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Thanks Indieweb module for Drupal!

Learning objectives

• Step through the Drupal installation process.
• Create nodes and understand their properties.
• Create content types and add fields.
• Configure fields of different types.
• Create taxonomy vocabularies and terms.
• Create views to display listings of content.
• Create, place, and control the visibility of blocks.
• Override the presentation of nodes with Layout Builder.
• Understand the user and permission system.
• Understand the taxonomy system.
• Understand the menu system.
• Install and configure contributed modules and themes.
• Understand how Drupal can be extended to meet specific project needs.

Prerequisites

No previous experience with Drupal is needed.

Setup instructions

A working Drupal 11 installation using DDEV will be provided.

This training will be provided over Zoom. You can ask questions via text chat or audio. Sharing your screen is optional, but you might want to do it to get assistance on a specific issue. Sharing your camera is optional.

What to expect

Prior to the training

Attendees will receive detailed instructions on how to setup their development environment. In addition, they will be able to join a support video call days before the training event to make the the local development environment is ready. This prevents losing time fixing problems with environment set up during the training.

On the days of the training

• The training totals 7 hours of instruction, which we usually split into 2 sessions
• A team of developers available to answer questions and help with training-related issues

After the training

• Attendees will receive a copy of the training recording.
• Attendees will receive a certificate of completion.

Using a collaborative, co-design process grounded in design justice principles, Agaric will move your website to have mobile-first design, powerful content management capabilities, and built-in accessibility. The site will continually be improved with new features, strengthened security, and more joyous experience of use.

Aproach

Agaric adheres to high standards of collaboration, communication, active client participation, and transparency.

Using design and development processes that center the people who will be affected by the website, a core team from Agaric will work closely with you to define overall goals, key outcomes, and user stories.

Through collaborative design, which will proceed iteratively throughout the project, we will identify and build a minimum viable product, and subject that to a round of feedback and further research. In this context, as Zora Neale Hurston put it, "Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose." Critically, this is research with people using the website. We then take what we learned and use that to identify and build the next minimum viable improvement.

This learning is not just for us building the site but for everyone who has a stake in success for the goals for which the site is being built. The learning covers both the website's usability and its effectiveness in reaching your goals, including effectiveness in communicating to colleagues and the general public your values and goals. Ideally, Agaric's research with you and the people who are or will be visiting the site is continuous and collaborative, constantly informing continued development.

In the steps of clarifying need and customizing the solution (leveraging state of the art open source libre software), we prefer to write and work off of user stories that clearly define the website's purpose. This helps ensure that product owners, designers, and developers are on the same page. User stories describe software functionality from the perspective of the person using the software, including motivation or benefit, such as "A visitor can ".

We use an agile methodology to prioritize with you to put critical functionality first, getting a functional website in your hands as soon as possible for review. We continue this iterative and collaborative development cycle, typically in two week sprints, always building the highest impact functionality first.

Comparative analysis

No one is doing exactly what you will do, but identifying quality peers and reviewing their respective content helps you get a wider perspective both on what potential visitors may have seen elsewhere and what seems to be working for others— we can start thinking together about where to emulate and where to differentiate, informing all aspects of building the site to achieve your goals needs.

Content strategy

Building on the review of competitors, Agaric will briefly interview people who should be interacting with your site (from content creators to potential visitors) and develop personas and user stories.

Content style guide

Along with bringing consistency to cooperative output (and saving time sweating the details every time they come up), a good content (copywriting) style guide incorporates suggestions for clear and effective writing and helps your unique aspects shine through. It can help tell your story in a consistent way and help let your individual personalities show through while maintaining collective coherence.

Agaric's content style guide has not received the dedicated attention we recommend for our clients, but can still be a useful starting point for you.

Services

From our discussion and review of your goals and audiences we recommend the following services, to be provided by Agaric in collaboration with the Drutopia cooperative web platform. Our agile method allows for flexibility throughout the project.

The Drutopia initiative builds powerful website software for grassroots groups and offers a Libre Software as a Service platform to make getting a website even easier for these groups. Drutopia members benefit from the collective development and maintenance of the software and platform; currently under the aegis of a not-for-profit, Drutopia plans to grow into its own cooperative.

May First Movement Technology is a non-profit cooperative which builds movements by advancing the strategic use and collective control of technology for local struggles, global transformation, and emancipation without borders. Together, through the cooperative, members buy information technology equipment to run websites, email, email lists, and just about everything else we do on the Internet. Drutopia is hosted on May First infrastructure, and Drutopia members become May First members.

Building on and with these cooperative initiatives, Agaric can focus our energy towards custom design or development that will benefit you.

