FLOSS Project Planets

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities Feb 2024

Planet Debian - Sun, 2024-03-03 02:52
Focus

This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes Issues Review
  • Spam: reported 1 Debian bug report
  • Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
Administration
  • Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages: ovito, tahoe-lafs, tpm2-tss-engine
  • Debian wiki: produce HTML dump for a user, unblock IP addresses, approve accounts
Communication
  • Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC
Sponsors

The SWH work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

This week in KDE: a smooth release

Planet KDE - Sat, 2024-03-02 20:43

Last Tuesday, the KDE Mega-Release came out, and I’m happy to report that it went well. Initial impressions seem to be overwhelmingly positive! I’ve been doing extra bug triage and social media monitoring since then to see if there were any major issues, and so far things look really good on the bug front too. I think our 3 months of QA paid off! So congratulations everyone for a job well done! Hopefully this should help banish those now 16-year-old painful memories of KDE 4. It’s a new KDE now. Harder, better, faster, stronger!

The roll-out in Neon has been a bit rockier, unfortunately. At this point, most of the packaging issues have been fixed, and folks who encountered them are strongly encouraged to update again. We’re doing an investigation into how this happened, so we can prevent it in the future. So thanks for your patience there, Neon users!

Needless to say, the week was full of other bug-fixing activity as well. There were still a few regressions, many of which have already been fixed, amazingly. I am just so impressed with KDE’s contributors this week!

New Features

There’s a new KWin effect called “Hide Cursor” (off by default for now, but try it!) that will automatically hide the pointer after a period of inactivity (Jin Liu, Plasma 6.1. Link)

On System Settings’ Legacy App Permissions page, there’s now an option to allow XWayland apps to eavesdrop on mouse buttons as well (Oliver Beard, Plasma 6.1. Link)

UI Improvements

The message shown on widgets not compatible with Plasma 6 is now clearer (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.1, though it might end up backported to 6.0.1 or 6.0.2. Link 1 and link 2):

When you try to activate the Cube effect with fewer than 3 virtual desktops, it will now tell you why it’s not working and prompt you to add some more virtual desktops so it will work (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.1. Link):

The default top-left hotcorner that triggers Overview once again closes the effect if you trigger it a second time, while Overview is still open (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.1)

A number of pages in System Settings have been modernized to move buttons that were on the bottom up to the top, and make their placeholder messages more consistent (Shubham Arora, me: Nate Graham, Fushan Wen, and Jakob Petsovits, Plasma 6.1. Link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, link 10, link 11, and link 12):

In Kirigami-based apps, the animation used when moving from one page to another is now a lot nicer and smoother (Devin Lin, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

You know that awkward little line in the toolbars of Kirigami-based apps that separates the sidebar from the content area? Now it has the appearance of a normal toolbar separator line (Carl Schwan, Frameworks 6.1. Link):

Bug Fixes

Taking a screenshot in Spectacle immediately after a screen recording now works (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.02.1. Link)

VLC’s fullscreen mode once again works (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Fixed a source of brief screen freezes in the X11 session (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Fixed a random-seeming crash in Plasma (Fushan Wen, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Dragging desktop files or folders onto another screen no longer causes them to temporarily disappear, and the fix for this issue also fixes a crash in Plasma that could be caused by dragging files or folders from the desktop into a folder visible in Dolphin (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.1. Link 1 and link 2)

Clicking on the “Defaults” button on System Settings’ Task Switcher page no longer breaks your task switcher until you manually choose it again (Marco Martin, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

When a panel popup is open, clicking on something else on the panel once again activates that thing instead of just closing the open popup (David Edmundson, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

There’s once again a blue outline around the active (and now also hovered) virtual desktop in the Desktop Grid view of the Pverview effect (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

When you right-click on a panel in Auto-Hide mode and select “Add Widgets…”, the panel no longer frustratingly closes again right after the Widget Explorer opens, which previously prevented you from actually adding a widget to the panel that way, and made you want to throw your computer out the window (Niccolò Venerandi, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

In the Tile Editor screen, you can no longer break your tile layout by dragging splits on top of other splits (Akseli Lahtinen, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Clicking on the search field in the Overview effect no longer closes it (Patrik Fábián, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Saving changes made to commands assigned to global shortcuts now works (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

Fixed some glitches with the new Cube effect: zooming with a scroll (did you even know that was a thing?! I didn’t!) now goes in the direction you would expect, and zooming goes in out too far no longer clips away the cube (Vlad Zahorodnii, Plasma 6.0.1. Link 1 and link 2)

