Last week, TheDropTimes (TDT) was able to publish two interviews. In one of those interviews, Holmes Consulting Group founder Robbie Holmes mentioned a concept. 

Many management professionals might know and practice it. But for me, it was new. I am not a management guy, and such concepts seldom graced my reading list. Listening to what others say has helped me, and I can also say the same about watching Alethia’s interview with Robbie. 

The concept he shared is not new. Isaiah Berlin proposed it in his 1953 essay, ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History’; later, Jim Collins developed it in his book, ‘Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap, and Others Don’t.’ The core theme of this book is that greatness is not primarily a function of circumstance but largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.

How Jim Collins describes the hedgehog concept intrigued me. He begins with Berlin’s adaptation of the ancient greek parable, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Jim tries to teach us how to find that one big thing. It is by placing your business in the intersectional area of three thought circles:

1. What you are deeply passionate about.
2. What you can be the best in the world at.
3. What drives your economic or resource engine. 

Jim explains that transformation from good to great comes about by a series of good decisions made consistently with a Hedgehog Concept, supremely well executed, accumulating one upon another over a long period. 

Pardon my audacity in pushing this concept again. But what I saw after going through it is that we at TDT can excel in creating more and more good-to-great interviews with the fantastic people working around Drupal and related projects with your active help. Also, we urge the Drupal agencies to find their one big thing and excel in it. 

As I mentioned, you can watch our interview video with Robbie Holmes here. The other interview we published last week was with Chris Wells, the co-lead of Project Browser Initiative. Chris is the founder of Redfin Solutions. You can read the interview here. We made both conversations as part of DrupalCamp NJ. 

As for other stories from last week, here are a comprehensive list:

Drupal Developer Days Vienna has started accepting session proposals. MidCamp is happening next month, and here is how you can help organize the camp. OpenSource North Conference has announced the lineup of speakers. Drupal Netherlands opened the sale of early bird tickets for Drupaljam 2023 in June. You may submit sessions to DrupalCon Lille until April 24. Drupal Camping Wolfsburg treats all sponsors as gold sponsors. DrupalSouth Wellington has put out a call for volunteers. You can submit sessions for DrupalCamp Asheville 2023 until April 25. Both DrupalCamp NJ and NERD Summit are over. DrupalCon Pittsburgh is looking for a launch sponsor or co-working space sponsor. 

Drupal Community Working Group has asked Drupalers to nominate candidates for Aaron Winborn Award 2023, and you have only five more days to do that. Kanopi and Pantheon have announced a joint webinar on Drupal 7 to 10 migration. Salsa Digital has started a blog series on ‘Rules as code insights.’ SFDUG is hosting a Technical Writing Workshop on April 13. We revisited a blog post from HTML Panda from May 2022, comparing WordPress and Drupal. A Drupal distribution focussed on the publishing industry, ‘Thunder CMS 7’ based on Drupal 10, published its beta release. Von Eaton, Director of Programs in Drupal Association, addressed the ‘Back to Work for Women’ program conducted by ICFOSS and supported by Zyxware. 

That is for the week, folks; thank you. 

Sincerely, 
Sebin A. Jacob
Editor-in-Chief

Aegir5 and Kubernetes Lately we’ve been working with clients ranging from large Canadian government departments to small commercial SaaS companies, who have asked us to deploy CMS apps to Kubernetes (K8S) clusters running on Openstack. In spite of our continued feeling that most of the time Kubernetes Won’t Save You, we’ve found it to be surprisingly useful in certain contexts. In fact, we’ve started to think that K8S will prove an extremely valuable backend to plug in to our existing Aegir5 front-end and queue system.

Introduction

Choosing a team's new Jira test management tool can be challenging, as one needs to consider a few key factors. The ideal test management tool should include test automation and observation testing. It should be easy to use, have robust test management capabilities, and have an efficient user interface.

A Glance at Tome - Drupal static content generator Editor Fri, 03/17/2023 - 15:13

Creating a completely static HTML website is quite a challenging process unless you use a static content generator. Tome is developed to make it as easy as possible with any site on Drupal.
Like any CMS, it provides a set of templates and automatically helps to create pages, avoiding a long and complicated manual setup. You don't even need to know Java to use it. Just a perfect match if you're creating content based on raw data and a website template set.
Static sites are perfect for SEO and SEA. Using a static content generator gives some severe benefits to your site, including better performance, a lighter backend, and multiple options for customization. Moreover, static sites are more flexible, secure, and scalable than dynamic types. Let's learn more about static website generators and Tome with our Drupal development team.

