Author: victorkane

Getting MacVim to run properly on Yosemite

I had postponed upgrading to Yosemite because of all the horror stories about 24-hour delays while the installation program copied all homebrew files from /usr/local to hell and back, and things running slowly afterwards, and, well, what always happens when you upgrade.

But I am progressive by nature and there were several things I wanted to install that required Yosemite and that was going to be a thing too. My great surprise was first that perhaps because I have a solid state drive on my MacBook Air, there was a delay, but not that much. And secondly, everything was snappy as all getout after the upgrade. I felt like I had a new computer running!

MacVim has long been my standard Mac text editor, and gvim on Linux, although now Atom with the vim mode and markdown plugins is vying for that position (make sure it’s always running to avoid delays in loading), along with LightPaper for Mac for markdown. Imagine my chagrin when I attempted to open a text file on Yosemite with MacVim, only to find that while the application launched, the window didn’t. No go.

This article explains what I did to remedy the situation completely on my MacBook and bring MacVim back to the contender status it deserves.

Continue reading…

Getting Started with a Real World Application on platform.sh

This is the second in a series of articles involving the writing and launching of my DurableDrupal Lean ebook series website on platform.sh. Since it’s a real world application, this article is for real world website and web application developers. If you are starting from scratch but enthusiastic and willing to learn, that means you too. I’m fortunate enough to have their sponsorship and full technical support, so everything in the article has been tested out on the platform. A link will be edited in here as soon as it goes live.

Diving in

Diving right in I setup a Trello Kanban Board for Project Inception as follows:

Project Inception Kanban

Both Vision (Process, Product) and Candidate Architecture (Process, Product) jobs have been completed, and have been moved to the MVP 1 column. We know what we want to do, and we’re doing it with Drupal 7, based on some initial configuration as a starting point (expressed both as an install profile and a drush configuration script). At this point there are three jobs in the To Do column, constituting the remaining preparation for the Team Product Kickoff. And two of them (setup for continuous integration and continuous delivery) are about to be made much easier by virtue of using platform.sh, not only as a home for the production instance, but as a central point of organization for the entire development and deployment process.

Beginning Continuous Integration Workflow

What we’ll be doing in this article:

Continue reading…

Five Things I didn’t know about Platform.sh

I want to share some exciting things I’m only just finding out about Platform.sh (the “Develop, Deploy, Rinse, Repeat” continuous delivery cloud platform for Drupal, Symfony and PHP based projects) that look as if they might have a lot to do with folks finding a straightforward way of enabling a truly Lean process applied to website and web application projects. We’ll cover five things I didn’t know about Platform.sh:

  1. The Standard Platform Workflow is just what modern, serious PHP, Symfony and Drupal developers might expect and can easily be set up for all team members.

  2. The Standard Platform Architecture is container based and scales tremendously well for most use cases.

  3. They don’t use Varnish! They use CDNs (content delivery networks)!

  4. There’s an Enterprise Platform with its own truly scalable architecture and unique benefits

  5. A chance to get a first-hand report from someone actually using the Platform.sh Enterprise Platform.

Continue reading…

Historic DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014 – Let’s get to the bottom of Headless Drupal

Let the Debates Begin – Part II

Other articles in this series:

Intro

Whatever it is, and in this article we are going to venture a proposal for a canonical definition, Headless Drupal seems to synthesis a heartfelt need in the context of the current Drupal problematic. It has been a hot subject for quite some time now, with an active group presence on Drupal Groups, and with a veritable avalanche of articles and presentations. Barring the obvious number one topic of Drupal 8 (which we’ll debate in the next article in this series) and successfully competing with “the new PHP” itself as a center of interest, it was really the number one topic at DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014, with training, presentations and at least one very important BOF:

Continue reading…