When sending a file to a Bluetooth device, the notification that indicates the progress of the transfer no longer shows a broken link after the transfer finishes (Kai Uwe Broulik, Plasma 6.0.1. Link)

MPV windows with the “Keep Aspect Ratio” setting turned on are now full-screenable (Łukasz Patron, Plasma 6.1. Link)

The layout of the “Overwrite this file?” dialog in “Get New [Thing]” windows is no longer visually broken (Akseli Lahtinen, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Fixed an issue that could cause glitchy horizontal lines to appear on graphs and charts in System Monitor when using a fractional scale factor with certain integrated Intel GPUs (Arjen Hiemstra, Frameworks 6.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

Automation & Systematization

Created documentation about how to write Appium-based GUI tests for KDE software (Fushan Wen and Thiago Sueto, link)

Created documentation about how to expose C++ models to the QML GUI side in KDE software (Thiago Sueto, link)

Added a test to ensure the functioning of the SystemDialog component, which powers a number of portal-based permission dialogs (Fushan Wen, link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

Thanks to you, our Plasma 6 fundraiser was been a crazy success! The final number of members is an amazing 885. Not quite 1000, but given that the original goal was 500 (which I even viewed as wildly optimistic at the beginning), I’m just bowled over by the level of support here. Thank you everyone for the confidence you’ve shown in us; we’ll try not to screw it up! For those who haven’t donated yet, it’s not too late!

If you’re a developer, let’s continue to try to focus on bug reports for the next week or two in the software we’re involved with, to make sure that any issued people find get noticed and fixed. I want that perception of quality to continue! We’re building up a good reputation here, so let’s keep pushing for just a bit longer before we pivot to feature work for Plasma 6.1.

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

New blogs.kde.org

Planet KDE - Sat, 2024-03-02 19:00
I'm happy to announce the launch of our revamped Blogs.KDE.org website, now powered by Hugo instead of Drupal 7! This switch was motivated by the fact that Drupal 7 is now reaching end of life and since Blogs.
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Ravi Dwivedi: Malaysia Trip

Planet Debian - Sat, 2024-03-02 08:59

Last month, I had a trip to Malaysia and Thailand. I stayed for six days in each of the countries. The selection of these countries was due to both of them granting visa-free entry to Indian tourists for some time window. This post covers the Malaysia part and Thailand part will be covered in the next post. If you want to travel to any of these countries in the visa-free time period, I have written all the questions asked during immigration and at airports during this trip here which might be of help.

I mostly stayed in Kuala Lumpur and went to places around it. Although before the trip, I planned to visit Ipoh and Cameron Highlands too, but could not cover it during the trip. I found planning a trip to Malaysia a little difficult. The country is divided into two main islands - Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo. Then there are more islands - Langkawi, Penang island, Perhentian and Redang Islands. Reaching those islands seemed a little difficult to plan and I wish to visit more places in my next Malaysia trip.

My first day hostel was booked in Chinatown part of Kuala Lumpur, near Pasar Seni LRT station. As soon as I checked-in and entered my room, I met another Indian named Fletcher, and after that we accompanied each other in the trip. That day, we went to Muzium Negara and Little India. I realized that if you know the right places to buy what you want, Malaysia could be quite cheap. Malaysian currency is Malaysian Ringgit (MYR). 1 MYR is equal to 18 INR. For 2 MYR, you can get a good masala tea in Little India and it costs like 4-5 MYR for a masala dosa. The vegetarian food has good availability in Kuala Lumpur, thanks to the Tamil community. I also tried Mee Goreng, which was vegetarian, and I found it fine in terms of taste. When I checked about Mee Goreng on Wikipedia, I found out that it is unique to Indian immigrants in Malaysia (and neighboring countries) but you don’t get it in India!

Mee Goreng, a dish made of noodles in Malaysia.

For the next day, Fletcher had planned a trip to Genting Highlands and pre booked everything. I also planned to join him but when we went to KL Sentral to take the bus, his bus tickets were sold out. I could take a bus at a different time, but decided to visit some other place for the day and cover Genting Highlands later. At the ticket counter, I met a family from Delhi and they wanted to go to Genting Highlands but due to not getting bus tickets for that day, they decided to buy a ticket for the next day and instead planned for Batu Caves that day. I joined them and went to Batu Caves.

