Talking Drupal #219 - This and That #2

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Stephen

This is talking Drupal, a weekly chat about web design and development from a group of guys with one thing in common. We love Drupal. This is Episode 219. This and that. The sequel. Hey, guys,

Nic

good afternoon.

Stephen

Have to edit out that little fumble in the title there. But we're calling this show this in that it's the second time we've just put a list of topics that we want to chat about. So chatting with me, Stephen Cross this week is John Picozzi from Oomph.

John

Good afternoon.

Stephen

Hello, how are you, john?

John

I am fabulous. I have recovered from my my illness and things are looking up.

Stephen

That's great. And Also joining us is Nick Laflin from enlightened development.

Nic

Good afternoon. It's a little bit earlier in the afternoon than usual recording an hour earlier, but

Stephen

not a day later.

Nic

day later, but I think this is actually our usual used to be our usual time for I think

Stephen

Until I started to started to travel. So your patios done?

Nic

Nope. 90 90% done, we get a putting up a son sale. And I think hopefully that arrived today or tomorrow.

Stephen

I want to note, Nic has documented his patio project in our weekly newsletter that comes out if you haven't subscribed to it. Just go to talking Drupal. com slash newsletter, you can sign up there, you get show notes. You get a reminder that the show came out and you get some extra content from us pretty regularly. Nick, one thing I noticed in that last post you made, it's not only the patio that changed significantly from the before and after images, your house has changed significantly as well. The before photo is like way before.

Nic

Know that before his last year.

Stephen

Oh, is it? So you've done a lot? You've done a lot of work. Yeah.

Nic

So yeah, so we had a those kind of throwaway line in the newsletter. But between October and January, we hired a contractor to put a small mudroom edition replace our deck. Right. And then once that was done, we found the decided to repaint the house. And then of course, I've been working on the patio for the last five weeks. Yeah. And so those three projects, you know, I'll combined you know, I kind of like forgot myself, like how much is changed. But

Stephen

I was looking at the pictures and going Hey, wait a second here. The house doesn't even look like the same house.

Nic

No, no, that before pictures last I think September, right? Maybe October.

Stephen

Right. So let's get on with our show. So the first thing I want to mention today is that we started if you haven't noticed, we've started putting transcripts into the show notes, the show notes that are on the website, not in the show notes that show up in the RSS feed for your podcast or in the newsletter, but the transcripts are on the website. So I think we've done three of them so far. We're using a tool called otter.ai is the website. We've tried to do this in the past, or I've tried to do it in the past, with some free tools out there. Like I think I tried it a couple of times using like the YouTube tool that creates transcriptions. And I tried a few other things, but they were really difficult to manage. And while we want to do transcriptions, it's we don't have the funding to pay someone to do them. So we were looking for some tools to help us and this thing is really worked out pretty well. The way it works is is you can take the audio when you're done and you upload it, you can also hook it into zoom, I believe. And it will take like if you record and zoom, it will take that audio directly. And then it uses this pretty smart technology that goes through. So like we had a show, not the last show, but the previous show, there was three of us and three guests, so six people. So the software is pretty smart. I think that's probably why it's a. ai say I'm guessing it figures out who's who in terms of voice, they can tell the difference between the voices. And then when once you assign a name, it will go through and assign the appropriate name to the rest of the voices. And if you've tagged the voice on past recordings, it will carry through to a new one. So like when I take the show today and upload it, it will recognize the three of us and put our names next to our voices. So it really works well. But like any transcription, it's not perfect, right. So the other nice thing about this tool is it gives you some pretty nice software to use in the browser or any devices that you have Android iOS, that you can sit and go to Edit mode, which is it will play the audio and you can take care of the text as you move along. So one thing I've been doing is re listening to the show and cleaning up as much as possible. I know I'm not even doing a great job of cleaning it up, but I'm trying to get it a little better. The thing that has trouble with the most is names. Like john Picozzi he still doesn't have that right yet. It hasn't noticed that I've edited it every time. So it's always john cozy. Well, john, the cozy. COZY or COZZY I'm hoping over time, it will just correct that on its own will will see me

John

Maybe we should leave it? I don't know.

