Coder Lounge - September 2014

This week's coder lounge saw us starting to look at VLAD. VLAD is a wrapper for a number of other tools and essentially allows the creation of a full development environment for Drupal websites. VLAD is an acronym for Vagrant, LAMP, Ansible and Drupal.

Vagrant is a tool for creating and provisioning virtual machines. LAMP is the web software stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Ansible is a tool for easily configuring systems and Drupal is a popular web content management system.

The purpose of VLAD is to give software developers a simple way of creating a standard development environment. All developers can then test the code they write in the same way on the same platform. It provides a development environment with tools like Solr, Varnish and HTTPS already preconfigured and ready to go. It also provides several testing tools which are often difficult to get working such as Xdebug and XHProf for debugging and performance testing.

VLAD is looking very promising and we have planned a series of lunchtime workshops to continue our testing of it to see how we can transition to using it instead of our standard method of a local installation of Acquia Dev Desktop.

Dan continued work on a Jira and Harvest unification plugin for companies which use Jira tools for project management and Harvest for time recording.

Mike also worked to get 7.x-1.1 and 6.x-1.1 releases of the Elastic Email module. This module allows the integration of the Elastic Email marketing tool with Drupal.

Chris was working on his project to provide cool data visulisations of the contributions to the Drupal 8 codebase. Read about the results here: https://www.deeson.co.uk/blog/data-visualisation-whos-making-drupal-8