How we fixed the perpetual hook_update_N merge conflict problem
If you work on a Drupal site with a development team, you've probably run into merge conflicts created by using the same update number. (E.g. developer 1 creates custom_module_update_7013 in one branch, and developer 2 creates the same update function in another branch) Wouldn't it be nicer if updates used machine names instead, or indeed almost anything besides incremented integers?
Manage meeting room availability and take bookings with BAT for Drupal
We put together extensive documentation on how to use BAT, using a meeting room availability and booking example throughout. This is one of the most often requested features - especially from libraries and educational institutions - so we hope you will find it useful. We hope this will help and would love to hear your thoughts - get in touch.
Booking and Availability Management Tools Beta Release and Roadmap
Our Booking and Availability Management Tools have reached beta release stage. This means that we have covered all the main features for the 1.0 version of the library and we will now focus on bug fixes and UI improvements as well as developing documentation and a more comprehensive test suite.
The BAT PHP library is now version while the Drupal module is at .
Speeding up Behat tests for Drupal on the Travis environment
Background
Implementing continuous integration of behaviorally-driven tests is a fairly heavy-weight process. In order to run a comprehensive battery of test cases, it’s necessary to set up a complete testing environment for each commit. This involves things like:
- downloading:
- a browser executable
- drush
- Drupal core
- all dependent modules
- Behat itself
- Selenium
- installing Drupal
- instantiating an HTTP server
Making this process as efficient as possible has many benefits, including preserving shared resources for public repos (or your money, for private repos!) and speeding up one’s entire development workflow. Below we will describe some of the tactics we employ to make testing on Travis faster.
Building a JIRA team planning app with BAT for Drupal
Last week we released BAT - our Bookings and Availability Management toolkit as well as a Drupal module for BAT.
We are using BAT to build the new version of our Rooms module as well as other products. However, BAT is much more than an engine for nightly bookings. It also allows us to build any sort of booking / resource management tool. So we asked: "What would it take to build a resource management tool to manage ourselves?". We have previously used a tool called , and while it is a wonderful tool, we wanted to build something that integrated tightly with our project planning and issue tracking tool, Jira.
The result actually impressed us. We thought it would be a useful exercise, but we didn't anticipate getting a tool that we could use daily this early in the game. Read on for some of the details of what we did.
Introducing BAT - Booking and Availability Management for... Everything
Towards the end of October 2015 we announced a broader vision for our company. Roomify aims to provide the tools that will allow anyone to manage the booking and availability of resources - whatever those may be. We consider this a core component of an open sharing economy platform.
After that announcement, we went to work. We kept our head down, the coffee (and tea) flowing and focused on what needed to be done to achieve this goal. Today we are thrilled to announce that BAT is ready to be downloaded and tested more widely.
Re-using the repeating date field widget in custom Drupal forms
As part of our work on Rooms Tours, (coming soon!) we wanted to give users the ability to quickly and easily input regular tour dates/times. This is a quick overview of how you can easily get this in Drupal using the widget that comes from the Date module.
Vacation Rentals, Hotels, B&Bs, Multiple Properties and Booking with Drupal.. oh my!
It’s now just over three months since roomify launched. We’ve been enjoying the process immensely, despite the inevitable frustration of trying to set up everything that a business requires. What has kept us going is the satisfaction of hitting product milestones, and hearing back from users and clients about how our products are helping them. (We also like getting paid - that’s awesome too!).
As such, we are particularly pleased to share this update with you.
Object-Oriented Forms in Drupal 7
While working on a channel management plugin for Drupal Rooms, (beta coming soon!) I had a couple of interesting requirements to satisfy. Many booking service providers use the iCal standard in a way that is generically similar, but we wished to be able to support differences in implementation or capabilities between services.