Stephen

Yeah, it is so and the other thing it has trouble with is like when obviously when we talk over each other, but it kind of does a pretty good job at that. So it's a good addition to the show that comes on every week. I hope it will be useful for people who need it.

Nic

How about the dog barking does it? Does it call that out? Or?

Stephen

No. So that's interesting. It takes out any umms and ahhs , like I just did that this will not be in the recording, it pulls those kinds of things out. The interesting thing though, and I don't know if you guys have read the transcripts, you get to see your tendencies in terms of words that you use. So I tend to use the word so a lot, and I end up seeing it in the transcripts. So comma, you know,

Nic

text, that's interesting.

Stephen

Yeah. And you can see as people who this happens more with guests who aren't used to talking, they repeat themselves a lot, they'll say the same words over and over again, it's not so obvious when you listen to but when you're reading it, it's real obvious that they'll say the word like I just said, I just heard myself say that will be out. But the repeating of words to try to make a point or get a point across. And I'm not going to change. I don't edit that from the transcript because it is actually what was said. But when you read it, it's not as easy to understand as if you listening. But anyway, so that's something we've done to the show, it's a little bit of a tech thing. It works amazingly well if you download the so what does it cost. So you get 10 hours free a month, for 9,99 a month, you get 100 hours. And then after that I'm not sure what the price breakdown is. And it works really well. So you could like for any meetings that you have, you can just like stick your iPhone on a table and fire this thing off and it will start transcribing it. It works really.

Nic

Does this all happen on the website? Or is there an application you have to download?

Stephen

So there's an app that you download? on a device if you want it to work right on your phone? I believe it's doing the transcriptions up on the website. I don't think it's doing them locally. So I think it's recording the audio locally. And working like Siri or any of those tools probably has a little bit of little bit of work doing locally. But I think a lot of its connected to the internet. But it will transcribe like real time in the app as you're talking. And it seems to do a better job than Siri does.

Nic

Oh, that's pretty impressive.

Stephen

Not really, Siri. It's not that good,

Nic

I mean, I mean the actual feature. Not that it's better than Siri.

Stephen

So go check it out. Next thing I want to talk about is something something about the Boston Drupal meetup. John?

John

Yeah. So last night, I went up to the Boston, Drupal meetup. And they were doing something interesting. They do project nights, every, I think third meetup that they have. And basically what those are, you can bring a Drupal project that you need help with or a problem that you're having or, or even work on a project that you just don't have time to try out otherwise, and you can bring it there and you can work in teams work by yourself, you can do whatever you you need to do, and you can just work on a project. So last night, admittedly did not go as well as I had hoped. My my goal for last night was to get a demo sites have a Gatsby Drupal demo site setup. And Benji Fisher had built a Lando Gatsby Drupal environment, and it's up on get lab, the link will be in the show notes. So my goal was to use this get up and running and then try to try to play around with it bit get a better understanding of of how Gatsby and Drupal can kind of interact with one another. I ran into some issues, getting it set up. But luckily Benji was there last night, so I can ask Benji questions and try to get get out of the weeds. Ultimately, we I ended up running out of time, so I didn't have time to kind of finish it and get it get it going. But also, well,

Stephen

John were yours issues around just the Lando configuration for this?

John

No, because that's all included in the repo. My issues were around, getting it started. My Lando starts weren't starting cleanly. I was running into issues with various various parts not completing.

Nic

Yeah. So do you think that's the speed of your laptop? You think it's the version of Lando? No, there's some issues with lindo versions being different, the files need to be different.

John

Yeah, so not 100% sure, I had asked Benji, what version he was using, he was only he was using the RC but he was only a couple versions behind me and didn't seem to have a have an issue with it. So after talking to him a little bit more, I'm going to try it again over the weekend and see if I have better better results. Sounded like it might have been Docker, Docker restart might have been required. And and I actually ended up restarting my whole computer last night anyway. But yeah, so it's going to keep going to keep trying it out. See what see if there is an issue there. Or if I'm just having kind of like my my own local localized issues, but

Nic

I'm curious about the project itself. Imagine each person is working on their own type project, two people helping each other. I've not had a chance to make it to the project night.

