Issue 37 May 31, 2012

News

Drupal Ladder: The New Name for the Learn Drupal Initiative!

Brock Boland outlines the goals of the Drupal Ladder initiative, "to get 1% of active users on drupal.org to contribute to Drupal core by 2014...".

Developers Needed

Help us make drupal.org awesome, improve Cod, and much more.

Drupal Association Launches New Supporting Partner Program

Events

2012 NH Drupal Summit

July 21st, 2012 in Concord, New Hampshire.

DrupalCorn Camp 2012

August 3rd & 4th, 2012 at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.

Articles

Big Performance Wins On The Front End

On the Drupal Watchdog Matt Farina gives us a great intro to frontend performance as it relates to Drupal. Really worth a read. I'm quickly becoming a fan of Drupal Watchdog. Their content is excellent and they put out a beautifully designed magazine every Drupal should have on their desks.

Tutorials

WYSIWYG Module + CKEditor Part Deux: Extreme Beastmaster

Adding CSS Classes to Blocks in Drupal

Aten Design Group's John Ferris discusses Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS (SMACSS) and adding CSS classes to Drupal blocks. Using preprocess functions you can take control of the classes Drupal adds to every block on your site.

How to Use $form['#attached'] with a JavaScript Setting in Drupal 7 Form API

Non-Blocking Loading Of 3rd Party Scripts In Drupal

Another excellent post from Matt Farina with great info in his comment replies as well. Matt introduces a technique from Steve Souder blog to avoid the blocking of page load by an externally loaded Javascript file. Engineeredweb.com is becoming a go to blog for all things related to Drupal frontend performance.

PHP with Homebrew

With Homebrew 0.9 we can now install alternate versions of PHP with ease on OS X.

Drupalcon

Design Partner RFP and Request for Volunteers Open

The DA is looking for volunteers and design help with DrupalCon Portland 2013.

Sell Your Drupal Gear at the DrupalCon Bookstore!

Drupal8

Designing Drupal's Mobile Navigation and Beyond

Barcelona Media Sprint and File Entity in Drupal 8 Core

Selecting an Http Client

Modules

Module Monday: Exclude Node Title

As advertised, this module allows you to disable the rendering of node titles on your site.

Commerce Module Tuesday: Commerce AutoSKU

Yep, a module that automatically creates SKU's. Very handy.

MailChimp adds Mandrill Integration & Campaign Creation

Lev Tsypin of ThinkShout shares the latest updates to the great MailChimp module including the ability to send campaigns from your Drupal site. He also gives us an introduction to the Mandrill module, which allows you to send transactional emails (password reset, contact message, etc.) using MailChimp's email system with some nice extra features you may not get with other transactional backends. The Weekly Drop uses MailChimp and the MailChimp module and I can't wait to check out the new additions.

Books

Online Book: Drupal 7 – the Essentials

I linked to Johan Falk's book on Amazon last week and he kindly pointed me to the free community documentation version on Drupal.org and suggested you all check it out.

Podcasts

DrupalEasy Podcast 83: Climbing the Drupal Ladder

Andrew Riley and Mike Anello discuss the Drupal Ladder project with Bryan Hirsch (bryanhirsch on drupal.org) and Kay VanValkenburgh (kay_v on drupal.org).

Modules Unraveled: 021 Jennifer Hodgdon and Drupal Documentation

Finally

Drupal Every Day

Came across this site last week on Twitter. Drupal Every Day helps you learn a Drupal function or hook every day. You can subscribe to their RSS feed or follow them on twitter (drupaleveryday).

Drupal Poetry

I've meant to mention Four Kitchens' Drupal Poetry for a while but this little gem pushed me to do it this week.

Jobs

It's been suggested to me that offering job listings would be a nice feature for this newsletter. My current thoughts are to list no more than three jobs per issue. I'd like to gauge interest in this, so if you would be interesting in publishing a job listing for a small fee simply reply to this email.