality of Drupal will skyrocket, as we will be able to ensure that each patch committed to core does not break any of the SimpleTests, therefore less bugs and more features! When we have complete core SimpleTest coverage for Drupal, we will be free to explore awesome new features instead of spending precious time on bug hunting and bug fixing.

Let's make that Drupal 7 release a killer! :)

For those of you who haven't read the drupal.org front page post yet, DROP is a new program that encourages and helps people get involved in the Drupal community! DROP is basically a continuation of GHOP, only extended so that everyone, not just 13-18 year old high school students, can participate.

Have you ever wanted to contribute to Drupal, but weren't sure where to begin? Developers, have you ever seen small tasks on drupal.org that you don't have time for but that are important nonetheless, and would be good for people just starting to learn Drupal? Then DROP is for you. DROP is an organization of small tasks from drupal.org, both documentation tasks and coding tasks—and everyone can participate in it, either by proposing DROP tasks, mentoring them, or doing them. No matter what your skill level and experience with Drupal is, you can find some way to benefit from this new program. Read on to learn more about this program, or click here to go to the DROP site's about page.

Over the past few months, the GHOP program has made innumerable contributions to the Drupal community. Now that GHOP is ending, many of these students are choosing to remain long-term contributors. This is awesome: it's exactly what the program was meant to achieve, getting high school students involved in open source communities. And what better way to get involved in Drupal than to go to Drupalcon?

Deeply inspired by chx's chipin for Dmitri, I have posted here the chipins' of two students requesting financial assistance to get to Drupalcon. Please, please, please seriously consider contributing to this cause. We want new contributors in the Drupal community? Well, here they are: but they need your help to fully join the community.

Today, the initial version of Flexifilter for Drupal 6.x was released. "What is this flexifilter?" you might ask. And the answer: Flexifilter is an awesome new module that's going to totally revolutionize the way filters are done in Drupal. It's going to become (almost) as important as CCK and Views for a site builder. Flexifilter was initially created by Corsix as a part of GHOP 2007-08.

What it is

Flexifilter allows you to define custom filters entirely through the user interface. You name a filter, you can create it. A filter to append a "back to top" link if the text is longer than 1000 characters? No problem. A filter to change links in the form of [[link|title]] into links in the form of <a href="link">title<a>? Downright easy. And, if you ever want to change the format from [[link|title]] to {{link:title}}, there will be no delving into php code necessary: just change your settings on the admin page.

Over the past two years, Drupal's wiki capabilities have expanded exponentially. Yet, still we get support requests on the forums, "How can I make a wiki with Drupal?" Well, here is a detailed plan that gives wiki functionality to Drupal. This tutorial assumes you're starting with an installed version of Drupal 5.x, and that you're familiar with installing modules.

Absolute Wiki Essentials:

1. Step 1: Allow for categorization of wiki pages.

   There is often this request: I want to be able to categorize my wiki pages into a hierarchy. Well, with Drupal core's book module, you can do just that! First, enable the book module. Then, go to the admin/content/types page to view your content types. Delete any content types you don't want. Then, rename the "Book page" content type to "Wiki page" or something similar. Also, in the "workflow" fieldset, make sure to check the "create new revision" checkbox. This will make it so that, by default, every edit of a page is done in a revision.

Drupal 6's updated theme() function creates considerable more support for templates. If you've even looked at a Drupal 5 theme's files or the Drupal 6 core, you've seen them. They're the little .tpl.php files.

What is a template, anyway?

A template is a file designed to be friendly to the typical administrator. There is not supposed to be any complex PHP code there, because that would scare off many a user. They're lightweight files used to generate the equivalent of what a theme_function does. Variables can be passed into the template for use through a nice php function, template_preprocess_template_name().

The Drupal simpletest module is awesome! I discovered it while I was looking for a new GHOP task, and I loved the idea of it immediately. So, I claimed the task, and I'm writing now to share what I learned with you.

What it is

The simpletest module extends the php simpletest framework. Basically, it allows users to run a series of automated tests on a Drupal install.

Why it's useful

Often, new code is entered into Drupal contributed modules, and even the Drupal core, without being thoroughly tested - or even tested at all, in some situations. With simpletest, tests become so easy (without having to manually try maybe hundreds of situations) that finding and fixing bugs becomes a breeze.