Dealing with Drupal - short term question and long term question
October 24, 2016 7:58 AM Subscribe
As part of my post doc work, I'm helping to finish up a Drupal site that has been built by a few different grad students and post docs. They're gone, there's no documentation, and I need to finish up some parts and the faculty supervising me really haven't had any hand in the details. Drupal is sort of wildly-overfeatured for the simplicity of our site, but that ship has sailed. I have a small amount of CMS experience (older Drupal version and Wordpress) but I'm having trouble with a couple of things.
1. Relevant details - we're running Drupal 8.0.5 (I know there's an update but not sure if I can get the powers to install it). Bootstrap and Bartik 8.01 are the themes.
2. Short term question - I need our home page slideshow images to be clickable links to resources on our site. There seem to be dozens of ways to handle this, but between the different modules for different versions of Drupal and the redundancies and inconsistent naming of elements (views/displays/content types) on our site because of multiple people working on it, nothing has worked so far.
3. Longer term question - I would love a recommendation for a good QA site for someone at my level. I can hack my way through some programming, but I don't want to get too much into the weeds. For what I need to do - I don't think that's necessary anyway. I'm struggling since many documentation forums have been around for so long, it's difficult to get a search result relevant to the current versions of things.
I can give more details if needed - thanks for any help!
1. Relevant details - we're running Drupal 8.0.5 (I know there's an update but not sure if I can get the powers to install it). Bootstrap and Bartik 8.01 are the themes.
2. Short term question - I need our home page slideshow images to be clickable links to resources on our site. There seem to be dozens of ways to handle this, but between the different modules for different versions of Drupal and the redundancies and inconsistent naming of elements (views/displays/content types) on our site because of multiple people working on it, nothing has worked so far.
3. Longer term question - I would love a recommendation for a good QA site for someone at my level. I can hack my way through some programming, but I don't want to get too much into the weeds. For what I need to do - I don't think that's necessary anyway. I'm struggling since many documentation forums have been around for so long, it's difficult to get a search result relevant to the current versions of things.
I can give more details if needed - thanks for any help!
I manage a web shop. We are not a drupal shop.
Sad to say, you may be well advised to start by going top-to-bottom on modules and/or take a "start-all-over" approach. It's the rule, rather than the exception, that when a floating team of moderately-to-not-at-all experienced hands start adding modules, that you get a jigsaw puzzle and conflicting changes happening and so many ways to perform a task that there's no way to get it done or to know what combination of Shazam! and Open Sesame! will work in any given case.
I'd audit all modules, disable everything you can (be aware that in some platforms disabling isn't enough; the database changes and dependencies stick even though things are disabled), and try to pare the thing down to the essentials as a first step.
Is there any way to stand up a copy of this site so you can muck around with it in a dev environment? Might really save on the blood pressure.
posted by randomkeystrike at 9:08 AM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]
Sad to say, you may be well advised to start by going top-to-bottom on modules and/or take a "start-all-over" approach. It's the rule, rather than the exception, that when a floating team of moderately-to-not-at-all experienced hands start adding modules, that you get a jigsaw puzzle and conflicting changes happening and so many ways to perform a task that there's no way to get it done or to know what combination of Shazam! and Open Sesame! will work in any given case.
I'd audit all modules, disable everything you can (be aware that in some platforms disabling isn't enough; the database changes and dependencies stick even though things are disabled), and try to pare the thing down to the essentials as a first step.
Is there any way to stand up a copy of this site so you can muck around with it in a dev environment? Might really save on the blood pressure.
posted by randomkeystrike at 9:08 AM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]
1. Don't update Drupal unless you get a handle on what's going on. I can't remember the number of times an update would casually break something and it would take all of my resources debugging things.
2. Don't start all over, unless you want to spend 10~100x more time then desired on this project.
3. Do the slideshow images already exist? Adding URLs to each image should be relatively easy but it could be done a few ways.
For example: each existing image in the slideshow might be a piece of content, and the slideshow is iterating over the many different contents. Adding a URL would require adding a url to each content type and then getting the slideshow to incorporate that URL into the html. Alternately, the slideshow might be iterating over many images that are attached to one piece of content.
The best way to find out is to go into the admin menu and see which module is responsible for the slideshow. For example, it could be 'Views Slideshow'. Googling from there should be pretty easy; often the best help will be in the Issue Tracker on the module page on the Drupal website. (For example, the search box on the right-hand side of this page.)
posted by suedehead at 9:27 AM on October 24, 2016
2. Don't start all over, unless you want to spend 10~100x more time then desired on this project.
3. Do the slideshow images already exist? Adding URLs to each image should be relatively easy but it could be done a few ways.
For example: each existing image in the slideshow might be a piece of content, and the slideshow is iterating over the many different contents. Adding a URL would require adding a url to each content type and then getting the slideshow to incorporate that URL into the html. Alternately, the slideshow might be iterating over many images that are attached to one piece of content.