John

Yes. Oh, there were a couple. There were variety of things that happened. So one thing was Benji actually posted a comment on the meetup earlier on saying that he was going to work on he wants to try to get a distribution, working for Cub Scout Girl Scout troops to be able to create websites quickly. So he put that in the meetup page. He commented on that. And he was a you know, he had one or two people, I think that were interested in kind of helping him out with that. So they were working on that. Mike miles, who runs the meetup was doing kind of like an intro to Drupal training or talk. He had a couple of people that were new to Drupal. And they all went into a conference room and they kind of went through the ins and outs of Drupal. He was showing them like Hey, how you use composer with Drupal and stuff like that. So pretty, pretty basic stuff, but very interesting. For those guys, I imagine because they're pretty new to Drupal. And then I was working on this Lando Gatsby thing. We had somebody else that was just working on stuff in the issue queue. So a lot of different things were happening a lot of different projects were going on. The other thing that I picked up from, from the meetup was Lando turbo mode, which is something that was released in a couple RCs ago. So it's a pretty pretty new newish feature. Again, we'll have a link to the GitHub, Lando issue that this relates to. But essentially, in your dot Lando file, you can put an exclude section in there with paths that you'd like to exclude. And these paths are typically paths that are, you know, file heavy, so like your vendors directory, or if you're using node, your node modules directory would be in there. And essentially what this is doing is this is telling Docker, not to sink these not to sink these items back and forth, which can actually slow down your machine. So I was talking to Nate Denzil has been on the show before, he was saying that he's actually seen a great speed improvement with cash clears inside of Lando. Using using this turbo mode, you can't see it, but I'm using air quotes that they released or they added to to lando. So I'm kind of Giving that a test to see how how well it works. So far, so good. Once you add the exclude, you will have to do a rebuild on your whatever probably you're doing. Nate even said that he had to do a restart of his computer completely, or at least a restarted Docker. So you may have experience may vary, I guess. But

Stephen

it sounds interesting. So another thing I want to mention is I'm playing with Tome, is that I'm not sure how you say T O M E, I guess that's tome, right? The tome Drupal module. JOHN, are you familiar with that?

John

I'm not No.

Stephen

It's a static site, generator module. So you basically take a Drupal site that you have, and you install this module. And then you use some, you can use the UI address commands to export the complete site out with HTML.

John

Interesting, so it's, yeah,, similar to Gadsby?

Stephen

So I haven't used Gatsby. So that's on my list of,

John

I guess, similar in the fact that it's generating a static site, not maybe not so much, maybe not so much in the fact that it's

Stephen

Yeah, Gatsby's building a react app. Right? That's what Gatsby is doing. It's really a react app.

John

This is using its using that to pull the data out of Drupal, right?

Stephen

This is going through your content and building all HTML for your site, fully functioning, except for the things that you wouldn't expect in a static site like search wouldn't work. Can't log into it. Can't think of one of the kinds of things, maybe some dynamic queries, although I've been playing with some of that stuff. And it's, it's a fascinating tool. One really, super interesting thing about it is, it's taking all of your content now, and putting it in config files. So as you add a node, it saves it in a config, you can actually take all of your configuration now when you get this module installed, and all your content and check it into GitHub. So every time you save a node, delete a node, update a node, you'll can look at your disk and see these, this data getting saved out as config. Right? It's fascinating. So this is what this is, like, when you go through the demo of it. One thing you can do is you can after you like build your site, you got it config done and, and you put some content in you export the HTML, once you check your site, and you can actually completely delete it from your website, from your delete the environment from your computer, then you can re add it, goto GitHub, check, do a GitHub clone. And then start up your site and do like a, from drush, a tome install, and it goes and takes and put your site builds it back together with all the config and all the data. Because everything was stored in GitHub. It's really interesting idea. So he's broken this module, this tome is really like a bunch of different modules, and he's built. So you can actually use pieces of this. If you just want to take your data and use it to import and export your data out of the site, you can use just that piece. You don't have to use it to do static HTML. It's really a fascinating project. I'm using it to build a new blog for somebody. And I have hooked it into netlify, it has a connection to that as well. So when I build my static site, I can then say deploy it to netlify it pushes it out there, and the site's updated. Pretty interesting stuff. So we're going to have the maintainer on the show in some time in August. Let me look here, his name is Samuel Martinson. And he's coming on at the end of August. So we can learn more about that module. pretty fascinating stuff.