Create accessible websites with Drupal neerajskydiver Mon, 03/20/2023 - 03:00

Use the open source Drupal CMS to create accessible websites that provide open access to everyone.

As the world becomes increasingly digital, it’s more important than ever to ensure that websites are accessible to everyone. Accessibility is about designing websites that can…

The Metatag Module Set up your Drupal site's meta tags along with specifying how your social media will appear when linking to pages, along with Schema information in one powerful Drupal module. Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/17/2023 - 18:19

How to Add Default Metatags for a Specific Content Type

So you've got your Metatag module installed and defaults configured for the Global, Front page, and Content. However, you want slightly different meta tags for several of your content types. Here's how you do that.

Tracy Cooper Fri, 03/17/2023 - 17:43

How to Add Meta Tag Fields to Your Content Types in Drupal

So you have your Meta tag module installed and all the default meta tags configured. However, you still need to tweak the meta tags for a specific page, but the meta tag fields aren't showing up in the edit interface. Here's how to get those to show up for the various content types.

Go to Manage > Structure > Content Types. This displays the Content types listing page. 

Tracy Cooper Fri, 03/17/2023 - 16:50

On behalf of Acquia I’m currently working on Drupal’s next big leap: Automatic Updates & Project Browser — both are “strategic initiatives”.

In November, I started helping out the team led by Ted Bowman that’s been working on it non-stop for well over 1.5 years (!): see d.o/project/automatic_updates. It’s an enormous undertaking, with many entirely new challenges — as this post will show.

For a sense of scale: more people of Acquia’s “DAT” Drupal Acceleration Team have been working on this project than the entire original DAT/OCTO team back in 2012!

The foundation for both will be the (API-only, no UI!) package_manager module, which builds on top of the php-tuf/composer-stager library. We’re currently working hard to get that module committed to Drupal core before 10.1.0-alpha1.

Over the last few weeks, we managed to solve almost all of the remaining alpha blockers (which block the core issue that will add package_manager to Drupal core, as an alpha-experimental module. One of those was a random test failure on DrupalCI, whose failure frequency was increasing over time!

A rare random failure may be acceptable, but at this point, ~90% of test runs were failing on one or more of the dozens of Kernel tests … but always a different combination. Repeated investigations over the course of a month had not led us to the root cause. But now that the failure rate had reached new heights, we had to solve this. It brought the team’s productivity to a halt — imagine what damage this would have done to Drupal core’s progress!

A combination of prior research combined with the fact that suddenly the failure rate had gone up meant that there really could only be one explanation: this had to be a bug/race condition in Composer itself, because we were now invoking many more composer commands during test execution.

Once we changed focus to composer itself, the root cause became obvious: Composer tries to ensure the temporary directory is writable and avoids conflicts by using microtime(). That function confusingly can return the time at microsecond resolution, but defaults to mere milliseconds — see for yourself.

With sufficiently high concurrency (up to 32 concurrent invocations on DrupalCI!), two composer commands could be executed on the exact same millisecond:

// Check system temp folder for usability as it can cause weird runtime issues otherwise Silencer::call(static function () use ($io): void { $tempfile = sys_get_temp_dir() . '/temp-' . md5(microtime()); if (!(file_put_contents($tempfile, __FILE__) && (file_get_contents($tempfile) === __FILE__) && unlink($tempfile) && !file_exists($tempfile))) { $io->writeError(sprintf('PHP temp directory (%s) does not exist or is not writable to Composer. Set sys_temp_dir in your php.ini', sys_get_temp_dir())); } }); — src/Composer/Console/Application.php in Composer 2.5.4

We could switch to microtime(TRUE) for microseconds (reduce collision probability 1000-fold) or hrtime() (reduce collision probability by a factor of a million). But more effective would be to avoid collisions altogether. And that’s possible: composer always runs in its own process.

Simply changing sys_get_temp_dir() . '/temp-' . md5(microtime()); to sys_get_temp_dir() . '/temp-' . getmypid() . '-' . md5(microtime()); is sufficient to safeguard against collisions when using Composer in high concurrency contexts.

So that single line change is what I proposed in a Composer PR a few days ago. Earlier today it was merged into the 2.5 branch — meaning it should ship in the next version!

Eventually we’ll be able to remove our work-around. But for now, this was one of the most interesting challenges along the way :)

• Acquia
• Drupal
• open source
• performance

International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), Kerala partnered with Zyxware Technologies to offer Drupal training for women who had career breaks owing to various reasons. This was the fifth edition of the program titled Back to Work for Women. The 15 day program started on March 01 and will end on March 19, 2023.