Drupal 8 site building – Week 03
More a log than a guide, but you get the idea! its a lengthy log this week, a lot got undone, done and then some.
Day 1
Backlog for the week:
Fonts
Contact Form (customise it)
Translations (Lingotek)
Take the site online
Toy around with Drush
Not part of the backlog, decided to update core, followed the instructions to the letter, used Drush and broke the site completely! ha! 'A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring' … and yes did not back it up did see Drush had created a back up but have failed to locate it! was going to take it online anyhow, so decided to rebuild on Acquia Cloud
Would be interesting to see how long it takes to rebuild it! good organisation should make the task a tad bit easier!
Revisions made to node/1 were not in the .txt file, extracted them from node_revision_body from the database (a little learning can be a useful thing too) - a small win on a rough day!
Logged into Acquia Cloud, spun up a free subscription, installed D8.rc3, and got cracking!
Only downer is can’t add contrib modules without figuring out how to SFTP, or using Drush. For now staying clear of Drush! fear of the terminal is back!
Set up path aliases, was a quick and easy introduction and gets rid of the node/n in the address bar, of course good for SEO and all that jazz.
I know there is an easier way to justify text alignment via CSS but that’s going to take some time to get to grips with so taking the long but short cut with HTML to <p style="text-align:justify”>.
It was a good day, a forced refresher on getting sh*t done and it took less than 2 hours to get the site back on track a little ahead of the previous version too! wooHoo!
Day 2
Tested the contact form but it won’t work, a bit of digging around and seems SMTP Authentication Support needs to be installed, am after a quick win today, decided to install and toy with Lingotek instead.
Dang it! can not upload to Acquia Dev Cloud, dug around, need SFTP or SSH access, ok set up my SSH Public Key, downloaded FileZilla, followed the instructions and nada! time to put the fear of theterminal behind me (again) bounced around from page to page but finally got in WooHoo! installed LingoTek in the wrong place Blistering Barnacles!
Tried to uninstall LingoTek, could not (commands I’m seeing online don’t work for me), Ok so the next best thing is to install LingoTek in the Dev folder but nothing in the sites folder! Bizarre! or may be not!
Anyway reading up on Drush and installing modules on Acquia Cloud and WTF! there is asimpler way to do so! Why is this nugget buried so deep! Evidently all I needs to do is go to my Sites/Cloud and 'Enable Live Development'
That done time to check out LingoTek, copy link address, install, enable, wait, enable dependencies, enable job done! Lingotek Translation itself, lemon squeezy!
LingoTek’s documentation here is most useful, relatively straight forward to follow.
Ending day 2 on a colossal WIN, I have translations for basic pages and articles in Arabic, Bulgarian, French, Hindi, Spanish and Urdu, the main and footer menus are not translated as yet, neither do I have language select buttons/icons enabled, to access the languages I have to go by the language code in the URL and its not perfect I still need our Peace Through Prosperity volunteers to check and edit multilingual content but they'll have less to do. LingoTek kicks ass!
Day 3
Time to take on the font challenge!
Noticed whilst on my local environment I was having problems installing modules, kept getting error messages that told me nothing other than it’s an error (FFS!), however haven’t been getting many of those on the Cloud.
AnyHoo, for fonts decided on Google Webfont Loader API, comes highly recommended by @Dakku and has a D8 recommended release out too, so what could go wrong. Installed, enabling took ages and it works but… there are only two font added to the library of fonts (not exactly a library!), all a bit anti-climatic!
Google Webfoot Loader API installation messed up with the Admin UI, went all D7ish!
Not quite what I expected, font attempt five or is it six now is a fail! uninstalled the Google Webfoot Loader API and am going to start exploring the CSS route one of these days.
Day 4
Its Menu translation day - why hasn’t LingoTek got an automated workflow for menu item translations? got it done but what a pain! suggested improvement for LingoTek: have multiple language translations for a menu item on the same page please! a lot of unnecessary back and forth in the workflow.
Decided to spend time on CSS so that I need not rely on modules to change fonts and to get the menu translations in place between day 4 and 5, SMTP set up and the contact form will have to wait its seems a bit complicated and will need help on this in the know, as a starter have bookmarked CSS architecture (for Drupal 8) and Drupal 8 Theming Fundamentals to my reading list.
Submitted my first bug contrib on D.O… only took 4+ years to get there wooHoo!
Day 5
Its a big day, the WIP site gets opened up for demo on the blog! Was going to spend day 5 on the backlog, got distracted, Easy Social here I come, installed and came across this pac_store error on the back and fronted and it isn't going away, Stackoverflow tells me my free-instance is out of memory, that was pretty quick! guess need a bigger sub! Time to go shopping for a place in the cloud.
Retro time!
Fonts - tackled again, failed, avoided (need dragon glass to tackle this one)
Contact Form (customise it)
Translations (Lingotek)
Take the site online
Toy around with Drush
Backlog grooming
..and disaster strikes! somehow managed to lock myself out! can’t recall the password! dang it! it was such an awesome run! need help on this, tried SSH, can SSH but getting access denied for getting DB backups and hesitant to do too much using Drush, remember day 1’s lesson well. Added @Dakku to the Site ’Team’ on Acquia Cloud and its all good.
Week three has been an epic adventure! am clearly trying to run before I can walk but am finding the platform is coaxing me to do so! what little surface I have scratched has opened up a whole bunch of stuff to add to the open social backlog and am getting pretty confident quite a bit of it could be handled by myself! yes humility is a must have EM trait!. Week four will start with an upgrade to Drupal 8.0.0 WooHoo…! in the mean time feast on this.....in seven languages!