After returning from Batu Caves, we went our separate ways. I went back and took rest at my hostel and later went to Petronas Towers at night. Petronas Towers is the icon of Kuala Lumpur. Having a photo there was a must. I was at Petronas Towers at around 9 PM. Around that time, Fletcher came back from Genting Highlands and we planned to meet at KL Sentral to head for dinner.

Me at Petronas Towers.

We went back to the same place as the day before where I had Mee Goreng. This time we had dosa and a masala tea. Their masala tea from the last day was tasty and that’s why I was looking for them in the first place. We also met a Malaysian family having Indian ancestry dining there and had a nice conversation. Then we went to a place to eat roti canai in Pasar Seni market. Roti canai is a popular non-vegetarian dish in Malaysia but I took the vegetarian version.

Photo with Malaysians.

The next day, we went to Berjaya Time Square has a shopping place which sells pretty cheap items for daily use and souveniers too. However, I bought souveniers from Petaling Street, which is in Chinatown. At night, we explored Bukit Bintang, which is the heart of Kuala Lumpur and is famous for its nightlife.

After that, Fletcher went to Bangkok and I was in Malaysia for two more days. Next day, I went to Genting Highlands and took the cable car, which had awesome views. I came back to Kuala Lumpur by the night. The remaining day I just roamed around in Bukit Bintang. Then I took a flight for Bangkok on 7th Feb, which I will cover in the next post.

In Malaysia, I met so many people from different countries - apart from people from Indian subcontinent, I met Syrians, Indonesians (Malaysia seems to be a popular destination for Indonesian tourists) and Burmese people. Meeting people from other cultures is an integral part of travel for me.

My expenses for Food + Accommodation + Travel added to 10,000 INR for a week in Malaysia, while flight costs were: 13,000 INR (Delhi to Kuala Lumpur) + 10,000 INR (Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok) + 12,000 INR (Bangkok to Delhi).

For OpenStreetMap users, good news is Kuala Lumpur is fairly well-mapped on OpenStreetMap.

Tips
  • I bought local SIM from a shop at KL Sentral station complex which had “news” in their name (I forgot the exact name and there are two shops having “news” in their name) and it was the cheapest option I could find. The SIM was 10 MYR for 5 GB data for a week. If you want to make calls too, then you need to spend extra 5 MYR.

  • 7-Eleven and KK Mart convenience stores are everywhere in the city and they are open all the time (24 hours a day). If you are a vegetarian, you can at least get some bread and cheese from there to eat.

  • A lot of people know English (and many - Indians, Pakistanis, Nepalis - know Hindi) in Kuala Lumpur, so I had no language problems most of the time.

  • For shopping on budget, you can go to Petaling Street, Berjaya Time Square or Bukit Bintang. In particular, there is a shop named I Love KL Gifts in Bukit Bintang which had very good prices. just near the metro/monorail stattion. Check out location of the shop on OpenStreetMap.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Megarelease Teething Problems

Planet KDE - Sat, 2024-03-02 07:16

As many have noticed, Neon’s release of Plasma 6 was not without its problems. We would like to apologise for the totally unexpected packaging problems as “Testing Edition” and “Unstable Edition” had been working just fine without these issues.

Of course the first round of fixes have already hit the “User Edition” archives. Expect more to follow as we continue to ‘Q.A.’ the packages and eliminate as many bugs as we can.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

OSM Hack Weekend February 2024

Planet KDE - Sat, 2024-03-02 06:30

Last week I attended the bi-annual OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe again, hosted by Geofabrik, focusing on indoor routing as well as Transitous.

Structured Email / Semantic Web

But first to something different (skip to the next section for OSM content).

While traveling to Karlsruhe anyway I used the opportunity to meet with people working on Structured Email, something that has a lot of overlap with the travel document extractor used by KDE Itinerary.

There’s plenty of aspects for collaboration here:

  • Sharing of test data. I learned about Web Data Commons for example, which is a giant corpus of structure data extracts from crawling the web by the University of Mannheim.
  • Sharing of lessons learned, approaches and quirks/workarounds for processing structured data. We are currently lacking a forum for that.
  • A standardized way for applications to register for handling a specific schema.org type. That way email clients or Plasma Browser Integration could dispatch objects they encounter to the respective application in a generic way, similar to how this is done for files based on MIME types. Ideally this is done on the XDG level, and while at it it’s probably worth looking at other areas where the same need came up (URLs, ActivityPub, barcode content, etc).