Included Features

Cutting-Edge Website Capabilities

As a member organization of Drutopia, the your website will automatically gain access to the following features:

• Configurable homepage - that include but is not limited to any of the following: prominent elevator pitch, recent news feed, featured resources, upcoming events, partner organizations list, and a list of current campaigns.
• Actions
• Campaigns
• Events
• Fundraising
• Groups
• News and/or Blog
• Profile pages
• Social media integration
• SSL (all pages on the site reachable at secure, privacy-protecting https:// URLs)

Highly Secure Internal Tools

In addition to these benefits, we recommend [membership in May First Movement Technology] and will discount your Drutopia membership by the amount of a standard organization membership in May First ($50/year). As a result of this membership, you will gain access to additional services beyond the website, including the following:

• E-mail boxes and forwards
• Webmail
• NextCloud Files and Gallery (similar to Dropbox or Google Drive)
• OnlyOffice (integrated with NextCloud for online editing of word documents and spreadsheets)
• NextCloud Calendar and Tasks
• NextCloud Contacts
• NextCloud Bookmarks and Notes

Content Strategy and Information Architecture Approach

We will work closely with your team to define an effective content strategy for your website and a clean, scalable information architecture. These will result in the following deliverables:

• Website goals
• User personas
• Content style guide
• Sitemap
• Technical architecture

Design Approach

Building off of the content strategy and information architecture work, we will work with your team to provide a compelling a theme that speaks to your audience and reinforces your brand.

We begin with our clean, responsive theme, with the following features baked in:

• Clean - simple design that puts your content first
• Secure - covered by the Drupal security team
• Accessible - works with assistive devices and keyboard-only navigation
• Responsive - looks beautiful on any device
• Extensible - well organized templates and Sass (style sheets)

We then identify and implement the customizations that will set your website apart and best tell your story, reflecting the unique voice and tone of your organization.

Development Approach

By leveraging Drutopia, we are able to quickly prototype with your team. After defining the information architecture we turn on all relevant features, and stub out the pages in the sitemap. We put on a collaborative training on how to work with the site and then allow your team to add content, test out the features and make note of any adjustments that would be helpful to the project.

We will then work closely together to prioritize remaining enhancements to be made to the website. Enhancements that do not make it into the initial build are added to our backlog for the Drutopia project as a whole.

Content Migration

Agaric staff will work with the you to move content from an existing website to your .

This plan will consist of manual migration work to move content from existing pages into the new website. Additionally, optional programmatic migration processes are available for moving user data and other content into Drupal. A redirect strategy will also be put in place for pages that are being culled from the old site.

Accessibility

It is critical that your site be accessible to as many people as possible, including those using screen readers. To that end, all of our work is built to support compliance with W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. The WCAG Guidelines, however, are not comprehensive and so we go beyond those guidelines to ensure high accessibility. Lastly, much of what makes a site accessible happens on the content entry and management side. We will provide resources for your content team so that after the site launches, you can rest assured that what you are creating is reaching as many people as possible.

SEO

Our developers will also follow SEO best-practice development and utilize Drupal's range of SEO-related features that allow administrators to edit page titles, implement human-readable and editable URLs, enter meta tags, and more. For further SEO-related services, we can also recommend SEO consultants.

Drutopia Membership and Continuous Improvements & Support

Launching with a site on Drutopia means more than getting all of the features and functionality Drutopia has to offer. It also means joining a platform cooperative of like-minded people. The cooperative consists of a one member one vote model and an accountable leadership team. Joining the Drutopia platform includes:

• Secure hosting with timely security updates
• The ability to request new features and endorse existing ideas
• Quarterly updates on the project
• Ability to coordinate with fellow members to crowdfund special development sprints

When joining Drutopia your site launch is not the end, but rather the beginning. Drutopia is in continual communication with all its members about what enhancements team members should work on next. Drutopia's roadmap is public to all so you know where the project is heading.

Agaric, as both your partner in maintaining your website and as a Drutopia partner, is well positioned to help see your priorities become realized.

Deliverables and Budget

Content Strategy documents

Information Architecture

Design

Development

Migrating content into a Drutopia typically takes an additional 10 to 50 hours ($1,500 to $15,000), varying

We are experts in Drupal migrations. We can move content from your old site to your Drutopia site so that you can keep working with all of your old content, all while gaining access to the flexibility and functionality of Drupal.

For a potentially much lower cost option, in four hours ($600) we can make a static archive of your old site, remove interactive features, add a link to the new site, place the old site at a subdomain, and configure your site to allow visitors looking for pages that exist on the old site but not on the new site to pass through and reach the old site.

