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This year’s Arts in the Heart of Augusta was not hurricane plagued the way last year’s was, and was a great weekend of good food, performances, and generally great chances to take pictures. Each year opens with a parade to celebrate the diverse set of communities that have settled in and around Augusta. Drummers from the Chinese community welcomed everyone to the annual opening parade. Representatives from various communities waiting their turn. Children from the Lebanese community. And at the end of the parade everyone dances. ...

After a couple months off, SC DUG met this month with a presentation on super cheap Drupal hosting. Chris Zietlow from Mindgrub, Will Jackson from Kanopi Studios, and I all gave short talks very cheap ways to host Drupal 8. Chris opened by talking about using AWS Micro servers. Will shared a solution using a Raspberry Pi for a fully wireless server. I closed the discussion with a review of using Drupal Tome on Netlify. ...

Drupal Tome is a static site generator distribution of Drupal 8. It provides mechanisms for taking an entire Drupal site and exporting all the content to HTML for direct service. As part of a recent competition at SCDUG to come up with the cheapest possible Drupal 8 hosting, I decided to do a proof-of-concept level implementation of Drupal 8 with Docksal for local content editing, and Netlify for hosting (total cost was just the domain registration). ...

Pantheon is an excellent hosting service for both Drupal and Wordpress sites. But to make their platform work and scale well they have a number of limits built into the platform. These include process time limits and memory limits. While they are large enough for the majority of projects, large projects can have trouble. For data loading their official answer is typically to copy the database to another server, run your job there, and copy the database back onto their server. That’s fine if you can afford to freeze updates to your production site. And have the time to setup a process to mirror changes into your temporary copy. And can afford some additional project overhead. But sometimes those things are not an option. Or the data load takes too long, or happens too often, for that to be practical on a regular basis. ...

I recently had reason to switch over to using Docksal for a project, and on the whole I really like it as a good easy solution for getting a project specific Drupal dev environment up and running quickly. But like many dev tools the docs I found didn’t quite cover what I wanted because they made a bunch of assumptions. Most assumed either I was starting a generic project or that I was starting a Pantheon specific project – and that I already had Docksal experience. In my case I was looking for a quick emergency replacement environment for a long-running Pantheon project. ...

For this month’s SC DUG, Mauricio Orozco from the South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs shared his notes and lessons learned during his first DrupalCon North America. We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations, try out heavily revised versions, and test out new ideas with a friendly audience. If you want to see a polished version checkout our group members’ talks at camps and cons. So if some of the content of these videos seems a bit rough please understand we are all learning all the time and we are open to constructive feedback. ...

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Hague Appeal for Peace and everything that happened (and didn’t) as part of that event and since, I decided to post some of my pictures from that adventure. In my post on being an activist back in March I mentioned attending the Hague Appeal and the peace walk that followed. I was part of a delegation from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting; a group mostly made up of college students and a few older high school students, along with a few adults who handled the logistics and kept us on track more or less. ...

For a project I’ve been working on recently we had need to create a module that provides secure redirects from a Drupal site to FormAssembly. Overall the module does a number of things, but handling dynamic parameter signing was the thing that took the most time. FormAssembly provides a variety of great features for creating flexible forms that integrate with Salesforce. One of the more popular features is its ability to pull data from Salesforce to prefill fields on a form. But the downside is that it is easy to create forms that leak information from Salesforce into those forms, and create privacy risks. ...

On Valentines Day this year my wife and I spent a few hours at DSS for a meeting related to some of the children we work with in the Guardian ad Litem program. In the course of a rather tense conversation a caseworker tossed out “Well, I am not an activist.” with the clear intention of implying that I am, and that activists are a problem. It is the first time I can recall being called an Activist as an insult, and I’ve been a bit hung up on the topic ever since. ...

For the SC DUG meeting this month Will Jackson from Kanopi Studios gave a talk about using Docksal for local Drupal development. Will has the joy of working with some of the Docksal developers and has become an advocate for the simplicity and power Docksal provides. We frequently use these presentations to practice new presentations, try out heavily revised versions, and test out new ideas with a friendly audience. If you want to see a polished version checkout our group members’ talks at camps and cons. So if some of the content of these videos seems a bit rough please understand we are all learning all the time and we are open to constructive feedback. ...