What we do in Itinerary for importing events, restaurants or hotels from websites is meanwhile also found in the Nextcloud Cookbook app, using the schema.org recipe data embedded in websites. And that’s still just scratching the surface, combining this with e.g. Open Food Facts could open very interesting possibilities. Very cool to see things like this being done :)

Indoor Routing

A month ago I had shown indoor routing running integrated in KDE’s indoor map demo application. That’s an important milestone, only the final 80% of the work remain now, namely making sure this produces reliable and useful results in a variety of locations.

Prefer corridors over rooms

Giving a computer the task of finding the shortest path will usually not yield practical results. That’s because human expectations around this contain many implicit assumptions, constraints and nuanced cost considerations that we all have to implement as well.

One example is shown below. The shortest path here crosses through two conference rooms or lecture halls, however you most likely don’t want to disturb whatever is ongoing in those rooms but rather take the slightly longer corridor around.

Shortest path (left), preferring corridors (right).

Giving different room types different routing cost factors helps with this.

Along the same line other details have been fixed or improved, such as:

  • Emergency exists are not the same as regular doors.
  • Not all OSM barrier types are actually blocking your way (eg. bollards, but also gates/turnstiles).
Data level of detail

Another aspect to deal with is that the OSM data in some places doesn’t have the necessary level of detail needed for routing. Examples include:

  • Missing “cut outs” in the ground for stairs coming up from the floor below.
  • Missing doors to rooms, staircases or elevator cabins.

Either of those can result in significant detours or even entirely inaccessible areas.

While augmenting the OSM data is the proper solution eventually, that is quite a large task. Fortunately we have a few workarounds and heuristics to deal with some of these issues:

  • Stairs are now implemented as “off-mesh links” everywhere, rather than as 3D geometry as done previously, which allows “teleporting” through any obstacle on the way.
  • We now drop walls around any elevator or staircase if there are no door nodes at all. That may lead to routing into those areas from the wrong side, but that’s still better than not being able access those at all.

With these improvements we can now also find a way out of the most complex test labyrinth so far, the Paris Metro.

Paris Metro station at Gare de l'Est. Data modelling

This work also identified a few issues where the OSM indoor data model is ambiguous or cannot express relevant details yet:

  • There’s a significant difference between implicit walls on indoor=corridor elements in the Simple Indoor Tagging (SIT) scheme and usage in reality. No matter how you interpret that for routing you either end up either with unreachable areas or routes through walls.
  • Similarly, there’s ambiguities on how (implicit) outer building walls should be mapped/interpreted.
  • There is no way to model service counters that you might find at ticket offices or fast food stands. This matters to route towards the right side of a building/room.

See also the corresponding mailing list post for details, as well as the the upcoming quarterly OSM Indoor Meetup (Wednesday March 6th, 18:00 CET, online).

Transitous

Transitous, an effort to set up a free and open public transport routing service, also involves a lot of OSM data and software, so that was the other big topic for me.

Intermodal routing

While the public transport routing part for this works quite well already, enabling the intermodal routing has proven challenging. That is routing the first and last mile to and from public transport stops by foot/bike/scooter/car or a combination thereof, possibly considering things like available parking spaces or rental vehicles.

That is build on top of existing OSM routing engines, and MOTIS supports different options there as well. We haven’t found a combination yet that can import planet-wide data or at least data for all of Europe on the hardware we have (ie. needing significantly less than half a TB or RAM), offers the feature set needed by MOTIS for intermodal routing (1:1, 1:N and N:M routing, customizable profiles) and deliver all that with sufficient runtime performance. Bonus points for at least having the option for other advanced routing features (elevation support, realtime traffic support, etc).

There was a clear recommendation from the people running and developing those things professionally for GraphHopper. MOTIS has no support for that one yet, but it seems doable to add that. The bigger problem here is potentially that GraphHopper’s “Matrix API” (the part doing very efficient N:M routing) is apparently not available in the open source release. So we still don’t have a proper solution for this.

Geocoding

Another component needed for all this is address and POI search and as-you-type completion. There was an equally clear recommendation for Photon. That comes in an easy to get started package with a single binary and a pre-built database for a single country or the entire planet, but also allows to transition to a more complex setup enabling incremental data updates and offering a ton of options to fine-tune and customize the results (support more languages, bias towards certain types of locations, etc).

