Today we are talking about Portals, Community Websites, and Drupal with guest Ron Northcutt. We’ll also cover Private Message as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/432

• Why are you passionate about community sites
• Different types of portals you’ve worked on
• Common features
• Why is Drupal a great fit
• Why would you choose Drupal over a Saas or PaaS
• What is unique about each community
• How important is UX
• What common content models do you see
• Most important tip

• Lego sorting
  • https://news.lugnet.com/storage/?n=709
  • https://brickarchitect.com/guide/bricks/
• PHPBB
• discourse
• Open Social
• Monday

Ron Northcutt - community.appsmith.com rlnorthcutt

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu

• Module name/project name:
  • Private Message
• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to include a full-fledged, ajaxified system for private messages between users on your Drupal site? There’s a module for that
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Apr 2017 by Jaypan, a fellow Canadian, but the most recent release is by Lucas Hedding, who hails from Nicaragua, and is a prolific contrib maintainer in his own right
  • Versions available: 8.x-2.0-beta18 and 3.0.0 versions available, the latter of which works with D9 and 10
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release in Oct 2023
  • Number of open issues: 130, 4 of which are bugs on the 3.0.x branch
  • Test coverage
• Documentation: does have a handbook, though the pages seem to date back to 2017, so hopefully the installation and setup hasn’t changed too much since then
• Usage stats:
  • Almost 2,000 sites
  • Maintainer(s):
• Module features and usage
  • With the Private Message module installed, users on your site can have permissions-based access to send private messages to each other
  • Messages and threads are fieldable entities, and in general the module is made to be highly configurable, so you can tailor it to meet your site’s specific needs
  • That includes the frequency for asynchronous operations like loading new messages, which can be done without a full page refresh. There’s also a companion module to use Node.js for the asynchronous operations, to reduce load on both the browser and the server
  • That also allows for browser push notifications, or you can use the integration with the Message module to send notifications via email, SMS, and more, including aggregating the notifications into digests
  • Companies often have a dedicated messaging solution like Slack or Teams that they use internally, but this can be a good solution for an extranet or vendor portal, where the users may represent a variety of organizations
  • It’s also worth mentioning that both Private Message and Message are included in the Open Social distribution, so that could be a way to try out a preconfigured setup

Recently, Randy Fay of the DDEV project blogged about two new Docker providers available (and supported by DDEV) for MacOS: Rancher Desktop and OrbStack. Both of these join Colima and Docker Desktop as supported Docker providers for DDEV on MacOS. 

What is a Docker provider?

I know that I certainly have asked this question - more times than I care to admit. As Randy explains in the blog post:

All of the Docker Providers on every platform (except Linux) are actually wrappers on the open-source Docker/Moby project, which is supported by Docker, Inc.

In other words, in order for DDEV to talk to Docker, it needs a provider. But, not all Docker providers are created equal. Neither Docker Desktop nor OrbStack are open-source - both have free versions (with restrictions); for most commercial use cases, there is a cost involved. Colima and Rancher Desktop are both open-source.

Features vary between Docker providers as well, so it only makes sense that performance differences also exist. Fortunately, Randy has written another blog post summarizing the performance differences between the various Docker providers on MacOS.

tl;dr if you have Mutagen enabled with DDEV, then they're all pretty fast, with OrbStack having the edge.

Why switch Docker providers?

While Colima is (IMHO) heads-and-tails better than Docker Desktop for Mac, upgrading Colima itself has been a bit of a rocky road. I have learned to never assume that my databases will remain intact during a Colima upgrade. This usually isn't a deal-breaker, but for me, it is squarely in the inconvenience category.

I'm hoping that the situation is smoother with Rancher Desktop.

Getting started with Rancher Desktop

As I (currently) use DDEV on MacOS with Colima (and Mutagen enabled,) I decided to give Rancher Desktop a try, as it is an open-source option. 

Using the instructions provided by the DDEV project, I downloaded Rancher Desktop from the official site. A bit surprisingly, the recommended installation method was not Homebrew, but rather a bit of an old-school MacOS .dmg file.

After downloading Rancher Desktop (but before installing it,) the steps I took to install and change over from Colima began with:

Next, I double-clicked to install Rancher Desktop - making sure to uncheck the "Kubernetes" checkbox as the DDEV instructions suggested. I didn't touch any other settings during the Rancher Desktop install.

Once that was installed, I restarted my Terminal app, then navigated to one of my DDEV projects.

If you haven't used it before, the docker context use rancher-desktop bit basically tells Docker which provider to use. In other words, you can have multiple providers installed (like I do with Colima and Rancher Desktop) and switch between them using the docker context use command.

With that, installation was complete. 

