Kalabox

As a Drupal developer, you may believe your spirit animal burrows somewhere between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. Mine resides in Backdrop. Let me tell you how I discovered it there. I saw Jen Lampton give a great session on Backdrop for the first time at Florida DrupalCamp 2014 and I really didn’t give it much thought. People were still yammering on about Drupal 8 and no one was adopting anything at the time. We were still trying to get people on Drupal 7. Flash forward to Spring 2016: Kalamuna won a small project through a nonprofit client in the San Francisco Bay Area. My dilemma: build the tiny site in Drupal 8, or do it with Drupal 7 (Panopoly and Kalatheme) — or go with Backdrop. I thought about it for a week and I landed on Backdrop. Here’s why: Read more

Two continents. Three Drupal events. One summer that would define the future of Drupal. This is a three-part series detailing the fantastic advances in the Drupal world that Kalamuna co-founder Alec Reynolds witnessed in his journeys to NYC Camp, GovCon in Washington DC, and Costa Rica Drupal Camp.

NYC Camp was about company mergers and Drupal in the context of other open-source technologies. And what better place to celebrate Drupal as part of a greater community of technologies than amongst the utopian art and blue-shirted guards of the United Nations building?

We were brought up to believe that a true friend does whatever he or she can to ease the suffering of daily life. Find out how Kalabox can bring joy back into your workflow and be the perfect companion for development life.

The Age of Kalabox 2 hath dawned. Our dev dungeon toil has come to sweet fruition and we have released the command line interface version. I’d like to highlight some of the new features of KB2 over its predecessor. More importantly, I’d like to call on developers and orgs to help us test the new release. Interested? Start using Kalabox 2 and post some issues on Git.

As many in the Drupal-verse know, we love using Pantheon to build and run our clients' websites. We’ve built our internal workflow around it, systematizing the process of migrating sites into the Pantheon system and creating Kalabox to allow developers to quickly download Pantheon-hosted sites onto their local work environments.

Crowdfunding isn’t about money. It’s about gathering people around a vision and inspiring them about what’s possible. Like getting a bunch of people on acid to see the same unicorn they’re all going to get to ride.

In my first year at Kalamuna, I’ve noticed that people here have a Thing about self-teaching. This may be a common trait among developers, or it might be something that brought the agency together. Noticing the tendency, I thought to ask everyone here to point out the most valuable summits, projects, and technologies from the past year -- the things that helped them most, and that, hopefully, will help you, too. The bits below are the cream of the crop.

1. The Aspiration Non Profit Development Summit (@aspirationtech)

Once upon a time, a Drupal shop owner hired a contractor for a project. The contractor signed papers, met the team, and then started work.

On the first day, the contractor’s invoice listed “local environment setup” as a line item.
On the second day, the contractor’s invoice listed “problems refreshing local environment” as a line item.
On the third day, the contractor’s invoice listed “fixing PHP version-related error” as a line item.

Are you a character in this story? Does it have a happy ending?

I’m proud to announce that we’re broadening access to Drupal development tools by creating Kalabox 2.0 -- now in the works. The new version, supported by a Kickstarter campaign (and hopefully, you!) will include technologies that will make it faster, easier to use, and accessible to a much wider user base.

As Drupal continues to become more complex and hyperspecialization produces significant gains in efficiency we need to ask ourselves: are we leaving people behind?

While it's true remarkable technologies like Vagrant, SASS/COMPASS, Drush, et al. have enabled professional services companies and experienced freelancers to provide higher quality goods at lower prices, it's equally true that in doing so we've erected even more daunting barriers to the newcomers and novices that are Drupal's current lifeblood and, ultimately, its future.