If you are following Drupal, you might already know that it is much easier to upgrade site to Drupal 9 from Drupal 8 as compared to Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. Yes, that is right.

In last year's Drupal Camp Pune, I gave a session on using Docksal for local development. Slides of the presentation can be found at https://www.slideshare.net/safknw/local-drupal-development-using-docksal.

I found a very good playlist of tutorials on React JS, it has bit size videos which are very good for learning at own pace. It has 68 videos in the as now. I watched about one-third of this and found it very useful. I highly recommed this to anyone who wants to learn about ReactJS.

I've recently migrated my site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. This was long overdue. I've used core migration module to migrate content, the delay is due to make a new theme, I could not decide what to do with the theme. After spending much time on finding a new theme, I finally decided to create a similar theme as previous with some changes. The new theme based on the Foundation framework, while D7 theme was based on adaptive base theme.

On July 26, OpenSuse project releases the latest version of OpenSuse distribution – OpenSuse Leap 42.3. It is powered by LTS kernel 4.4 with many features backported from a newer release, particularly related to latest hardware support. Among the key packages are gcc 4.8.5, KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS and Gnome version 3.20. Other desktop environments like XFCE or LxQt can be downloaded from repos. It shared the base with Suse Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service pack 3, so it is extremely stable and secure. Firefox version is 52 ESR (ESR is enterprise release channel) and LibreOffice 5.3.

Atom editor (or just Atom) is free and open source text and code editor build by GitHub. It is build using Chromium, nodejs, CoffeScript and Less. There are few other editors build using nodejs, second most popular project is Brackets. I've tried both and found Atom stable among two. Another advantage Atom has more plugins than Brackets. Recently I'm started to using it as alternate for Sublime Text. It has many plugins for Drupal also. I'm using the following plugins

Few months back I started using disqus commenting system on my site, so far my experience is good. Disqus is very is easy in install and configure. Download and install disqus module from Drupal.org enable it, get api key for your site from Disqus.com and that's it.

In the following blog post, I'm going to tell you how I set up my development environment. I hope people will find it useful.

Currently, my work is mostly focused on Drupal, but I've worked with C++, C#, and Asp.net. First I'm going to tell you about the general setup which is common for all technologies, after that I'll tell you about items specific to technologies.

To work with Drupal 8, we need Drush 7, which is in alpha stage of development. So there no package available for distribution (like Ubuntu, OpenSuse). Installation of Drush 7 is not as simple Drush 6, if you not familiar with composer, you may find it difficult to install, so I've written a shell script, which can be used to install Drush 7. This script install drush 7 for normal user, you don't need root access to run it.

Block is a very basic building block of any site. Blocks in Drupal 8 are very different from what we are using in d7. In D8 blocks are plugins (like ctool content type plugin) and also an entity. One more major improvement from site builder is that now you can have more than one instance of a block on the same page, all instances can have a different configuration, which was a nightmare in d7. In d7 to achieve this, you have to use either use panels or delta + context modules. Even in this way you can’t have a different configuration for each instance.