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Simplify the installation of Drupal modules with Project Browser

opensource.com - Wed, 12/14/2022 - 16:00
Simplify the installation of Drupal modules with Project Browser Nadiia Nykolaichuk Wed, 12/14/2022 - 03:00

Drupal's modular structure lets you extend your website with an endless array of features. Then again, discovering the right module and installing it on your website can be a challenging task for beginners or non-developers.

That's where the Project Browser initiative comes into play!

Project Browser is one of the most exciting initiatives for Drupal. It is intended to make the platform genuinely easy for everyone. Read on to discover what the project goals are, why we're excited about it, how Project Browser works, and when you might see it in Drupal core.

Why Project Browser?

The initiative is aimed at providing an easy process for discovering and installing contributed modules directly from the Drupal admin dashboard with the click of a button. This means you don't have to go to Drupal.org or elsewhere. It is one of the key Drupal strategic initiatives that determine the priorities for the platform's development.

The easy discovery and installation of modules should empower people who are new to Drupal, as well as "ambitious site builders" — a category of Drupal users, often mentioned by Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert, as a strategically important user persona.

Project Browser should eliminate complicated steps and provide more consistency in the process of extending Drupal websites. Leslie Glynn, the co-lead of the Project Browser strategic initiative, said the following as part of the Driesnote at 2022's DrupalCon Portland:

I've been working with Drupal beginners for more than 10 years doing trainings and mentoring at contribution days. I saw firsthand the struggles that folks face once they install Drupal and want to then add functionality. Taking folks to the terminal is hard, the current drupal.org extend page is overwhelming, it's complex, and there's not a lot of consistency across the project pages. I was super excited to learn about this strategic initiative to make browsing for projects easier.

A good comparison, made by Leslie at DrupalCon Prague was the example of a visit to a grocery store where a shopper is faced with "hundreds and hundreds" of different types of cereal.

How does the individual know which box of cereal or which module to choose if there are something like 60,000 cereal boxes (contributed modules) on offer? Folks need to have some direction with a path to enable them to narrow down their search. Finally, they need a "checkout" — clear and easy steps to install the chosen module on their website and have no worries about version compatibility.

Image by:

(Leslie Glynn, CC BY-SA 4.0)

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Making it easier for users to browse for great modules also helps the community highlight and recommend these great modules and, in doing so, attract more people to Drupal. At his DrupalCon Portland keynote, Dries Buytaert said:

People don't really know about these things unless they go to an event or hear somebody else talk about it. And we are even losing people because once they install Drupal core they don't know where to go next. We have an opportunity to make this a lot easier and actually to promote some of these great innovations, we can stand behind them. And the solution obviously is the Project Browser.

How Project Browser works

Project Browser provides a user interface (UI) for browsing contributed Drupal modules with a set of useful features to optimize the process. At the OPEN WEB COMMUNITY - Project Browser Initiative: Where We're At session of DrupalCon Prague, the initiative's co-lead, Chris Wells, shared the minimum viable product (MVP) for Project Browser. It includes the following:

  • Enables users to browse for modules compatible with their website's Drupal version

  • Filters modules by category

  • Adds advanced filtering

  • Provides instructions for downloading and installing modules via Composer*

*Composer is the software package manager that ensures all the right software libraries are installed to run Drupal core and other modules.

However, according to Chris, they are very close to making it possible to download modules automatically for users, with Composer running behind the scenes. For this purpose, they have a separate experimental branch. This means that the work is being done on the functionality that will allow Project Browser users to do without Composer in module installation.

The latest demo of Project Browser at DrupalCon Prague by Srishti Bankar, a Project Browser contributor, showed the module in action. The new Browse tab stands out on the Extend page of the Drupal admin dashboard.

Image by:

(Leslie Glynn, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Project Browser's UI gives you suggestions for contributed modules based on filtering and sorting features. The default sorting is by usage, which means that the most popular modules show up first.

Image by:

(Leslie Glynn, CC BY-SA 4.0)

You can filter modules by categories or search by keyword or module name. Project Browser also provides some recommended default filters that are as follows:

  • Modules that are compatible with the version of the site you are running Drupal on (you no longer need to worry about versions)

  • Modules that have security coverage

Image by:

(Leslie Glynn, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Once you have chosen the module you would like to install, click the Download button to view the instructions for downloading and installing it via Composer.