MOTIS integration for this also yet has to be done, but should be quite straightforward. Without intermodal routing this doesn’t gain us much on its own though.

Public transport coverage

Meanwhile the public transport coverage on Transitous is growing rapidly, see Jonah’s blog post on how to get your region included.

Transitous coverage in Europe.

If you are interested in collaborating on this, join the #opentransport Matrix channel and the Transitous Github project.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

This Week in KDE: delayed until tomorrow!

Planet KDE - Sat, 2024-03-02 00:44

The mega-release has been such a mega amount of work that I’m a bit behind on my blogging, but don’t worry, the normal TWiK post will be out around this time tomorrow! Thanks for your patience, everyone.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Tips to get involved in KDE as prepration for Google Summer of Code 2024

Planet KDE - Fri, 2024-03-01 19:38

KDE got accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2024! Are you thinking about getting involved into KDE development? Check out the cool ideas KDE devs came up, they showcase what can be achieved by taking part as a student in GSoC. How to start? How to get involved? How to make an impression that will help your application?

Prerequisites
  • You like KDE, you like us as a community, you can follow our philosophy, you like our product (a desktop or at least an specific application), and you resonate with our tech stack (C++, Qt, CMake).
  • Grab some code from our GitLab, clone a repository and build it locally. This sounds easy. For first-timers it is not easy. Reach out for help in case you struggle.
  • Run your self-built software. Now you can explore the joy of developing KDE.

You do not need an idea, at least not yet. Give it some time.

Get involved

Try getting involved. Usually it is not easy to fix bugs of implement a feature request from KDE bugtracking system. Some are hard to fix. Others need debates of future directions or best ways to get things done.

I propose you start looking for other opportunities:

  1. Fix compiler warnings. Compilers analyze the code and as a result they might warn you. This can have various reasons like bad coding practice, code that is difficult to read and might easily be misread by humans, code with bad performance, bug-prone constructs.
  2. Fix deprecation warnings. KDE, Qt, and every software evolves. Old interfaces are replaced by newer ones. The old ones are not directly thrown away, but deprecated. The deprecation warning reminds the developer to migrate from the old to the new interface. Some deprecations are trivial to fix, others require ample code changes.
  3. Fix findings of static analyzers and linters. These are tools that analyze code more thorough compared to a compiler for the price of a longer runtime. They offer great hints for but are prone to false-positives (wrong warnings). Good tools for KDE are Cppcheck, Clazy and qmllint.
  4. Fix crash bugs. Crashes often occur when the code contains memory issues. Examples are using objects that were deleted, accessing arrays out of bounds, de-referencing null pointers. Tools like a good debugger, Valgrind, and AddressSanitizer (and its cousins MemorySanitizer and UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer) help to localize the problem. Crashes are more difficult to understand and fix compared to warnings for tools.

Try to work for fixes of one to ten cases. More makes reviewing harder. Create a pull request and wait for feedback.

Rationale

Why do I think these areas are good to start working? The maintainer might reject your pull request. This can always happen. Compared to implementing a whole new feature, the amount of work you invested is limited.

Once you have an idea for GSoC and write your application, you can point to your pull requests as proof of work. Maintainers see your involvement, they see how you interact, and you get an early sense whether you like the contributing experience or not.

Even in the case that you do not want to become an GSoC student, you improved KDE a tiny little bit. Great feeling, isn't it?

Word of warning

Not everybody deem warnings worth to be fixed -- in general or in specific cases. You will learn what kind of warnings getting fixed are welcome. I already wrote a blog post about my experiences with fixing some Cppcheck in Kile.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

TechBeamers Python: Python Remove Elements from a List

Planet Python - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:59

Hi everyone – Today’s tutorial brings you various techniques to remove elements from a Python list. Manipulating lists is a fundamental aspect of programming, and understanding how to efficiently remove elements can significantly enhance your Python coding skills. We will cover a range of methods, from basic and straightforward approaches to more advanced techniques that […]

The post Python Remove Elements from a List appeared first on TechBeamers.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

TechBeamers Python: Python Remove Elements from a List

Planet Python - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:59

Hi everyone – Today’s tutorial brings you various techniques to remove elements from a Python list. Manipulating lists is a fundamental aspect of programming, and understanding how to efficiently remove elements can significantly enhance your Python coding skills. We will cover a range of methods, from basic and straightforward approaches to more advanced techniques that […]

The post Python Remove Elements from a List appeared first on TechBeamers.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: DrupalElementStyle: Add styles to drupal-media in CKEditor 5 using only configuration

Planet Drupal - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:14

With Drupal’s upgrade to CKEditor 5, users can now add their own attributes or styles to the media toolbar using the new DrupalElementStyle plugin via YAML definitions …without writing a single

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: DrupalCon Survival Guide: Making the Most of Your Conference Experience

Planet Drupal - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:14
Why DrupalCon?

