Issue 117 - December, 19th 2013

The past few weeks I've been working on the backend of TheWeeklyDrop.com so I can spend more time making this email awesome every week. You may also notice I have changed the HTML template a little bit. I hope it is easier to read. Let me know what you think.

News

Drupal 8 - Improved Upgrade Process

Drupal 8 will have an migration path for D6 & D7! Say goodbye to hook_update_N() for major version upgrades. I think this is a really good move and will be a big win for Drupal 8 upgrades.

From Our Sponsor

Community

Drupal Community - Gittip

Support members of the Drupal Community on Gittip. It's really easy.

Articles

5 Steps to Build a Great Drupal Team: Step 5: Evaluating Applicants

Heather James continues her great series on Acquia.com. Glad she mentions Impostor Syndrome which is something many of us deal with.

Drupal Sitebuilder, Citizen-Engineer

A great article by Zach Chandler from the Stanford Web Services blog. Some days I forget that one of the main reasons Drupal is so popular is that you don't have to be a engineer to build crazy awesome stuff with it.

Is Implementing Continuous Integration Worth It?

Promet Source's Jay Uhlinger makes a convincing case for adopting CI and provides steps to work towards that goal. Worth a read if you are on the fence or are just thinking about it.

Drupal 8

Drupalism

Resources To Help You In Your Transition From Drupal 7 To Drupal 8

How to Create a Drupal 8 Toolbar Icon

Josh Miller has written a sweet tutorial that will walk you through creating an icon for the Drupal 8 tool bar.

My First Site on Drupal 8. or Securing a Drupal Site Like a Paranoid

Another Drupal 8 blog.

Preparing for Drupal 8 Development - Blocks, Forms, and Pages

Josh Estep explains how to extend objects in Drupal 8 to create blocks, forms, and pages.

This Week in Drupal Core: December 11 12, 2013

Criteria for beta 1, Drupal 8 API documentation, views block conversions and much more.

Top Resources for Getting Started with Drupal 8

Another nice list of Drupal 8 resources. This one is from Appnovation Technologies.

Tutorials

7 Ways to Add Custom JS and CSS to a Page in Drupal

Kirill Cebotari of Propeople outlines the multiple ways you can add JS and CSS to Drupal pages as well as the pros and cons of each approach.

Attach Extra or Pseudo Fields to Any Entity in Drupal

Extra fields are one of those areas of Drupal development you might not be aware of. Here is a handy tutorial from Frans van der Meer.

Creating a Sitemap for Auditing Your Site

Not Drupal specific but really good advice for anyone doing a site redesign or audit. Gotta say, the folks over at Stanford Web Services have been killing it lately.

Making Sql-Sync Safer

Mike Keran shares how you can protect yourself from messing up your day with sql-sync @remote @local.

Multistep Forms Using the Ctools Object Cache in Drupal 7

Need to create multiple page forms? Check this out.

Send Emails Directly from Views Using Views Send in Drupal 7

Ivan Zugec shares how you can use a few contrib modules to create a list of users and send email messages to them without writing a line of code.

What I Learned Today: Drupal #Attached Awesomeness

Metal Toad's Jonathan Jordan taught me something today. You can do some cool stuff with the #attached key in the render array.

Announcements

Twitter Engineering on Drupal

Not the first Drupal site Twitter has launched but it's a nice one.

Projects

Canopy Is Now Available on Drupal.org | Appnovation Technologies Inc.

Canopy provides a bridge between Alfresco and Drupal.

The Drupal Entityqueue Module

Metal Toad's Jonathan Jordan announced Entityqueue Module, a rewrite of Nodequeue for Drupal 7 based on entities.

Releases

Honeypot 8.x-1.16-Beta6

Podcasts

Wftools with Dave Hall - Modules Unraveled Podcast

Finally

Holly Ross Reddit AMA

Holly is the director of the Drupal Association and it's really cool that she did an AMA.