We do not charge extra for hosting the static site.

Drutopia Membership, Hosting & Services $50/month or $500/year.

There will be no license fees for any software.

Agaric, founded in 2006, is a worker-owned web development cooperative headquartered in Boston (USA), with worker-owners also in Minneapolis and in Managua, Nicaragua. We help organizations meet their goals and strengthen the free software movement by providing consulting in online technology strategy, by building and customizing high quality software, by training people and by speaking at events. We use design justice principles to help your online presence meet your goals and make real world impact. We build with proven software that gives you power and control over your website and online presence. We use and contribute to libre software whenever possible, creative commons license our documentation, and work under an open organization model.

We look forward to creating a better website for building a better world with you!

The grocery store was open for a brief time, but it was never a cooperative. I know, because I joined as a member the day it first opened in 2017, on August 11. (I first e-mailed to ask about becoming a member ten months earlier, but that required meeting in person and this was the first time it was feasible.)

On 2018, June 12, after Wirth Cooperative Grocery had been closed for two months, I received my only formal communication as a member owner: an e-mail acknowledging that the store was closed, noting that the current grocery market is extremely competitive, and saying they had plans to re-open by the end of the month.

The e-mail did not ask for decisions. It did not ask for volunteers or help of any kind. While addressed to us as member owners, it did not afford us any opportunity to affect the future of the store. It did not provide any information on which we might try to act. Instead it told us to wait to be notified when an opening date was set. An opening date was never set.

Although I'm certain some staff and volunteers worked hard behind the scenes, from my perspective as a member owner the grocery store went down without a fight.

That's why it's so important for cooperatives to be true cooperatives. The seven cooperative principles aren't a "pick any three" sort of deal.

The first principle specifies that membership in a cooperative be open to all people willing to accept the responsibilities, but a person cannot accept responsibilities which aren't offered.

The second principle is democratic member control, but people cannot exercise direct control or hold representatives accountable without information and without a means to communicate with one another.

Likewise for the next three cooperative principles: the third, that members democratically control capital; the fourth, that external agreements preserve democratic control; and the fifth, that a cooperative educate, train, and inform members so they can contribute to it effectively. An organization with no mechanisms for discussion nor for democracy violates these principles, too.

Principles six and seven, cooperation among cooperatives and concern for community, are likely to be hollow without functioning internal democracy— and certainly cannot be realized if the business fails.

A cooperative can't exist only on good intentions.

When I hear this sentiment expressed by experienced cooperators—founders and developers of cooperatives—it usually means that there needs to be a solid business model for a cooperative, because a cooperative that isn't economically viable can't fulfill any of its goals.

A more fundamental meaning is that a business can't be a cooperative if it merely intends to be; it must act like a cooperative. Otherwise, it's just another business with some co-op lip service gloss— and given the greater success of cooperatives compared to other businesses it's less likely to be around as a business at all, if it does not live up to its cooperative principles.

I'm not trying to use technicalities to dodge counting the failed Wirth grocery store as a failure for "team cooperative". On the contrary, this is a wakeup call for everybody who supports cooperatives, one that must rouse us, because fully-functioning cooperatives are bigger than the cooperative movement. Cooperatives can prefigure true democracy. We need to show that economic democracy works in our voluntary organizations; we need to give people in a world which is already ruled unjustly, and threatening to spiral out of control, a promise and a practice for how whole communities can take collective control.

In my experience as a member owner, Wirth Cooperative Grocery was not a co-op beyond its name and some vague intentions. Now I know that my experience matched everyone else's, thanks to Cirien Saadeh's reporting, both last year and in the most recent issue of North News (an invaluable local non-profit enterprise).

What worries me, then, is that no one quoted in these articles called out this failure to meet the basic requirements of being a cooperative. Minneapolis and Minnesota have perhaps the highest rate of cooperative membership in the United States, with about half of all residents estimated to belong to at least one cooperative of one kind or another. If we, here, don't have the awareness and interest to note when a cooperative doesn't act like a cooperative, who will?

More important than calling out failures is providing pathways to success. There are many programs and organizations supporting cooperatives in Minnesota and beyond, but none put ensuring member control first.

The bias of my profession and my passion is to lead with an online tool: ensure member owners can communicate with one another. Although a technological fix can't solve political problems, people who are affected need a way to talk among themselves to come up with a solution.

Efforts like a local cooperative grocery are small enough that a Loomio group or any mailing list would mostly work for member owner discussion. A better software application would work for collaborative groups of any size: members would filter messages for quality without ceding control to any outside group. This self-moderation for groups of equals, including cooperatives, is a goal of Visions Unite.

