Giving Back to the Drupal Community with Recipes

One of the benefits of 2020 is attending conferences and Meetups from all over the country (or world for that matter) since they have all been remote. I have been able to join Drupal users group from Chicago and San Francisco for their get-togethers from my home office in Michigan.

In a circuitous way, I kept running into Bob Snodgrass, Fox Valley users group organizer. They are located outside of Chicago. Bob and Fox Valley have been working on compiling a collection of recipes, step-by-step instructions for common and/or desired functionality for Drupal.

A while ago, I was asked to create a video gallery for an existing D8 site. The client wanted to have a single page to collect all the videos from the media library in a list of some kind, allowing the user to choose which one to play.

I mentioned the gallery at the Meetup, and the interest and support of the other attendees were inspirational.

Nine months later and the client still has not approved the video gallery. My time has been paid for, but my creation is not out in the world. I am working to recreate the gallery in a generic Drupal 8 build with videos unrelated to the previous client. Update 1: client finally gave approval 10 months after the first development of the functionality. The Drupal version has been bumped up from version 8 to version 9 and one of the contributed modules is no longer viable. The video gallery was reworked on the Drupal 9 site and is now live.

A learning experience

This project afforded me opportunities to learn some new skills. I have been a long-time user of Lando (all the way back to Kalobox) but a new user of ddev. Although I have heard of composer for quite some time, I am mainly front-end, creating themes and doing the site build, and have usually relied on my back-end teammates to do the scaffolding. Now I have some new tools in my belt/box!

Update 2: The Video Gallery Demo is now up on Pantheon. I have become very proficient at both composer and ddev with Pantheon (through trial and error, multiple times). I kept documentation in Notion for the project and updated it with each iteration.

Things learned along the way

• Make sure that you have finished the Drupal install on your Pantheon environment before you clone it locally.
• When first in the project working directory, do the ddev auth pantheon ....
• After your ddev config pantheon, immediately add drush with ddev composer require drush/drush (this will force addev start` automatically).
• With ddev, you should NOT need to make a setting.local.php.
• Add modules with composer but enable with drush.
• drush dl-cycle-lib is great at making the library folders you need but does NOT pull down the jQuery library contents. Download the jQuery plugins/libraries from their repos, manually add them.

Releasing it in the Wild (in process)

Sharing this recipe with the rest of the Drupal community is a bit scary for me. I have been building Drupal sites for over 10 years but have let imposter syndrome get the better of me. This is also my first technical blog post. Hopefully, this will be the first step in boosting my confidence.

Next step is getting the Video Gallery Drupal recipe up on FoxValley.

I am hoping that this recipe may relieve the frustration of other developers trying to create similar functionality. It might even provide them a jumping-off point to create their own recipes. It is a rewarding way to give back to the community.

Thanks for the Inspiration

1. Bob Snodgrass and the Fox Valley Drupal Users Group
2. Virtual Coffee November challenge working together to hit 50,000 words. Based on NanWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Challenge.
3. Ali Spittel's talk at Southern Dev Fest, Nov. 7, 2020
4. Ali Spitte's talk to the Hashnode Bootcamp III, April 7, 2021