Image by:

(Leslie Glynn, CC BY-SA 4.0)

However, as mentioned above, in a separate experimental branch for Project Browser, it's already possible to click the Download or Download and Enable buttons and get the desired module downloaded and installed via the admin UI. The only thing left to do is to configure the newly installed module according to your website's needs.

Image by:

(Leslie Glynn, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Try Project Browser

Project Browser is currently a contributed module with an ambitious goal to become part of the Drupal core. Working on it in the form of a contributed module gives the creators more freedom to play with exciting functionality until everything is fully ready. It is currently available for testing and you can install it from Drupal websites via Composer. Alternatively, you can click the Try it now button on the project's page and give it a test drive by spinning up a demo on Gitpod.

The module is also available for contributions so anyone can get involved. The creators actively encourage getting involved. There are contribution opportunities for all levels of expertise, including non-code contributions. For example, every module needs a short non-technical summary and a logo to be displayed in Project Browser. Absolutely anyone can get involved with or without coding skills.

So when might we see Project Browser in the Drupal core? The best way to learn the latest news about the readiness of any planned core functionality is to listen to the latest Driesnote from DrupalCon Prague 2022. Dries mentioned a lot of great progress made on the initiative. He said Project Browser would not be done in time for Drupal 10, but that was never really the plan. However, hopes are that the feature will be included in the Drupal core shortly after Drupal 10 is released — perhaps in 10.2. The exact date is yet to be determined.

Extending Drupal with the most powerful features with a click of a button is an exciting prospect. Drupal deservedly gets plenty of compliments and Project Browser is another benefit to bolster the title of "the most user-friendly CMS". I look forward to see how this rolls out moving forward in the wider community.

The Project Browser initiative is aimed at providing an easy process for discovering and installing contributed modules directly from the Drupal admin dashboard with the click of a button.

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Experience Linux desktop nostalgia with Rox

opensource.com - Wed, 12/14/2022 - 16:00
Experience Linux desktop nostalgia with Rox Seth Kenlon Wed, 12/14/2022 - 03:00

Rox-Filer is an open source file manager for Linux, once intended for the defunct Rox desktop but now a streamlined application for any window manager or desktop. There hasn't been much activity on the Rox project since 2014, and even then it is mostly in maintenance mode. And that's part of Rox-Filer's charm. In a way, Rox-Filer is a snapshot of an old desktop style that was progressive for its time but has given way to a more or less standardized, or at least conventional, interface.

Install Rox-Filer

On Linux, your distribution's software repository may have Rox available for install. For instance, Debian packages it:

$ sudo apt install rox-filer

If your Linux distribution doesn't package Rox-Filer but you want to try it out, you can compile from source by downloading the source code, installing its build dependencies, and then compiling:

$ sudo dnf install gtk2-devel libSM-devel \
  shared-mime-info glade-libs xterm
$ wget https://codeload.github.com/rox-desktop/rox-filer/zip/refs/heads/master
$ unzip rox*zip
$ cd rox-filer-master
$ ./ROX-Filer/AppRunConfiguring Rox

The Rox file manager is based on the look and feel of RISC OS, an operating system developed by Acorn in Cambridge England (the same group responsible for the popular Arm microprocessor). Today, there's an open source RISC OS you can install on a Raspberry Pi, but for now, Rox is close enough.

Rox has a simple layout. It has no menu bar, but there's a toolbar across the top, and the file panel is at the bottom.

Image by:

(Seth Kenlon, CC BY-SA 4.0)

As with the KDE Plasma Desktop, the default action of a single click in Rox is to open an item, whether it's a folder or a file. Unfortunately, no version of Rox, either packaged or compiled directly from the source, seems to be completely integrated with the mimetype definitions of the modern Linux desktop. For instance, Rox on CentOS renders an error when I click on even a basic text file, while the packaged version of Rox on Debian opens a plain text file but not a JPEG or archive file. You can fix this by setting a Run Action in the right-click context menu.

Image by:

(Seth Kenlon, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Setting a run action can have broad definitions, so you don't have to set a separate run action for JPEG, PNG, WEBP, and all other image types, instead set the same run command for all mimetypes starting with image.

Once you set that, you're ready to manage files with Rox.

Navigation

You can navigate through your file system using the arrow icon in the top toolbar. The Up arrow takes you to the parent directory of your current location (in other words, the folder your current folder is in). To descend into a folder, click on it.

Refreshing the view

Rox may not redraw the screen for every action, so sometimes you may need to prompt it to refresh. Click the Circle arrow in the Rox toolbar to refresh your current location's contents.

