Iztok

Drupal Drush + OSX MAMP

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:14:38 +0100

One of the things that gave me some headache is setting up Drush on Max OSX Mountain Lion 10.8 with the combination of MAMP.

On the Drush project page the installation looks fairly simple, but it wont work if you run your server on MAMP (which I recommend you do if you are not a super user).

If you try this two commands you should get the following responses:

$ pear
-bash: pear: command not found

$ which php
/usr/bin/php

We need to fix this by adding the right binaries to our path. The path is an environment variable that denotes which directories to look for commands in. The path can be modified by editing the “.profile” file under your home directory. I’ve used version 5.3.20 of PHP, but you can choose from whichever versions are available to you.

$ echo "export PATH=/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.20/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.profile

Now you can either restart your terminal session or run the following from your home directory to read in the new path variable.

$ cd
$ . ./.profile

Now lets test what we have done

$ which php
/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.20/bin/php

$ which pear
/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.20/bin/pear

$ which pecl
/Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.20/bin/pecl

If everything is ok you should be getting the results above.

You might have some permissions issues, so just run:

$ chmod +x /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3.20/bin/*

I hope this helps!

Drupal camp Alpe-Adria

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:30:00 +0100

Drupal Slovenia is organising first Drupal event. Not only that, its the first international event with all the sessions in English language!

We will host some great speakers from all over Europe. For keynote sessions we will have Jeffery from Acquia and Florian from Wunderkraut.

This week is the last week of early birds ticket sale, so hurry up and get your ticket!

Se you in Ljubljana on 13 and 14 April!

Deadlines are bullshit

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 20:33:00 +0200

Deadlines are bullshit in 80%.

I am about to sign a contract for a Web design/development projects which has a 60 days deadline to execute the project. For this type of projects it is a very tight deadline, but since we have the know-how for it, we agreed on the terms.

Looking at the contract I realized that it’s very much time-based, but not spec-based.

Clients take four months to choose a vendor and prepare the papers, but want us to finish the production in two. From the engineer point of view that is irrational use of time. Legal advisors are so proud of their penalties if we don’t finish the projects in time, but nothing about the quality of the product - it just has to work for 1 year. They don’t care about the user experience, the performance, nothing. Speaking honestly, we can provide bug-less system with a horrible user experience that would need a replacement right after release, and they would have nothing to protect them self against it!

Who gains anything if the projects is done in time based on specs defined before the actual process? How many times did you think about how would you have done something different, if you have had that deeper understanding like you have after the project. Probably always.

I am not saying deadlines are always a false concept, but in my experiences this couple of things work much better:

Defining phases of the projects and features that need to be implemented in those phases. Deadlines can be used here.
Having a open project where client always know where the project stands, rather then waiting for the last day to be disappointed by the end result.
Writing tech specs together with the development team so realistic features can be defined with reasonable time-scopes.
Not choosing the vendors by the price and time-scopes but by their attitude and passion to work.
Just having an open and transparent relationship on both side with the focus on making an awesome product.

I hope more and more projects will be handled by more agile methodologies so we can let engineers and designers do their jobs instead of letting legal advisers and marketing guys controlling the production.

Drupal-mania 2012

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 18:05:13 +0200

I’ve been really busy in the last few months with all Drupal events. I do want to point out some new people I meet on last events in Europe.

First was Drupal Roadshow Austria in Klagenfurt. I was invited there by Josef Dabernig to give a session about Aegir (same thing I did in Oslo and Berlin last year). Road show is a great project driven by unselfish individuals wanting to spread Drupal around Austria, great idea and great execution. Josef did a similar thing in Central America in 2008. He is also an awesome guy to talk to!

After Klagenfurt I attended Drupal Business days in Vienna. As it says in the name this one was less techy but still very geeky! There was also Linux week happening at the same time where Damjan (my biz partner at ETELJE) gave the Aegir sessions for Linux geeks. We meet bunch of interesting people there, and the most astonishing discovery was the fact that managers and sales guys share their business ideas and sales process to other people same as developers share their code, ergo open-business is posible!

Last event was just last week in Edinburgh, Scotland where there was a two day Drupal camp. Also great organized event from the Drupal community in Scotland. In terms of sessions it was not so revolutionary for me personal (after working 5 years in Drupal you get over beginners questions), but you can still get little bits of information that can help you out in the future.

So what is next for me? The last event in 2012 for me will be DrupalCon Munich. Even though I was not so pleased with Drupalcon in London I am going to visit this one because I know that many familiar faces will be there. I would also like to join to some in-depth discussions about Drupal 8 development, since there is still some bad taste of me not engaging in global open-source community enough.

btw: post some links to your website to Drupalcon Munich website to increase SEO power of this web site over the previous con’s sites!

Drupal Domain module: default path on specific paths

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:09:12 +0100

This is simple custom code to set outgoing links to point to default domain URL all the time:

OSX Slovenian spelling dictionary - spell checker

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:00:00 +0200

When writing emails and documents I used to using spellchecker, and OSX does not include Slovenian spelling directory so here is the package from Slovenian Apple community to extend you Mac computer with Slovenian language support.

New completed project. This time it’s not Drupal, good old...

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:05:05 +0200

New completed project. This time it’s not Drupal, good old plain HTML with a little help of PHP Ajax calls.

Link: Flow Tables

New layout designs for a new site we are working on. We are very...

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 06:05:05 +0200

New layout designs for a new site we are working on. We are very very busy last few weeks!

Video from Drupal Design Camp where I had a presentation about...

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 01:06:00 +0200

Video from Drupal Design Camp where I had a presentation about Drupal hosting system Aegir.

You can find my slides on slideshare: Face your fears: Drush and Aegir

I am also working on a free e-book chapter about Aegir. Stay tuned.

Dropbox Encore for Mac OSX

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:14:00 +0200

Dropbox Encore for Mac OSX:

After using Dropbox as replacement for USB keys I decided to use it for work as well. I wanted to separate personal and professional accounts so I was looking for a way to enable multiple accounts. One solution was to do it manually but Drupal Encore is way more easy!