Mediacurrent Dropcast: Episode 12

This episode, we have on special guest Jesus Olivas from FFW to talk about Drupal Console and his upcoming training at BADCamp. We also talk about the importance of the Drupal Association, and why YOU should sign up on their membership drive.

Mediacurrent is hiring and again YOU should come work with us. We completely blow off the Pro Project Pick because Mark has a grudge against Linkit and of course we have Drupal 8 News and Ryan’s Final Bell.

Episode 12 Audio Download Link

Updates:

See show notes and past episodes.
Subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher.
Most if not all of our articles come from TheWeeklyDrop, the best Drupal news and links delivered to your inbox every week, which we turn around and steal.
Mediacurrent is hiring.
Email your questions to: dropcast@mediacurrent.com

Community Updates:

Drupal Association membership drive.
Mediacurrent is hiring developers.

Mediacurrent Blog Mentions:

Drupal 8 RC1 has Launched - by Dave Terry
Converting a Drupal 7 theme from CSS to Sass - by Chris Doherty
Contrib Committee Status for September - by Damien McKenna

Interview with Special Guest Jesus Olivas

Follow Jesus on Twitter, Github, and Drupal.org

1. Can you describe what the Drupal Console project is for our listeners?

The official definition: The Drupal Console is a suite of tools that you run on a command line interface (CLI) to generate boilerplate code and interact with a Drupal 8 installation;
a CLI tool based on Symfony components, that uses modern PHP practices to generate code and interact with Drupal, it’s not only for sysadmins and it will be not only CLI => http://drupalgenerator.com

2. Why did you create Console? Why not Drush? How is Console different from Drush? Why the project was created?

Initially, we created it because we wanted to learn Drupal 8, and since the documentation was the code we found a need to generate code.
Based on previous experience building Symfony applications and using the generators provided by the framework, we decided to create a modern CLI tool based on the Symfony/Console and other third party libraries like Twig to generate code.

3. Why not Drush and how is it different?
The main difference with Drush is that we embrace the same modern OOP practices and principles you will find at Drupal and any other PHP modern application such as Symfony, Laravel, Silex.

We only support Drupal 8, because we really want to take advantage of what Drupal 8 provides out-of-the-box.

We are more than happy to collaborate and have a drush integration, actually I spent a couple of days working with Greg Anderson at Pantheon Offices and we wrote an integration.

I will share the PR, Call Drupal Console commands Natively from Drush. But that PR was not moving, we decided to keep working and adding features to have a more mature tool, fully feature out-of-the-box.

Finally I want to clarify: Drupal Console is not a Drupal module, it is a Symfony Application.

4. What's the best way to get started with the Console project?

if you have php 5.5.9, installed Drupal Console is quite easy we provide, because Drupal Console is an isolate application.

5. Can Console help you upgrade your Drupal 7 modules to Drupal 8?

Nope, you have the Drupal Module Upgrader.

6. Can Console help you learn Drupal 8 module development?

Sure and I am glad you asked this question. A few months ago, we added a feature to help people learn and understand Drupal 8. You can take advantage of this by passing the “--learning” option to the executed command, the project will do a verbose output including not only the generated code, using this a comment block will be added explaining the generated code. (Since the project is multilingual, this messages can use that feature and render on the user selected language)

But even without this feature, you still can learn Drupal 8 the old way, just by reading the generated code, which what developers used to do to learn, so the same old recipe is still working :P.

7. What is on the roadmap for Console? Can you give a tease about any new features coming up?

Remote command execution.
Site installation.
Increase code coverage. (we are almost halfway the road on this one)
Multi-site support.
Improve documentation and translations. (Most currently active translation Spanish, French, Hungarian, Romanian and Hindi -- Working slow Portuguese and Chinese)
Improve verbose code-output. (we want feedback from user where to add this feature)
Dummy content generation.
Config staging export/import.
Content staging export/import.
GUI for the CLI drupalgenerator.com using (ReactJS + ES6 + Material UI)

Audience questions:

8. Tell us about your podcast.
I chose the name before this Mediacurrent podcast, ok?

It is a Spanish Drupal-Symfony-Silex-Drupal and related web technologies podcast, so if you want to learn these topics and also Spanish join us at “drupodcast[dot]com”
We had Mario Hernandez from Mediacurrent invited. If any of you or any of your listeners speak Spanish and want to join us just ping me at @drupodcast.

9. I know you are leading a Drupal 8 module development training at BADCamp, are there spots still open?

Yes I am and the training is full already, but can probably do what we did last year with the Symfony 2 training and bring some extra chairs.