My experience with Rancher Desktop

In short: uneventful (in a good way)

I didn't have any issues at all - it all went very smoothly. From a performance standpoint, Drupal 10 sites feel a little bit snappier than with Colima, but this is purely qualitative, not quantitative. 

The (minor) downside

When switching Docker providers, while project code isn't touched, unfortunately, project databases don't automatically come along. In his blog post, Randy suggests using ddev snapshot --all as an initial step in the process to back up all databases. I tend to take a more piecemeal approach - individually exporting databases while using Colima, then importing them while using Rancher Desktop. For example, here's my process for moving a database from Colima to Rancher Desktop (assuming my system is currently using Rancher Desktop):

Granted, it's a bit wordy, but it works for me.

So, Orbstack?

At the present time, I have no plans to test-drive Orbstack. While Randy's blog post does indicate I would experience a minor performance boost, at this time, I'd rather just stick with an open-source solution.

One of our Professional Module Development course graduates, Jay Volk, recounted his recent experience with Orbstack:

My experience is that OrbStack is really fast and while not open source (it's $8/mo.) it seems well worth the cost and I'm happy to support this project.  Orbstack will take your existing Docker settings and move them to Orbstack when starting up (it asks your permission.) This proved to be no problem for DDEV but occasionally causes problems with the other solution I sometimes need, Lando.  Easy enough, Docker can reclaim settings back from OrbStack and with a Docker restart you're good to go again with that (albeit slower) solution.

Conclusion

I wrote the first draft of this blog post about 2 weeks ago - since then I've stuck with Rancher Desktop and have no plans to go back to Colima. I'm pretty sure the performance is a bit better than Colima and I've had absolutely zero issues. The real test (for me at least) will be when it comes time to update Rancher Desktop - assuming it is a smooth experience, I doubt I'll be returning to Colima. 

Header image generated by ChatGPT-4 using the prompt: "Create a cartoon image of a cowboy lassoing a giant laptop computer using 2:1 aspect ratio". If someone could identify the two flying objects to the right of the laptop, I'd be most appreciative.

The Goal

Core Drupal Commerce provides Order Receipt functionality. An Order Receipt is an email notification sent to a customer when an order is placed. It lets the customer know that the order has been received and includes a summary of the order. For each Order Type, you can turn order receipts on/off and, if enabled, specify that a copy be sent to a specific recipient.

The Goal

Administrative users creating and updating orders in the backend may want to:

• Preview the order receipt before emailing customers.
• Send a copy of the order receipt to an email address other than the contact email address for the order.

Developers may want to:

• Preview the order receipt for testing purposes when working on environments with outgoing emails disabled

A Solution

We can add a button to the right of the existing, "Resend receipt" button that appears on Order View pages, like this:

The Goal

Drupal Commerce order types can be configured to email the customer a receipt when an order is placed, with or without a BCC copy sent to a specified email address. Additionally, administrative users can use a "Resend receipt" button to send a receipt to the contact email address set for the order; no copy is sent to an additional email address.

When re-sending an order receipt, administrative users may want to:

The Goal

When a store has customers that are businesses or institutional, the standard Address field properties and formatting may not align well with actual billing and shipping addresses. For example, a business address may not include the customer's first and last name as the first line; instead, an organizational name may be used. If a contact name is included, it may be an "Attention" line. Additionally, businesses may require a line with reference or purchase order number.

The Visual Layout Suite module is a great improvement of the core editorial experience leveraging Layout Builder and many contrib modules. Basicailly, it enables Layout Builder, depends on several contrib modules that improves Layout Builder and ads its custom magic.

One of the most important features is the use of utility classes allowing the configuration of the look and feel easily from the frontend with an instant preview. Additionally, it allows to restrict the utility classes a user can use, so the user is not overwhelmed by the extra options and also the look and feel of the page can be limited to be compliant with the style guide of the site. New utility classes can be easily added and components can be configured to only use a reduced set of utility classes to un clutter the UI.

VLSuite integrates with any Drupal component that integrates with Layout Builder and more: entity fields, paragraphs, Views, SDC, medias, etc. And there's no dependency on any theme, external service or certain entities. The only soft dependency is a Bootstrap 5 theme to enjoy all the VLSuite features out of the box. However, you can use any theme as long as it provides the utility classes you require. T

All the previous information means you could add VLSuite to an existing site with minimal…

Since Drupal 8, there has been a mostly smooth migration path between major versions, so you can upgrade from 8 to 9 to 10 relatively easily.

One bump in the road can be the availability of modules for the new version. Drupal 8 and 9 were only supported for a year after the release of their successors, which didn’t help. While quite a lot of modules had a release supporting the next version quickly, there seemed to be quite a few that were very slow to update, and quite a few sites were waiting for one or two modules to release compatible versions before being able to upgrade. I think there are…

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