Ian Luckraft - Software Engineer

Stepping back to move forward with ReactJS

October 20, 2017
Web Development
decoupled drupal, Drupal, ReactJS

I’ve been using ReactJS as I have been exploring Headless / Decoupled Drupal and have so far found it to be very nice to work with. However, as I am not overly familar with it I’ve found myself looking up lots of things to ensure I’m doing it “the React way”. This has meant I’ve been doing more React learning than I have Drupal learning. My solution is to go back to an existing Drupal 7 project where I have a custom piece of search functionality and replicate it using JSON feeds provided by Drupal and a ReactJS frontend. ...

Headless / Decoupled Drupal 8

October 4, 2017

I’ve been lucky enough to attend DrupalCon Dublin and DrupalCon Vienna, at both of these events there has been a lot of talk about Headless / Decoupled Drupal and in particular using a JavaScript framework as a frontend for your site. Since then Dries has followed up with a blog post confirming that there will be attempts to include the React Framework in core. Inspird by this I decided to start trying out Headless / Decouple Drupal. ...

Headless / Decoupled Drupal 8 First Go

October 4, 2017
Uncategorized
decoupled drupal, drupal8, headless drupal

The installation of a minimal Drupal setup is very quick and easy. From there I enabled a few modules and a theme to help me create some data. Modules enabled Field UI Image Views View UI RESTful Web Services I also installed the Devel module to help with dummy content population of my content type Article. A common function of a website is to list content in an order, newest items or most relevant, and paginate this list. ...

Testing SSL certificates without a domain name

June 27, 2016
Uncategorized

Recently at Headscape we were setting up a new server ready to launch a redesign of a site. Whilst testing we were accessing the site using the server’s IP address which works fine for checking everything is working, apart from when we needed to install the SSL certificate. The SSL certificate is based on a domain name so going to an IP address causes the SSL certificate to warn of an insecure connection. ...

Drupal Commerce, TeamCity and Git Submodules

June 17, 2015
Uncategorized

At Headscape we use TeamCity as our Continuous Integration server and I recently came across an error when trying to build Drupal Commerce Kickstart. The main parts of the error message were Failed to build patch for build... due to error: 'build patch' command failed. stderr: The repository has a submodule in the commit '77b28273d1ebb08fd03ee254bbb20b6b476d16ec' at a path 'profiles/commerce_kickstart/libraries/jquery.bxslider', but has no .gitmodules configuration at the root directory To fix this I needed a list of the submodules which I found using a command given in this Stack Overflow thread ...

Enjoying getting it wrong

March 4, 2015
Web Development

This post also appears on the Headscape site as part of our blog. During my teens and twenties I spent a lot of time skateboarding. It’s quite a unique sport in the way it influences your life as a whole. For example, you begin to look at architecture in a new creative way. You also fall over, a lot. In fact you get really good at falling over: jump down ten steps roll across the concrete, hop up and do it again. ...

Boagworld article Do people see you as a roadblock

February 1, 2015
My work, Web Development

Paul Boag has recently posted an article titled “Do people see you as a roadblock?” that includes some very nice mentions about me. So in a shameless act of self promotion I’m going to link to it. You can read the article at https://boagworld.com/dev/do-people-see-you-as-a-roadblock/

Codeception Database Helper

May 15, 2014
Uncategorized

I’ve been using Codeception for some acceptance testing recently. The project has a large database and using the standard Codeception database module that rebuilds the entire DB from an SQL dump was too slow. All I needed to do was run a few queries to put some tables into a known state. I made a helper module that will run all .sql files in a directory. I’ve put the DbHelper on Github and hopefully it will be useful for others. ...

Guesting on Modules Unraveled Podcast

January 4, 2014
Uncategorized

At Headscape we were recently contacted by Brian Lewis from Modules Unraveled Podcast to see if we would like to appear on the show to discuss our use of Drupal. It was really great to have a chat with Brian and there were a few questions sent in by Twitter users who were watching the live stream. You can listen to episode 90 on the Modules Unraveled website.

Moving on from the MBA to Headscape

February 25, 2013
Uncategorized

I have been working for The Marine Biological Association for close to five years now but the time has come to move on. I’m very proud to say I will be working for Headscape where I’m sure I will learn lots and continue to progress as a developer. In the five years since I started the web and my skills have progressed exponentially. It’s been fun and nostalgic to talk about the early days and see how far the sites and applications have come since I began working with the MBA. ...