DrupalCon is the premier 3-4 day conference for the Drupal community. It brings together developers, content creators, site builders, and business leaders from around the world to learn and share their Drupal knowledge. You will have the chance to attend sessions, workshops, and keynotes led by some of the most innovative and successful Drupal leaders. The best part of DrupalCon (in my opinion) is participating in community events, networking opportunities, and social events with the vibrant community of Drupal enthusiasts. Check out this video below from the Drupal Association to learn more.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: How to Enable Project Browser on Your Drupal Site

Planet Drupal - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:14

Project Browser makes it easy for site builders to find modules. Once selected, instructions are provided on how to install the modules on your site. This browser lives inside the Drupal site itself, which means you don't need to leave your site in order to look for modules. Plus, it's a much improved experience than trying to page through modules by popularity on Drupal.org.

To get started, we must first composer require the module:

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: Drupal: cache tags for all, regardless your backend

Planet Drupal - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:14

This blog has been re-posted and edited with permission from Matt Glaman's blog.

Phil Karlton is quoted as having said, "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." As someone who suffers horribly from the latter, I'm glad Drupal's caching APIs make the former a breeze. The long short of it is that caching of data improves performance by not having to perform the same operations multiple times after it has been done the first time until you need to re-run that operation again. It involves some storage (static variable in memory, memory backend storage, or the database.) Generally, you store the data with a given identifier for later retrieval, the actual data to be cached for later reuse, and possibly an expiration time for automatic invalidation.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: Evaluating Drupal Community Modules

Planet Drupal - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:14

When looking to use a module from the Drupal community there are a number of factors to consider, beyond its functional use, that determine suitable quality and support for your organisation to use.

When you deploy a Drupal site into production, who is responsible for maintaining it? How long will that site live for? These types of questions shape the risk tolerances of the project. E.g. Lower Drupal competencies means you need greater community support and more stable modules.

All modules on Drupal.org are open source and fall under the GPLv2 open source license. They are free to download and use at your own risk. Each project has its own set of maintainers and a sub-community that uses the module, interacts through issues and contributes bug fixes and feature enhancements.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: 10 Drush Commands for Acquia CMS

Planet Drupal - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:14

Drush - The "drush" command is very useful for accessing and manipulating your website's settings and data from the command line.

If you are new to Drush, you might find the large number of commands available overwhelming and not know which ones to start with.

1. watchdog-show (ws)- Show a listing of most recent 10 log messages.

drush watchdog-show

2. pm-list (pml)- Show a list of available extensions (modules and themes )

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: Try Drupal Automatic Updates today on your site!

Planet Drupal - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:14

Did you know that Automatic Updates are in the works for Drupal 9/10 as a contributed module?

The module applies patch-level updates to Drupal core in a separate, sandboxed copy of your site, to keep you up and running until the update is completely ready to be deployed. It can detect and report problems at every stage of the update process, so you don't have to find out about them after an update is live. It automatically detects database updates in an incoming update, and helps you run them during the process.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: Image Optimization in Acquia Cloud

Planet Drupal - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:14

Optimizing the images on your website is crucial for performance, and in turn, User Experience, SEO, and more generally, the success of your site. The good news is that the Acquia Cloud Platform has built-in capabilities to help your site serve great-looking images that load quickly.

Let's break down the steps needed to put these capabilities to use:

  1. Use the Built-in Utilities
Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Acquia Developer Portal Blog: Image Optimization: The Oft-Forgotten (But Crucial) Performance Step

Planet Drupal - Fri, 2024-03-01 14:14

When we think about how to make a Drupal website load faster, we often focus on how to make Drupal render the pages faster: optimizing queries, caching entities, and so on. But out of the box Drupal has several layers of caching enabled by default, and many popular Drupal hosts have additional systems in place like memcached and Varnish to further enhance the overall page load. In practice, the load of the page itself is often a small fraction of the overall time and data needed for a visitor to view a page.

Categories: FLOSS Project Planets

Pages