Karl Kedrovsky

DrupalCorn Camp 2014

If you’ve never been to a Drupal camp you’re really missing out. Camps are kind of like conventions but they’re smaller and a whole lot easier to participate in. The talks are more like discussions than lectures, it’s easy for everyone to interact with anyone else, and it’s a great opportunity for anyone to give back to the community. I’ve been to DrupalCorn for the last two years and both times I’ve come away feeling like the experience was more valuable and rewarding than just about anything else I’ve done in the community that year.

DrupalCon Austin

DrupalCon Austin is over. This was the first time in a few years that I didn’t have to man a booth or go to meetings for the majority of my time. That gave me a lot more time to attend talks, BoFs, and just have conversations with lots of different Drupalistas.

Moving To Middleman

Over the last few years my long-neglected blog has been running on Drupal. That was mostly due to the fact that I use Drupal in my day job (and most side projects) and when I needed a way to stand up a simple site it was the path of least resistance. Other than that and the ability to easily enable comments (more on that later) there was no real reason why I needed a CMS, the site is pretty much just static content.

Clojure, Emacs, nREPL and Leiningen

UPDATE: - I had a couple of mistakes in the original post below and a thing or two has changed since I wrote it. I’ve updated the post to hopefully clear those things up.

I’ve just started learning Clojure and for whatever reason I’ve had a hard time finding the “right” way of just setting up an environment to play with the language and try things out. I think a lot of my problems stem from the fact that clojure is still very new and the speed at which things change is pretty high. Googling for solutions to my problem leads to all sorts of solutions but trying to figure out which approach is the latest/greatest/best is all but impossible. Below is the solution that I’ve found that works great for me (at least for now).

Drupal Development On A Mac With Homebrew

Hot on the heals of my efforts to set up a Linux VM for Drupal development (and a borked up Macports installation) I ran across this article describing how to set things up on a Mac for Drupal development. Since I had already gooned up my Macports installation I decided to give it a go. After removing Macports I just did the following.

Zsh and Solarized

For a while now I’ve been hearing that all the cool kids are using zsh and the solarized color scheme and I finally got a chance to try them out a couple of weeks ago.

Bulk Loading Content With The Drupal Migrate Module

For a lot of new site builds the folks creating or gathering the content need to do so before the system is ready for users to start creating the content directly on the site. One common way to do this is to create a document (e.g. Word doc, spreadsheet) to hold all of the content then have some poor slob copy and paste it into the site when it’s ready. As I was already looking for an excuse to work with the migrate module anyway I thought I’d use this scenario as an excuse to see how easy it is to bulk load content from a spreadsheet (csv file).

Sass, Compass and Drupal

Sass is, according to it’s website, “an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more”. It allows developers to better structure their CSS making easier to maintain. Compass is a framework that’s built on top of Sass that provides additional functionality. The Sass Drupal module makes it easy to integrate these two frameworks into your Drupal theme.

Syncing Databases and Files With Drush

One of the most common tasks I have to do when working on Drupal sites at work is setting up a local instance of a site on my laptop and then syncing the database and contents of the “files” directory from the development or stage environment to that local environment. In the past I’ve used a combination of ssh, mysql and rsync but lately I’ve been using drush to make it even easier.

Server Specific Drupal Settings

For a while I’ve been thinking about the best way to keep the database settings out of the settings.php file in my Drupal sites. While this isn’t a new problem (or solution) I wanted to make sure it would work on single site deployments, multi-site deployments and drush.