Talking Drupal #464 - Drupal Content Production

August 26, 2024

Today we are talking about Producing content with Drupal, How Drupal can help content producers, and ways it could be better with guest Jerry Ta. We’ll also cover Stage File Proxy as our module of the week.

Listen:

direct Link

Topics

  • Brief overview of Urban Institute using Drupal
  • What are the day to day responsibilities of a content producer
  • Layout Builder or Paragraphs
    • What is your opinion
  • You've been in content production for almost 2 decades, what was your first website editing tool.
  • How long have you been using Drupal
  • What is your number one wish the Drupal community would solve
  • Drupalcon
    • What value do you look for for a content producer
  • What is the hardest part of using Drupal
  • Starshot reaction
  • Predictions for Drupal in 5 years for content producers

Resources

Module of the Week

Stage File Proxy
  • Brief description:
    • Have you ever wanted to work on code or configuration changes to your Drupal site in a non-production environment, without having to copy over all the images and other content files? There’s a module for that.
  • Module name/project name:
  • Brief history
    • How old: created in Jan 2011 by netaustin, by recent releases are by Stephen Mustgrave, who listeners will probably recognize from the Needs Review initiative, among his many other Drupal contributions
    • Versions available: 7.x-1.10, 3.0.0-alpha2, and 3.1.0, the last of which works with Drupal 10.3 and 11
  • Maintainership
    • Actively maintained
    • Security coverage
    • Test coverage
    • Documentation - not a lot, but it has been the subject of numerous blog posts over the years
    • Number of open issues: 15 open issues, 2 of which are bugs against the current branch
  • Usage stats:
    • 16,710 sites
  • Module features and usage
    • Once you have Stage File Proxy site up on your non-production site, when the environment gets a request for a content file it doesn’t have like an image, it will query the production site to create a local copy
    • It also has a mode where those requests are served 301 redirects to their location on the production server, so no files are ever copied
    • Once you have the module installed, you can set the origin website URL using the admin UI, using a drush variable-set command, or you can add a line to your settings.php file.
    • Also, if you have simple HTTP authentication set up on the site you want to pull from (for example using the Shield module), you can add URL-encoded versions of the username and password to the origin URL, and the module will still be able to copy down the files.
    • This module was previously covered in this podcast way back in episode #33, but I thought it was worth bring back because it is so useful for working on site locally or across non-production environments
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