I upgraded my site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 this week (yes, that's why it's running on Bartik - a PatternLab developed theme will be installed in time).

This morning I enabled the Metagtag module and set some defaults for page title, description, image, etc. The help notes on the image metatag field says "An image associated with this page, for use as a thumbnail in social networks and other services. This will be able to extract the URL from an image field." This is true, except in my case, all the image fields on the site use the Media Entity module, so they are entity reference fields rather than image fields.

When I put in a token of [node:field_main_image], the result in the outputted metatags was:

<meta property="og:image:url" content="Mark Conroy | DrupalCon Dublin 2017" />

In that case, "Mark Conroy | DrupalCon Dublin 2017" is the name of the referenced media. I needed to output the image field of the referenced media.

After a little trial and error, I came up with this:

[node:field_main_image:entity:field_m_image_image]

which outputs:

<meta property="og:image:secure_url" content="https://mark.ie/sites/default/files/media/images/2017-10/mark_presenting_1.jpg" />

In this case, "field_main_image" is the name of the image field on my content type, and "field_m_image_image" is the name of the image field on my image media bundle.

If you wish to output a specific image style, you can append :default:url to the token like so:

[node:field_main_image:entity:field_m_image_image:default:url]

or

[node:field_main_image:entity:field_m_image_image:large:url]

To use the image media item's alt tag for your Twitter alt tag, you can do this:
 

[node:field_main_image:entity:field_m_image_image:alt]

I hope that helps!

This year's Drupal Camp Dublin has a great line up of speakers from Ireland and abroad, covering such topics as:

• Building multi-lingual, multi-region websites (Stella Power)
• Working as a developer with attention-deficit disorder - add (Levi Govaerts)
• Planning for disruptions (Jochen Lillich)
• Migrating from Drupal 4 to 5 to 6 to 7 to 8 (Alan Burke)
• Automating deployments (Luis Rodriguez)
• Working webform and commerce and paragraphs and display suites and more (Chandeep Khosa)
• Live debugging a site that's giving issues (Anthony Lindsay)
• Stop estimating, start forecasting (Mike King)
• Deploy with Fabric, and test driven development (Oliver Davies)
• Design in the Browser (yours truly, me, Mark Conroy)
• Teaching web development at third level (Ruairi O'Reilly)
• The QA process (Daniel Shaw)
• Getting started with Docker (Ed Crompton)
• The new theme coming to Drupal core (Mark Conroy)

And then there's some socials, and our Drupal Ireland AGM, and at least one other talk not announced yet, and ... you get the idea.

The full schedule is available on our website. There are some tickets left (only €20), get them before they are all gone.

At this year's DrupalCon in Vienna, the Drupal Association will only be providing 'free' t-shirts to people who purchase an early bird ticket (not exactly 'free' when the ticket costs almost €500) - a position I don't agree with (if you can't afford to give a t-shirt in a welcome pack when charging €500 a ticket, there seems to be something drastically wrong with your business model).

After a tweet last night of me sporting a Druid.fi t-shirt that I received at DrupalCon Dublin, I got thinking: how can we do something to make sure everyone gets a free t-shirt? Then I thought, 'why not provide our own'? Heaven knows we all have loads of them.

Today I'm sporting some haute couture from @druidfi pic.twitter.com/hZm4YYDZ4g

— Mark Conroy (@markconroy) July 28, 2017

So, here's the plan. Everyone brings a Drupal-related t-shirt to DrupalCon. It could be one from your company, one from a previous DrupalCon (I've never been to an non-European one so would like one from somewhere else in the world), one from your local DrupalCamp, a DevDays t-shirt, etc. Then, after the Driesnote, while we are all getting into position for the group photo you give that t-shirt to someone of a similar size to you, and they give you they one they brought (if they brought one). Feel free to bring more than one t-shirt to cover those who don't bring any (it might be some people's first Drupal event).

Oh, and by the way, my size is 'medium'!

There was a MASSIVE deal when 7.32 came out as it patched a very serious security hole. If you're site wasn't patched within 7 hours, you could consider it hacked. We had all ours patched within 45 minutes.

Not keeping your website's security update patches applied will get you in trouble.

They still haven't updated their website, so if you wanted to hack them again, you could simply use one of these scripts: https://github.com/…/drupalg…/blob/master/attack/exploit.php

(P.S. I am NOT suggesting anyone should hack them - just illustrating how easy it is - be careful when you trust your sensitive information to others.)

If you're anyway interested, the theme to power their portal cost a whopping $48.

And it seems their server is running on PHP 5.2, which reached end of life over 5 years ago.

Each show will be a friendly conversation (lasting approximately 30 minutes) giving participants a chance to share their thoughts on a recent project, how it was built, what others can learn from it, and contributions made to the Drupal community from the project.