John

That's really interesting. And the fact that there's a really low barrier to entry there, right. So like the big the big. wouldn't say hang up. But the big difference it sounds like with that, and Gatsby is the fact that you have to with Gatsby, you have to have a little bit of a little bit of js js coding knowledge. And you have to know that you need an endpoint in order to pull data from in order to to build the front ends.

Stephen

And you've got, you've got the full Drupal admin experience here. So like for this particular blog, I could just have the Drupal running on the content editors machine, or I could stick it up on Pantheon on a dev server, and not every I push the site to production, and then the production that the production website is just HTML, it's sitting somewhere, it could be a completely different place.

John

To be clear, it's also using the Drupal theme, right?

Stephen

Yeah, it's, it's you can't when you're looking at the site, at the end of the day, you can't tell the difference between it running in Drupal and running as HTML.

John

Okay, so like a really basic, super basic level, it's basically taking whatever the user output of a page would be, and basically building HTML files based on there. Exactly. And how does have you while you said you're building it, you're in the process. So we'll get up early, get an update, but have you done anything with like dynamic content?

Stephen

So give me an example. So I have I have, I have views that are driven by passing in parameters on the URL to for taxonomy. So if I have like a blog page, I can filter it by taxonomy type, because they got them on a determine like a block on the left hand side, you click on the taxonomy, and it calls the page in pulls up. It's just HTML at that point.

John

What do we those taxonomy zone?

Stephen

I'm sorry, go ahead. What

John

I was just gonna say what if those taxonomy weren't like in a block on the right hand side? What if they were in like a select list? Like so if they weren't? They weren't links that could be could be traversed?

Stephen

I know. I would. I don't know. I'd have to try that. So if it was an IT, I'll try that out. I'll put it in. And I'll put them in a drop down list and see if the tool smart enough to select each one of those in like a, like an exposed filter kind of scenario, right?

Nic

Yeah, exactly. You could probably do it with a sitemap or something, Yeah, it would just have those.

Stephen

Yeah, I haven't got that far yet. But I was I'm pleasantly supply. surprised by what I have. I love static websites. I mean, my current personal blog is using a tool called sculpin. That's a PHP twig. static site generator. So I just I write markdown. And then I just push a button to push a static HTML site up to a, you know, a Digital Ocean server. And I could see a large website even working like this, if it doesn't have dynamic stuff in it.

Nic

It's also probably good for archiving old sites.

Stephen

Yeah. Be archiving old sites. Yeah, I mean, think of all the issues you get rid of from a, from a production site scenario, if you just have static HTML.

John

I also kind of wonder a little bit and this probably be more of a question for our show with with the maintainer. But like, commerce, right, I'm working on a huge commerce project right now. Like, that's probably not going to work. Well, yeah. Now,

Stephen

right? Because you need, you need dynamic login. Yeah, build carts and all that kind of stuff. Now, it doesn't work for that. Right? There's a certain use cases for this kind of thing.

John

So that's kind of where you if you really wanted a static site, something or other, you would probably go back to go back to something like Gatsby. Maybe I'm even struggling. I personally even struggle with that to try to figure out where these tools really fit.

Nic

I mean, I I'm curious about I think I'm going to do some more serious investigation for this, because I imagine it makes HIPAA compliance a lot easier. In some respects, because you just have flat HTML. I mean, there's not really a whole lot. I mean, there's still security things to worry about. But there's not a whole lot that you can do with static HTML. No. And then it also

Stephen

really more worried about server lockdown. So someone can't get into the server, you get rid of sequel injection concerns, you getting rid of all that stuff.