Are you in a position to provide resources to cooperatives and other groups seeking to grow and be democratic? Are you starting or do you want to start a cooperative or group? Do you have other ideas on how to help new and established cooperatives live by the foundational cooperative principles? I would like to hear from you!

(Technically, there is one formatter each for text lists and for entity references, but all the options which In Other Words adds are the same for both.)

We can configure a separator between list items, a final join word, and whether to connect the final items with a comma (or semicolon or any other punctuation we can imagine for our list).

In all its glory in context:

 

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Accumsan hos si. Enim letalis minim suscipit valde valetudo vicis. Comis occuro torqueo ullamcorper. At blandit dolus haero hendrerit ille jus verto. Abluo at consequat immitto in olim sed volutpat. At nibh velit. Autem esse facilisis secundum sudo. At augue incassum quidne voco vulpes. Melior paratus scisco. Dignissim haero modo molior sed vereor vulpes.

 

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Agaric Technology Collective worker-owners have developed, maintained, and upgraded scores of Drupal sites; contributed to more than one hundred modules; and authored authoritative guides and documentation, including The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 and the aforementioned 31 Days of Drupal Migrations.

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We believe in the freedom to move our data to whichever platforms best meets our needs. For that reason, we specialize in helping people migrate onto liberating software such as Drupal— and helping you learn how to do the same.

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In previous posts, we introduced the concept of defining migrations as configuration entities. These types of migrations can be executed from a user interface provided by the Migrate Tools module. In today’s article, we will present the workflow to import configuration entities and execute migrations from the user interface. Let’s get started.

Important: User interfaces tend to change. In fact, Migrate Tools recently launched a redesign of the user interface. Screenshots and referenced on-screen text might change over time. Some exposed settings might work, but give no feedback indicating a successful outcome. Some forms might only work with specific versions of modules. The goal is to demonstrate what is possible and what are the limitations of doing so. In general, executing migrations from the command line offers a better experience.

Getting the example code

You can get the full code example for today’s example at https://github.com/dinarcon/ud_migrations The module to use is UD configuration group migration (JSON source) whose machine name is ud_migrations_config_group_json_source.  It comes with three migrations: udm_config_group_json_source_paragraph, udm_config_group_json_source_image, and  udm_config_group_json_source_node. Additionally, the demo module provides the udm_config_group_json_source group.

You could install the module as we have done with every other example in the series. Instructions can be found in this article. When the module is installed, you could execute the migrations using Drush commands as explained in this article. But, we are going to use the user interface provided by Migrate Plus instead.

Importing configuration entities from the user interface

The first step is getting the configuration entities into Drupal’s active configuration. One way to do this is by using the "Single item" import from the "Configuration synchronization" interface. It can be found at /admin/config/development/configuration/single/import. Four configuration items will be imported in the following order:

1. The udm_config_group_json_source using "Migration Group" as the configuration type.
2. The udm_config_group_json_source_image using "Migration" as the configuration type.
3. The udm_config_group_json_source_paragraph using "Migration" as the configuration type.
4. The udm_config_group_json_source_node using "Migration" as the configuration type.

When importing configuration this way, you need to select the proper "Configuration type" from the dropdown. Otherwise, the system will make its best effort to produce a valid configuration entity from the YAML code you paste in the box. This can happen without a visual indication that you imported the wrong configuration type which can lead to hard to debug errors.

Note: If you do not see the "Migration" and "Migration group" configuration types, you need to enable the Migrate Plus module.

Another thing to pay close attention is changes in formatting when pasting code from a different source. Be it GitHub, your IDE, or an online tutorial, verify that your YAML syntax is valid and whitespaces are preserved. A single extraneous whitespace can break the whole migration. For invalid syntax, the best case scenario is the system rejecting the YAML definition. Otherwise, you might encounter hard to debug errors.

In today’s example, we are going to copy the YAML definitions from GitHub. You can find the source files to copy here. When viewing a file, it is recommended to click the "Raw" button to get the content of the file in plain text. Then, copy and paste the whole file in the designated box of the "Single item" import interface. Make sure to import the four configuration entities in the order listed above using the proper type.

To verify that this worked, you can use the "Single item" export interface located at /admin/config/development/configuration/single/export. Select the "Configuration type" and the "Configuration name" for each element that was imported. You might see some extra keys in the export. As long as the ones you manually imported are properly set, you should be good to continue.