The site is complete in terms of functionality, some more theming is needed, and some more interviews need to be added to the backlog. I'm hoping to launch within about 6 weeks.

In the mean time, join the mailing list for updates and/or suggest a website for the podcast, or chat with me at DrupalCon Barcelona about participating in a show.

Thanks, and keep Drupalling!

(Oh, and the website is here: http://dscpc.mark.ie)

For example, you are setting some permissions for a certain role, you run the update but then realise there was another permission you should have enabled. Instead of adding another update hook, you can revert the update you just ran, amend your update hook, and then re-run the update.

Note*: this is only for reversible changes - like adding/removing permisisons; it will fail if the update had created a new field for example.

It's as simple as this SQL query:
update system set schema_version = XXXX-1 where name = 'module_name';

This means, you are telling your database to update the table 'system' using scheme_version 'XXXX-1' (this will be something like 7001 or 7137 or whatever N equals in your hook_update_N() function minus 1, so if the update was hook_update_7138 you would use 7137 where XXXX-1 is), and apply this update to 'machine name of the module'.

Note*: Do not try this unless you know what you are doing. Make sure you have a backup of your database in case things go wrong - of course you do, don't you?

*Note - notes were added from items left in the comments, to bring them to the body.

I try to live my life along the lines of open source philosophy. Actually, I try to live my life following the tenets of anarchism - no hierarchies, a system of relations towards others built on trust, friendship, helping each other, solidarity, and distributed leadership (if leadership is the right word here).

When I came upon open source software (specifically Drupal), I quickly realised that anarchism and open source software have so much in common. Drupal is distributed, it is without formal leaders (except Dries as project lead - I know, this is a very simplistic reading of Drupal's set up). Developers work in solidarity/cooperation with each other, sharing code and knowledge to build the best product we can. We are friends, we trust each other.

It was inevitable, then, that I would think an organisation such as CoderDojo was such a good idea. Many, many groups around the world. Everyone helping each other to learn. All sharing knowledge. However, living in a small town in rural Ireland, I wasn't sure it would work here - we don't have coders, we don't have a meeting room, we don't ... Hang on. Let's not be negative, let's give it a try.

So tonight, we have our inaugural meeting of Portumna CoderDojo in the local adult education centre. With use of the computer room. And me as mentor. And some more parents as supervisors. And about 20 kids ready to start coding.

This looks workable. And exciting. Wish us luck.

When site building in Drupal, I am constantly using the drush si (site install) command to rebuild the site and check that my new feature is working correctly. Whilst this is a great way to get the site re-installed in super-quick time, it has a built in security feature of creating a user called admin (fine by me) and a new password for this user (which I then change to something simple like "admin" - just for development purposes). This is quite simple:

drush user-password admin --password="admin"

When I'm given a new project to work on, the first thing I do with my local instance is set the admin password to "admin".

To speed things up, I decided to write a drush alias to make these two use-cases easier to manage (yes, I know, first world problems!). And then I thought, why not share this and some of my other aliases. So, here goes (with comments):

alias dr='drush' // general alias for drush
alias drcc='drush cc all' // clear all the caches
alias drup='drush up' // update core and contrib modules
alias drupdb='drush updb' // run update.php
alias dren='drush en' // enable a module/theme
alias drdis='drush dis' // disable a module/theme
alias drfl='drush fl' // list all features on the site
alias drflo='drush fl | grep Overridden' // list all overridden features
alias drfu='drush -y features-update' // update a feature - you must put the feature's name after this
alias drfua='drush -y features-update all' // update all feature
alias drfr='drush -y features-revert' // revert a feature - you must put the feature's name after this
alias drfra='drush -y features-revert all' // revert all features
alias drpad='drush user-password admin --password="admin"' // change password for user admin to admin

Note: to get these working, I put them in my bash_profile file. Every time I add a new one, I run source ~/.bash_profile to reload the file and make the alias available to drush.

What aliases do you use?

This will create an "Image Gallery" content type, with images within each gallery re-orderable by 'drag and drop'. Here we go.

You will need:

• Drupal 7
• Multi-upload File Field Widget (to allow your file fields to upload multiple files in one batch)
• Multi-upload Image Field Widget (to allow the above to upload multiple images in one batch)
• Colorbox
• Some rudimentary CSS

Technique

• First off, enable the modules listed above.
• Then we need to create a content type. In this case, we'll call it "Image Gallery".
• Next, we need to create an image field inside this content type.
  • Choose "Image" as the field type and "Multiupload" as the widget type
  • Set the number of allowed values for this field to "Unlimited".
• Create some image presets, such as:
  • Gallery Thumbnail (150px x 150px) - used on the gallery page to list the images in that gallery.
  • Gallery Full Size (1000px wide) - used in an overlay when Gallery Thumbnail images are clicked on.
• Go to your "Manage Display" page for this content type and for "Full Content" set the following displays for the image field
  • Label = Hidden
  • Image = Colorbox
    • On the colorbox settings, set "Content Image Style" as "Gallery Thumbnail" and "Colorbox Image Style" as the "Gallery Full Size"
    • There are some other options here as well. Feel free to experiment.
    • Click "Update".
  • Click "Save".