Nic

Yeah. So even if you can, even if you have like, maybe three or four pages that forms on them or something and you don't staticly generate those. But everything else is like you're you're reducing the footprint and the speed of a static a demo site versus

Stephen

how much effort is how much effort is put in on the Drupal site and other dynamic tools to build caches, which is actually static HTML, right? With all these caching layers and stuff, it just delivering static content. And if that's your starting point, right, your costs for hosting is going to be significantly lower. Right, you don't need the horsepower. And you know, you throw a static site and put a simple CDN on the front of it. I mean, you've eliminated a lot of the headaches with serving up a website. Anyway, yeah, I think it's an interesting thing for the government to be looking at as well, for this kind of stuff. I mean, anyway, so we spent too much time on that. But that's a sort of a tip to something that's going to be coming up in the future. So when we hit that show, well, I'll have lots of questions for the guest on that day.

Nic

So I think my topic is next I, I have kind of a practical tip thing that I've been working on for a project that I think is kind of interesting. And I think I think John's, I think at oomph they do something similar for some things. But I have a client that has multiple websites, but they're looking to share a theme between the the three or four sites that they have. So they have some generic layouts and things that they want the same across every site. And then each site has, you know, some small tweaks to it like minor, you know, color changes or style changes, but in general, the three main sites right now have exactly the same theme. And so they don't want to duplicate effort. You know, if they need to fix spacing, or change a font or something, they didn't want to duplicate effort and have to, you know, replicate that across three different sites, three different themes. Now, with composer, it's actually pretty easy to just include other projects. So for this particular client, you know, I just set up a new repository for the theme. And we treat that as its own project. And now you can, you can include outside packages in composer just by adding a new stanza to the repositories array. And so in my case, that just, you know, added a package type, put a essentially put a link to the repository on GitHub. Let composer know that it's a Drupal theme. And now composer install, downloads the latest, I haven't configured just pulled out master because that's, you know, the current latest theme, but you can also version it. And because it's the Drupal theme, the installer paths puts it in the correct control space, in the in the document tree. And so whenever where we have a new update to the theme, we can just kick off a build for the three projects. And we'll pull down the latest theme code and compile it. And, you know, build it for the site. Interesting. So it's pretty, it's pretty handy. Yeah.

John

So recently, I actually installed this tool called ice stat menus. And it was kind of in response to get a better understanding of how my computer was using memory and how much available memory my computer had. In the past, I'd used other tools like memory clean and stuff like that. But somebody had recommended I stat menus to me. And so I downloaded it, they have a pretty cool free trial and start using it. And it provides you with a ton of information about your system, and what's going on what the you know what's taking up a bunch of your memory. But it doesn't just stop it memory, it does. network speed, it does. CPU usage, fan temperature, fan speeds, temperatures, all sorts of all sorts of cool stats about your about your system. It also give you battery stats, and you can kind of customize it add like customize your date and time on your on your toolbar. So all of this stuff, if you're on a if you're on a Mac, all this stuff is up in the up in the utility bar at the top of the page, you can kind of hover over certain things to see different different stats even has the weather in there. So if you're like looking for the easy weather widget, this kind of has it built in. And you know, I tried the free trial, and was so impressed whether they actually ended up buying it because it just provides a ton of pretty cool features also will give you if you have USB devices connected it'll show you the battery level for those USB devices. So it just puts a lot lot information right, right in your toolbar there. And when I was using

Stephen

a Mac more regularly, john, I I've used this thing for years paid for a while to it's super handy when you when I found myself trying to figure out issues that were going on with my machine. I do find a comical JOHN has a screenshot and our notes for us here. It is kind of comical that the outside temperature like like a weather bug is showing up in there.

John

I actually think it's super useful because sometimes I'm like, oh, what's the what's the humidity outside? And I'm like, Oh, hey, look, there it is. Okay, it's like 60% humidity. Great. So definitely going to want to turn on the air conditioners,

Stephen

or right next to your computer free space you have what's the temperature? What's the weather, I find it funny? It's funny. Everyone thinks that providing the weather is handy. It's everywhere. Everywhere you go, the weather's there. I mean, we live in a world at some point that everyone needs to have the weather on their website in the upper right corner, right?