Note that we included uuid keys in all the example migrations. As explained in this article, that is not required. Drupal would automatically create a uuid when the configuration is imported. But defining one simplifies the update process. If you needed to update any of those configurations, you can directly visit the "Single item" import interface and paste the new configuration. Otherwise, you would have to export it first, copy the uuid value, and add it to the code to import.

Executing configuration entities from the user interface

With the migration related configuration entities in Drupal’s active configuration, you should be able to execute them from the user interface provided by Migrate Tools. It is available in  "Manage > Structure > Migration" at /admin/structure/migrate. You should see the UD Config Group (JSON source) that was imported in the previous step.

Note: If you do not see the "Migration" link in "Manage > Structure" interface, you need to enable the Migrate Tools module.

This user interface will list all the migration groups in the system. From there, you can get to the individual migrations. You can even inspect the migration definition from this interface. It is important to note that only migrations defined as configuration entities will appear in this interface. Migrations defined as code will not be listed.

For the udm_config_group_json_source group, click the "List migrations" button to display all the migrations in the group. Next, click the "Execute" button on the udm_config_group_json_source_image migration. Then, make sure "Import" is selected as the operation and click the "Execute" button. Drupal will perform the import operation for the image migration. A success status message will appear if things work as expected. You can also verify that images where imported by visiting the files listing page at /admin/content/files.

Repeat the same process for the udm_config_group_json_source_paragraph and udm_config_group_json_source_node migrations. The final result will be similar to the one from the JSON source example. For import operations, the system will check for migration dependencies and execute them advance if defined. That means that in this example, you could run the import operation directly on the node migration. Drupal will automatically execute the images and paragraphs migrations. Note that migration dependencies are only executed automatically for import operations. Dependent migrations will not be rolled back automatically if the main migration is rolled back individually.

This example includes a paragraph migrations. As explained in this article, if you rollback the node migration, any paragraph associated with the nodes will be deleted. The Migrate API will not be aware of this. To fix the issue and recover the paragraphs, you need to rollback the paragraph migration as well. Then you re-import the paragraph and node migrations again. Doing this from the user interface involves more manual steps compared to running a single Drush command in the terminal.

Limitations of the user interface

Although you can import and execute migrations from the user interface, this workflow comes with many limitations.The following is a list of some of the things that you should consider:

• Updating configuration in production environments is not recommended. This can be enforced using the Configuration Read-only mode module.
• If the imported configuration entity did not contain a uuid, you need to export that configuration to get the auto generated value. This should be used in subsequent configuration import operations if updates to the YAML definition files are needed. Otherwise, you will get an error like "An entity with this machine name already exists but the import did not specify a UUID."
• The following operations to not provide any user interface feedback if they succeeded: "Rollback", "Stop", and "Reset". See this issue for more context.
• As of this writing, most operations for CSV sources fail if using the 8.x-3.x branch of the Migrate Source CSV module. See this issue for more context.
• As of this writing, the user interface for renaming columns in CSV sources produces a fatal error if using the 8.x-3.x branch of the Migrate Source CSV module. See this issue for more context.
• As of this writing, it is not possible to execute all migrations in a group from the user interface in one operation. See this issue for more context.
• The Migrate source UI module can be used to upload a file to be used as source in CSV migrations. As of this writing, a similar feature for JSON and XML files is not working. See this issue for more context.

To reiterate, it is not recommended to use the user interface to add configuration related to migrations and execute them. The extra layer of abstractions can make it harder to debug problems with migrations if they arise. If possible, execute your migrations using the commands provided by Migrate Tools. Finally, it is recommended to read this article to learn more about the difference between managing migrations as code or configuration.

What did you learn in today’s blog post? Did you know you can import migration related configuration entities from the user interface? Did you know that Migrate Tools provides a user interface for running migrations? Share your answers in the comments. Also, I would be grateful if you shared this blog post with others.

Next: Understanding the entity_lookup and entity_generate process plugins from Migrate Tools

This blog post series, cross-posted at UnderstandDrupal.com as well as here on Agaric.coop, is made possible thanks to these generous sponsors. Contact Understand Drupal if your organization would like to support this documentation project, whether it is the migration series or other topics.

Overview

Code with confidence. Deploy without doubt. End-to-end testing provides you with the assurance that improvements to your site are not breaking anything else. And when changes do cause regressions, end-to-end tests point you to what needs to be fixed.

Behat makes it possible to set up end-to-end tests that can access Drupal's APIs for setup, context provisioning, and teardown.  And it does this with tests that can be read by project managers, product owners, and everybody else involved in the project, because each step is written in plain English.

This training will give you the setup that makes testing a realistic part of your day-to-day development.

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