Now you are ready to create an image gallery. You may need some CSS to float the images left/right and set some margins/padding.

You can then use Views to list the galleries and link each item in the list to its corresponding gallery.

(Note: a version of this is available on Drupal.org.)

Creating your own Drupal installation profile is a great way to save time when building a new website if you have many features that you use again and again on projects, such as news content type, image galleries, rotating slider. It's a great way to store your configuration in code and build and rebuild your site while in development. It's also best practice if you want to share code and rebuilds between developers working on large projects.

So, how do ywou make an installation profile, the easy way? The easiest way to create an installation profile is to just copy one that comes with Drupal core and modify it. To do this;

• Open up your profiles folder, find the folder called "standard" and copy it, then rename it to whatever you want. I call mine "adfl" as I do work as a freelancer under the name "A Design for Life".
• Next, rename each file in your new folder from standard.profile to adfl.profile, standard.install to adfl.install, standard.info to adfl.info.
• In the .info file, edit the description to something more meaningful for your installation profile.
• Finally, open each file and replace the word "standard" in the code with the word "adfl".

You now have a working installation profile called adfl, but it does the exact same as the standard installation profile. Let's customise it.

In the .info file, you'll see a number of modules already installed, like so:

dependencies[] = block
dependencies[] = color
dependencies[] = comment
dependencies[] = contextual
dependencies[] = dashboard
dependencies[] = help
dependencies[] = image
dependencies[] = list
dependencies[] = menu
dependencies[] = number
dependencies[] = options
dependencies[] = path
dependencies[] = taxonomy
dependencies[] = dblog
dependencies[] = search
dependencies[] = shortcut
dependencies[] = toolbar
dependencies[] = overlay
dependencies[] = field_ui
dependencies[] = file
dependencies[] = rdf

We can turn these off by deleting some, like so (or simply placing a semi-colon before them to comment them out):

dependencies[] = block
dependencies[] = comment
dependencies[] = contextual
dependencies[] = image
dependencies[] = list
dependencies[] = menu
dependencies[] = number
dependencies[] = options
dependencies[] = path
dependencies[] = taxonomy
dependencies[] = dblog
dependencies[] = search
dependencies[] = field_ui
dependencies[] = file
; this is commented out dependencies[] = overlay
dependencies[] = rdf

Now, if you reinstall your website, you'll see that we only have the above modules installed. We can now add in some modules that we use on every website. Place these modules in profiles/adfl/modules/contrib. We add them like so:

dependencies[] = admin_menu dependencies[] = ctools dependencies[] = features dependencies[] = views

Keep adding whatever modules you need. Now, when you resinstall your site drush si adfl, you'll see these modules also installed. To add custom functionality, you create features, and then add those features to your install profile, like so:

dependencies[] = adfl_blog dependencies[] = adfl_views_blog dependencies[] = adfl_gallery dependencies[] = adfl_views_gallery

A new site install will have these features enabled as well. A site install gives some simple errors at the moment: since I don't have dashboard enabled, the blocks placed in the dashboard can't be placed. Opening the .install file, we can find where this is and delete it:

array( 'module' => 'search', 'delta' => 'form', 'theme' => $default_theme, 'status' => 1, 'weight' => -1, 'region' => 'sidebar_first', 'pages' => '', 'cache' => -1, ), array( 'module' => 'node', 'delta' => 'recent', 'theme' => $admin_theme, 'status' => 1, 'weight' => 10, 'region' => 'dashboard_main', 'pages' => '', 'cache' => -1, ), array( 'module' => 'user', 'delta' => 'login', 'theme' => $default_theme, 'status' => 1, 'weight' => 0, 'region' => 'sidebar_first', 'pages' => '', 'cache' => -1, ),

In the above case, we need to delete the array

array( 'module' => 'node', 'delta' => 'recent', 'theme' => $admin_theme, 'status' => 1, 'weight' => 10, 'region' => 'dashboard_main', 'pages' => '', 'cache' => -1, ),

Then, just keep building up your profile with features, theme, variable settings, etc. There you go, a custom installation profile, the easy way. (Might be better to start with minimal as your base, I'm only using standard for illustration.)