John

It's because you're an Apple Watch user you have access to the weather anytime you want it right on your wrist. I do not have an Apple Watch. So I know you're not

Stephen

you're not wearing that one anymore how that you had.

John

Now Now I gave up on that quite a few quite a probably about a month and a half ago now.

Stephen

Alright, well, Nick, Nick's Internet has died for the second time today. So that's why he was a little silent earlier. So we're going to go move on to our last topic for today, john, unless you have anything else, I'm doing a presentation at Gov con called a switch to Linux you can to as John's laughing at that probably that title. And I did this experiment, as part of practice for this conference is if I could dig up a put together a Linux laptop that I could actually do Drupal work with for under $300. Like, buy something I first started by looking to see if I can buy something new, like go to a big box store, you know they have the two to $400 laptops, they're usually on sale at BestBuy kind of get one of those and like install Linux on it and like have it as a useful Drupal machine. Because I think a lot of us, me included in the past have you know, dropped 1500 to $2,500 on an apple computer to get our work done. And, and we know that macs are great machines, but they're not the best place to be doing Docker kind of work, which is what we're pretty much doing these days in Drupal. And so I reached out to a few chat groupthat im on that talk about Linuxy things and said, Hey, I'm thinking about what is a good two to $300 laptop, I could get out there and people back to me saying don't you spend your money on that crap, go out to eBay and buy a used like enterprise business class machine that's like somewhere between five and 10 years old, you'll get more power, and you'll spend about the same money and you'll have a better physical machine because the things that they sell today, a lot of people think that just junk, you know, the you know, everything on a single board, all that kind of stuff. So I did that I ended up buying a think pad, 420 from 2011, which has an i5 processor in it, eight gigs of memory. And I got it on eBay for 20. I think it was $40. At the end of the day, maybe it's $45 it didn't have an hard drive in it and didn't have a power cable. So I just ordered those two things online, I just ordered an SSD for like 30 bucks, and then order the power cable. And I loaded this experiment now was I was trying to get someone to $300. Now I was looking at being sub 100. So actually have put this laptop together with a Linux distribution on it. The total is under hundred dollars. And it's a completely workable computer. It's as fast for everyday kind of stuff as any of the other computers I have, including a Mac, where I see it not performing as well is if I'm the one piece of software on it that runs crappy on my Mac to is if I'm doing some Drupal VM work. That's already a hog that doesn't run super great on this machine. But it didn't run super great on my Mac either. So it's really an interesting experiment. So if you're going to be at Gov con, actually did this was that at one time experiment? No, I actually went to see if I could do it again. And I did. So I found another machine, same spec, putting it together at my presentation at Gov con, I'm going to sell it to anyone who wants it at my cost all configured with an SSD with the power cord for whatever I pay for, I think that was going to be about $92. So if you're interested in getting into Linux, I can get you set up with a computer that could do it for you. And if you if you go into our into our newsletter, I wrote about this in our last newsletter what I did. So if you sign up for the newsletter, you can also get access to the archives. So you could go see some more details there on this experiment.

John

I've so many so many questions about this right now. Especially the fact that you're presenting this at a government's focused all be at a Drupal government focused conference. But the other other thing that that's coming to mind is I'm going back to my HIPAA training, where it said not to pick up a flash drive you find a parking lot and put it in your computer. I think it probably also applies to not buying computers from guys at conferences trying to sell you on Linux. Yeah, I mean, I mean, knowing, knowing Steve, he's an honest guy. And I, you know, I'm sure the computer is is above board. It's just very going to be very interesting to see the guy that says, Yeah, I'll take that for 100 bucks.

Stephen

I mean, I, I mean, using that logic, I picked it up for I got another one for like $25 on eBay, like a shell computer. So I mean, who knows what's on that board? Right? I guess it's your point.

John

It's also interesting. Yeah, I mean, from that standpoint, like I don't I don't know a lot of people that are in high security jobs that would probably buy a computer off the internet and then retrofit them with Linux and do this. But I think those are the guys

Stephen

that actually actually do that pretty regularly.