Copy or move a file

There are two ways to copy or move a file in Rox. First, you can launch a second Rox window and drag and drop files from one window to the other. When you do, you're prompted to copy, move, or link the item you've dropped.

Alternatively, you can right-click an item and open the File submenu from the context menu. In the File submenu, choose Copy and then enter the destination path for the item you want to move or copy. After you've confirmed that the file has successfully been copied to the target location, you can optionally select the item again, choosing Delete from the File menu.

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You can customize some aspects of Rox by selecting Options from the right-click menu. This brings up a Rox configuration screen that's admittedly only partially relevant to Rox. The Rox options assume you're running a window manager, like Windowmaker which provides a traditional dock (or "pinboard" in Rox terminology). I wasn't able to get the pinboard options to work on Fluxbox, my preferred window manager, or Windowmaker. In both cases, the window manager handled iconified windows, and I wasn't able to configure Rox to override the control. It's possible that I wasn't drastic enough in some of my configurations, but considering that Linux window managers are very capable of managing iconified windows, the pinboard mechanism of Rox isn't a vital feature (and probably not as flexible as the window manager's options).

The other options, however, still work as expected. For instance, Rox by default resizes its window size to fit the contents of a folder. When you change from a directory containing twelve items to a directory containing just three, Rox shrinks its footprint. I find this jarring, so I chose the Never automatically resize option, forcing Rox to stay whatever size I set.

Window commands

Some of my favorite features are four menu items hidden away at the bottom of the Window submenu in the right-click context menu. They are:

  • Enter path: Enter an arbitrary path and change directory to it.

  • Shell command: Enter an arbitrary shell command and execute it.

  • Terminal here: Open a terminal at your current location.

  • Switch to terminal: Open a terminal at your current location, and close the Rox.

I love options that allow for quick navigation or quick commands, so it's nice to have these close at hand.

Oldies

Rox is a "blast from the past," whether or not you've ever used RISC OS or something like it. Rox represents a style of digital file management and even desktop configuration that just doesn't quite exist anymore. I've run Fluxbox, on and off again, at work and at home for the past decade, and I love manually configuring menus and configuration files. However, most of the Linux desktop has moved on from the conventions Rox relies upon. It's not impossible to make Rox fully functional, but it would take a lot of work, and most of what you'd be configuring are already provided by modern window managers and desktops. Even so, Rox is fun to use and experience. It's a great demonstration of how flexible a traditional Linux desktop setup was (and still can be, if you use only a window manager), and much of its charm is in its simplicity. I can't imagine a file manager today not having a dedicated move function, but Rox dares to force you to copy and delete instead. It's a different kind of file manager, and it might not be the one you use all day every day, but it's something you have to try if you miss, or literally missed, the "old days" of the Linux (or RISC OS) desktop.

Rox-Filer is a snapshot of an old desktop style. It was originally intended for the defunct Rox desktop but is now available for any Linux desktop.

Image by:

kris krüg

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Linux 6.2 Speeds Up A Function By 715x - kallsyms_lookup_name()

Phoronix - Wed, 12/14/2022 - 07:32
As a nice Christmas present, code merged today to the Linux 6.2 kernel speeds up a core kernel function by a factor of 715x...

Linux 6.2 Graphics Changes: Intel Arc Graphics Stable, Initial NVIDIA RTX 30 Acceleration

Phoronix - Wed, 12/14/2022 - 04:30
The Linux 6.2 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) open-source kernel graphics/display driver changes have been merged with a few notable feature additions for users this cycle...

Linux 6.2 Addresses Another "Tasty Target For Attackers"

Phoronix - Wed, 12/14/2022 - 02:30
The x86 memory management updates for the Linux 6.2 merge window have been submitted with two primary additions: addressing another "tasty target for attackers" and separately is also landing of Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) functionality...

Upgrading Linux 5.15 LTS To Linux 6.1 Can Yield Additional Performance For AMD EPYC "Milan" Servers

Phoronix - Wed, 12/14/2022 - 01:00
Released on Sunday was Linux 6.1 and in addition to having many new features making it all the more exciting is that it's expected to be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel release. As such it will see widespread adoption particularly among servers and much interest from the hyperscalers. For those weighing an upgrade from last year's Linux 5.15 LTS kernel, Linux 6.1 with initial testing on an AMD EPYC Milan-X 2P server has shown a nice speed bump is possible across a wide-range of workloads.

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