Drupal Commerce IATS

As faithful readers of this blog will know, I'm a fan of IATS as a payment processor solution for non-profits. Many years ago I wrote a CiviCRM payment plugin that is still in wide use by most of my clients and many others as well.

Although my Drupal module contributions have been minimal over the recent past, I'm happy to announce a new one to integrate IATS payments into the new Drupal Commerce module/distro/framework/thingy.

Tada: http://drupal.org/project/commerce_iats

Many thanks to Karin Gerritson, my colleague at Blackfly Solutions, and her project to develop a new site for the school she sends here kids to, here: https://secure.cfis.com/

What this means for the rest of the world: non-profits have a nice solution to get e-commerce going on Drupal 7 with a minimum of cost and hassle.

The Tyee: Bricolage and Drupal Integration

The Tyee is a site I've been involved with since 2006 when I wrote the first, 4.7 version of a Drupal module to integrate Drupal content into a static site that was being generated from bricolage. About a year ago, I met with Dawn Buie and Phillip Smith and we mapped out a number of ways to improve the Drupal integration on the site, including upgrading the Drupal to version 5 from 4.7. Various parts of that grand plan have been slowly incorporated into the site, but as of next week, there'll be a big leap forward that coincides with a new design [implemented in Bricolage by David Wheeler who wrote and maintains Bricolage] as well as a new Drupal release of the Bricolage integration module . Plans Application integration is tricky, and my first time round had quite a few issues. Here's a list of the improvements in the latest version: File space separation. Before, Drupal was installed in the apache document root, which is where bricolage was publishing it's co...

A Strange Passion for Security

I'm not a computer security expert, but it's been part of my work for many years, in different forms. A very long time ago, a friend hired me to write up a primer for internet security, and ever since then it's been a theme that's sat in the background and pops up every now and then . But lately, it's started to feel like more than a theme, and but indeed a passion. You may consider computer and internet security to be a dry subject, or maybe you imagine feelings of smugness or righteousness, but "passion" is the right word for what I'm feeling. Here's google's definition: Passion: 1. a strong and barely controllable emotion. 2. the suffering and death of Jesus. Okay, let's just go with number 1. for now. If you followed my link above to other posts about security, you'll notice one from eight years ago where I mused on the possibility of the discovery of a flaw in how https works. Weirdly enough, a flaw in https was discovered shortly...

Orchestrating Drupal + CiviCRM containers into a working site: describing the challenge

In my previous posts, I've provided my rationale for making use of Docker and the microservices model for a boutique-sized Drupal + CiviCRM hosting service. I've also described how to build and maintain images that could be used for the web server (micro) service part of such a service. The other essential microservice for a Drupal + CiviCRM website is a database, and fortunately, that's reasonably standard. Here's a project that minimally tweaks the canonical Mariadb container by adding some small configuration bits: https://github.com/BlackflySolutions/mariadb That leaves us now with the problem of "orchestration", i.e. how would you launch a collection of such containers that would serve a bunch of Drupal + CiviCRM sites. More interestingly, can we serve them in the real world, over time, in a way that is sustainable? i.e. handle code updates, OS updates, backups, monitoring, etc? Not to mention the various crons that need to run, and how about things ...

The kernel of my home office

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