Nic

Interesting, surprised?

John

I mean, it sounds it sounds pretty interesting. And oddly enough, I had this thought, like last week of like, Hey, you know, Apple's coming out with new MacBook Pro, and my computer could use more memory. And I was like, maybe I'll get my computer, my wife go out and buy a new one. And then I'm like, Well, what if I went and like, bought a Linux machine? And I was

Stephen

he's cracking?

John

I don't know about that.

Stephen

I'm gonna tell you what my goal at this presentation is to one give people the steps like, here's the things you need to look out for and the traps you could get. But also, I want to build a case for someone to seriously consider this. Because it is you pay such a premium today. Like,

John

I think we're speaking at the same time arn't we?

Stephen

I don't have no idea. This presentation. I think this one's on Wednesday, two in the afternoon, or no? No, I actually don't know what it is, john.

John

All right. Well, if we're not speaking at the same time, maybe I'll maybe I'll swing by it will be

Stephen

recorded. Yeah. So anyway, it's a fun project. But I mean, I'm in a world now that I've got, I can easily swap out a computer and keep working on $100 machine if I need to, which is a different world than just going out and buying a $2,000 Mac, to kind of do the same job. So I'm not anti Mac. I'm just looking for some more flexibility. And I actually think it's a way better environment for people like us to be in. So anyway, Nick, you are with us? Again, I think I'm I am back. He's back. We had written you off, you want to hit your last topic before we close the show.

Nic

Sure. Soon, my internet holds up for another 30 seconds, I guess. So the last thing, or possibly the first thing you're hearing today is another quick tip on Lando. I'm sure most people using lindo today kind of already know a little bit about this. But one of the nice things that you can do when you're defining a new command, for example, I do this with yarn is you can specify when that command is called what it really means. So for example, most of my projects, they use yarn to compile the theme, or compile the SAS and you minify the JavaScript to do whatever you need to do. And so when I add the yarn standard to the tooling, I say, I put a command for yarn to change the working directory to whatever the theme directory is. So I don't have to either make sure I'm in the theme directory, I can just call Linda yarn to command it will make sure the command runs from the theme directory. So that takes care of a lot of stuff. The second thing that I do is I build out depending on the project, bunch of custom tooling stanzas, but one of the nice things you can do is you can add a post, whatever the command is, event, and then you can chain together a bunch of commands. So for example, I have a project where I have to very often completely refresh the theme. And so I have a theme reset command for Lando. So just called Lindell theme reset. And, you know, the command itself just does an echo saying, hey, redoing the theme, but then there's a post event. And what that does is it doesn't in the app server doesn't rm rf deletes the theme folder. Then it runs a composer install to pull down the new theme that runs the yarn commands that need to run in order to build it. And then it clears cache. And so rather than having to run all those commands, man, and like just run Lando theme reset. And within 30 seconds, 45 seconds, have a brand new compound theme with the cash cleared and Drupal. Nice.

Stephen

The tooling section of Lando, you could spend time in it and really automate a lot of stuff. And I was recently putting together an environment, I start to head down that path. Because I'm working with a dev team that, you know, I want to try to make things as easy as possible, then they start to realize if I put too much tooling in there, people aren't even going to understand what's running and what's happening. I think that's dangerous is sort of a balance. You gotta strike there, right?

Nic

Yeah, I mean, I personally, I feel like the that's why I use the events rather than just the commands directly. And I feel like the tooling is actually fairly well self documenting for a developer, Because he's a command. Yeah, exactly. These are commands that they'd have to run anyway. Like, they would have to run composer install, they'd have to run to rush, you know, clear cache cr or whatever. And so it's self documenting to show that they can see kind of how they're used in conjunction with each other. And then they can they need to just, they can run into individual command. The other thing that's really nice about it is your for the somewhat novice dev or somebody who's not really a developer, but still needs access to a local environment, you can get back to the point where you just kind of have like dumb commands that that that run so you say to a designer or something that needs to be able to see something locally like all you do is your lender start and then you run lindo re install, and then that will run 45 commands that get some, you know, pulls down the database and inserts the new one and does you know, does wherever they need so they have a new work environment and then you can say for example, you make the changes here in the theme. So So instead of them having to know 1520 commands to get up and running from scratch, there's just one or two for them, and they can just ignore that's just in the readme or something you know they don't have to know what it's doing it just does it

Stephen

so you wouldn't you wouldn't create a Lando command that would be DC for drush Clear All right, you still make someone do interesting car.