The best way to find out is to go into the admin menu and see which module is responsible for the slideshow. For example, it could be 'Views Slideshow'. Googling from there should be pretty easy; often the best help will be in the Issue Tracker on the module page on the Drupal website. (For example, the search box on the right-hand side of this page.)
posted by suedehead at 9:27 AM on October 24, 2016
I'm not sure how much help I can give you, but I'll give it a shot. Can you run drush? If so, can we get the output of this command? Just throw it in a pastebin and link it here.
drush pm-list --type=Module --status=enabled
Next, is the site accessible on the web? If so, can we get a URL to the page with the slideshow? If not, can you grab the code for the page and again throw it up in a pastebin?
(I'm trying to figure out what module is serving up the slideshow. Once we've got that, we might be able to give you instructions on configuring it)
posted by Leon at 9:48 AM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]
drush pm-list --type=Module --status=enabled
Next, is the site accessible on the web? If so, can we get a URL to the page with the slideshow? If not, can you grab the code for the page and again throw it up in a pastebin?
(I'm trying to figure out what module is serving up the slideshow. Once we've got that, we might be able to give you instructions on configuring it)
posted by Leon at 9:48 AM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]
It goes without saying that you never run updates on a live site without first running them in a test environment.
posted by humboldt32 at 10:06 AM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by humboldt32 at 10:06 AM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]
I started out in such a situation and ended up becoming a Drupal developer and leaving academia. My biggest tip is to get a handle on making sure it's being backed up properly (revision control on the code, file backups for sites/default/files etc., sql database backups, using Features to manage configuration) and also having a proper workflow for pushing stuff out (local environment on your computer such as Acquia Dev Desktop, staging site on a server somewhere, then production which should be touched sparingly). Then you can bang your head against the wall in your local trying to figure it out without destroying anything anyone is using. Another way to learn which is how I teach people now is writing behavioral driven tests for your current functionality, but it might be a little advanced for a non-programmer.
The bad news is getting help in your situation is hard. Drupal has gotten more and more bloated over the years and it's pretty much an Enterprise product at this point (I stopped going it for this reason) so most of the help available is $200+ an hour consultancies. I'd suggest participating in local meetups and Drupal camps, as well as the official IRC channels and some less official Slacks out there.
posted by melissam at 11:43 AM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]
The bad news is getting help in your situation is hard. Drupal has gotten more and more bloated over the years and it's pretty much an Enterprise product at this point (I stopped going it for this reason) so most of the help available is $200+ an hour consultancies. I'd suggest participating in local meetups and Drupal camps, as well as the official IRC channels and some less official Slacks out there.
posted by melissam at 11:43 AM on October 24, 2016 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks for all the good advice. And good questions!
To clarify --
Views Slideshow is installed and that is what is serving up the slideshow - > in a view called Slideshow.
There is also a custom content type called "Home Slideshow." The Slideshow view is set to filter for only Home Slideshow content types and display "body" and "image" content fields from that content type. We have three content items of type "Home Slideshow" that we use (3 slides).
I guess my question is where is the most logical container for each link.
For example, if Slide #2 is a picture of a bee, and I want that image linked to our story about honey - is that established as part of the Slideshow view or part of the particular bee image content piece of type Home Slideshow?
And yes, I hear you on the best practices for having backups and a dev instance. Unfortunately for political/structural/funding reasons I can't implement all that just now. But yes.
posted by pantarei70 at 12:17 PM on October 24, 2016
To clarify --
Views Slideshow is installed and that is what is serving up the slideshow - > in a view called Slideshow.
There is also a custom content type called "Home Slideshow." The Slideshow view is set to filter for only Home Slideshow content types and display "body" and "image" content fields from that content type. We have three content items of type "Home Slideshow" that we use (3 slides).
I guess my question is where is the most logical container for each link.
For example, if Slide #2 is a picture of a bee, and I want that image linked to our story about honey - is that established as part of the Slideshow view or part of the particular bee image content piece of type Home Slideshow?
And yes, I hear you on the best practices for having backups and a dev instance. Unfortunately for political/structural/funding reasons I can't implement all that just now. But yes.
posted by pantarei70 at 12:17 PM on October 24, 2016
Xylothek nailed it.
posted by christopherious at 3:12 PM on October 24, 2016
posted by christopherious at 3:12 PM on October 24, 2016
Response by poster: HOLY SMOKES I HAVE CREATED A LINK IN MY SLIDESHOW!
xylothek - thank you! The field ordering in #3 and the rewrite results thing was messing me right up.
I will check out the Stanford Web Services blog you linked to - as a librarian/info scientist/post doc/whatever the heck I'm sort of a jack of all trades at the moment and that sounds perfect.
AskMeFi is the best. <3
posted by pantarei70 at 1:37 PM on October 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
xylothek - thank you! The field ordering in #3 and the rewrite results thing was messing me right up.
I will check out the Stanford Web Services blog you linked to - as a librarian/info scientist/post doc/whatever the heck I'm sort of a jack of all trades at the moment and that sounds perfect.
AskMeFi is the best. <3
posted by pantarei70 at 1:37 PM on October 25, 2016 [2 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
What do you mean by "a good QA site"?
This really comes down to learning what your working with.
posted by humboldt32 at 8:56 AM on October 24, 2016