Meet Michelle!

With a strong desire to reduce our technical & product debt, or at the very least stop adding more, our team explored options to optimize our QA process. We have landed at the beginning of a new journey starting with user personas and ending with automated testing; behavior driven development (BDD) focuses on the users' experience as the primary deliverable.

"Behat is a tool that makes behavior driven development (BDD) possible. With BDD, you write human-readable stories that describe the behavior of your application. These stories can then be auto-tested against your application. And yes, it’s as cool as it sounds!"

The Process

• Create personas. Understand "who" is your user base.
• Write user stories. Figure out what they need/want.
• Write Behat tests. Make the desired outcome testable.
• Develop features. Match your specifications.
• Run Behat test suites. Confirm you didn't break any existing functionality.

In addition to giving detailed examples, showing snippets of "human-readable" code, and running tests, I'll share approaches to reach optimal code coverage.

I am pleased to share this collaboration framework that allows stake holders, developers and everyone in between to finally speak the same language. Easily defined and agreed upon goals, written by both the planning and development teams means a target that can be reached.

I will share all of the resources needed to start a Behat initiative in your organization.

This is an open forum to discuss tips and tricks about Site Building.

• What tasks should be in your development plan?
• What is the first thing you should do after you install Drupal?
• What configurations should you make to your website?
• What configurations should you NOT make to your website?
• What modules do you absolutely need?
• What are the most useful modules out there?
• How do you select a module?
• How do you select a theme?

I have a loose agenda that I will follow, however this session is a discussion and I will let you ask questions and drive the direction.

Jake Strawn and Michelle Lauer of ThemeGeeks join me this week to talk about their new distribution NodeMaker.

Basic Features

• During installation, choose which Apps you want to enable. Using our admin UI, you can change this at any time.
• Install optional default content that really shows off the power of the distro.
  • Too many times when installing a distribution or Drupal core alone, you really get no idea what’s going on behind the scenes or what the site in front of you is capable of. Our powerful set of default content demonstrates all the features available to you and creates a complete site out of the box that is ready for you to dig into and customize with a much greater understanding of how all the pieces fit together.
• An interactive launch checklist so you know that you have completed all of the steps needed.
• Lots and lots of in-site documentation. (Although it is not all written yet.)

Use Cases

• For new Drupal users, provides all the normal out of the box functionality that you know you want but might not know how to build yet.
• For the advanced Drupal site builder/developer, cut 2-3 weeks of development time out of every project when using NodeMaker as a starting point.
• For when that friend says: “Hey, you build websites right?!? Can you build me a website tomorrow? I only have 200 bucks... “ You can actually say “Sure... I can help you out” and launch a site with everything they need in just a few minutes! I mean, you know you really do hate telling your friends that they can’t afford your work, so NodeMaker makes it simple!!
• Whatever the need for you site, NodeMaker’s core functionality is a very sturdy platform to get you started on your next project.

Why DrupalCamp?

This first DrupalCamp in NH has been structured to be a training day for new drupalers, and those interested in learning about Drupal. Our goal is to provide valuable information for those users, and help grow the New Hampshire Drupal community by making it more accessible to users with new and varied interest.

Structured sessions will provide a start to finish overview of everything you should know when putting together a Drupal site from scratch. Topics include setting up infrastructure, Drupal Basics, CCK (Content types), Views and other important contributed modules, along with theming to round off the training.

Sessions

We will be teaching you how to build a Drupal site from beginning to end including how to work with a localhost and noting best practices along the way.

• Registration: 8:30 am - 9:00 am
• Welcome: 9:00 am - 9:20 am
• Infastructure: 9:30 am - 10:20 am
• Drupal Basics: 10:30 am - 11:20 am
• Content Types: 11:30 am - 12:20 pm
• Lunch - BoF Sessions: 12:30 pm - 1:20 pm
• Views: 1:30 pm - 2:20 pm
• Modules You Should Know About: 2:30 pm - 3:20 pm
• Theming Basics: 3:30 pm - 4:20 pm
• Closing Announcements: 4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
• After Gathering: 5:00 pm

Views are a powerful way to display specific subsets of your content. From a simple list of all nodes in a single content type to a complex collection of related information, each step will be explained so you can easily repeat the strategy in your own views.

I will demonstrate a systematic approach to building all views and show examples of using arguments and relationships.

Topics

• Systematic way to create ALL views in the GUI
• What are arguments and how to use them
• What are relationships and how to use them
• Discussion of CCK node reference
• Why you should export your Views to code

This session will familiarize attendees with the tools and processes used to manage development, QA, and production of Drupal projects.

Abstract:

Building complex web applications, especially in a team environment, requires more than just code and geeks; it also requires strategy. Drupal shops need to understand how to manage the platform in multiple environments and in all phases of the application lifecycle.

Agenda:

• Drupal development strategy
• Multiple environments
  • sandboxes, staging area, production
• Managing Drupal with Subversion
  • Repositories, branches, tags, externals, template files, etc
  • Two tier checkout
    • Core repository and project repository
      • Multisite considerations
• Automate administrative tasks through code
  • views, content types, settings, nodes, taxonomy
  • Install profile “gotchas”
• Drupal Tools
  • Permissions API
  • Deploy
  • Services
  • Drush
• What’s Missing

Goals:

This session will familiarize attendees with the tools and processes used to manage development, QA, and production of Drupal projects.

Resources:

• Permissions API (http://drupal.org/project/permissions_api)
• Deploy (http://drupal.org/project/deploy)
• Services (http://drupal.org/project/services)
• Drush (http://drupal.org/project/drush)