Nic

Know what so what I did actually I kind of did that. Okay, but I'm on Linux so well macs also have this but there's a bash RC file. So what I did is I created aliases for a bunch of the when I got sick of tired and tired of typing Lando, drug CR. So I just created aliases like l see I am address them. You know, LCR runs lindo drush cr Yeah. And so that allows me to just shortcut those commands. But that's not something that's a little thing. That's just a Linux that's just a Unix

Stephen

Anything else anyone wants to bring up?

John

This just in, if you use them custom permissions module, you've got a module update.

Stephen

Oh, itis Wednesday. That's what we miss about not recording on Wednesday anymore. We announced the security updates as they come out.

Nic

I feel like security updates have been slowing down recently.

Stephen

Summertime.

Nic

Yeah. Well, I mean, just in general, I wonder if it's

John

security updates based on season?

Nic

No, I think it's actually two things. And I know we could have stopped in a moment. But I think one is Drupal seven is extremely stable right now. And changes aren't happening. So you know, it's not as there's not as much new stuff there. And the second thing is the security policy only looks at fully released, Drupal eight modules. And they're just 99% of them I feel like are in offer dev or something. So they just don't get reviewed,

John

I'm waiting for Nick to start the initiative to like, hold maintainers to a standard at which they have to release they're Drupal module.

Stephen

I like some years ago, he I think years ago, he he got serious for a moment, it was gonna attempt to do that.

Nic

Yeah, it didn't get a lot of traction.

John

Then he bought a house and had to work on a patio and dig stomps out. And

Nic

that's part of it. I think, also maybe changing the security policy. I mean, I'm not one I'm not on the security team. So I'm not one to really say this. But I wonder if it's worthwhile saying like, if something has been released for a certain amount of time, it should be looked at at least cursorly. Or if it gets a certain number of installs, it should be looked at whether or not it's a full release or not, because it I feel like there's a lot of modules now they get used by a lot of websites that just never get looked at because they're just in dev or alpha, but they're the only module out there for it. And there's 100,000 people using it maybe or 100,000 sites

Stephen

Well, I wonder in listening to the show that you guys recorded with Jen from backstop last week, which was really good episode. I get the willies a little bit when you were talking about the the point of Drupal seven end of life and sort of now if I'm a backdrop user, I am now not relying on the full security team over Drupal to help me out it's kind of getting pared down to now just the people over at backdrop their security team. so I did put in our agenda in September to see if we could get someone get a show on the security team so we could learn more about who they are what they do and and get some insight from them

Nic

it'll would be fascinating thats a good direction

Stephen

All right, well, okay guys, john picozzi. Where can people find you online?

John

You can find me online pretty much everywhere at johnpicozzi you can find me in a couple of weeks at Drupal gov con down in Bethesda Maryland. And it is it is coming up quick and you can find out about Oomph and oomphinc.com

Nic

you can reach me pretty much everywhere online at nicxvan

Stephen

well based on today's internet access I'm not sure anyone can reach you online

John

ah

Nic

that hurts

John

Oh, as a as a side note, I got I just got a email from Cox a couple of weeks ago saying that they've actually increased my speed of internet which was a pleasant surprise, for free

Nic

Yeah, that's the that's the opposite of charter where you find out two years after the fact that the increase the speed and that you just had to come and request the speed and then they will bump you up

John

reality is actually it was only they only increased download they do not increase upload.

Stephen

so I'm just Cross you can reach me online at Stephen Cross on Twitter with a pH and you can reach us at talking Drupal at show at talking drupal.com and you can tweet us at talking Drupal. And that will be this week show. Thanks, guys.

Nic

Thanks for next week.

John

Have a good one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai