Issue 27 March 22, 2012

As I write this DrupalCon Denver is happening and it's pretty insane. Look for a DrupalCon recap in the coming weeks. Please excuse any typos this week. I finished this in the wee hours of the morning.

Headlines

Distribution Packaging Now Fully Supported On Drupal.Org

The new features for distros on d.o include, external library support, patch support, support for development snapshots. This is really a huge deal for Drupal.

Phase2 and Treehouse are Coming Together

This week Phase2 Technology and Treehouse Agency announced that they are merging into one company. The Phase2 name will be retained.

From Our Sponsor

Announcements

Acquia Dev Cloud Free Developer Tier

Acquia has announced a permanently free tier of their Dev Cloud service.

The Future of Open Atrium

Phase2 Technology shares their plans for Open Atrium.

The Open Atrium Community Features Directory

Announcing Drupal Sun: Drupal Planet, Reloaded

Willem Shepherd has created a very cool tool for following Drupal news. He is using Drupal, Apache Solr, and javascript. Oh, and it's nice and responsive.

Announcing Webform.com

Nate Haug, the author of the Webform Module we all know and love has just launched Webform.com. Webform.com is a really slick mobile friendly webfrom service with features like a drag and a drop form builder, multiple page forms, file attachments, and much more. To top it all off you can export your forms and use them on your own Drupal site. Yeah. Pretty cool.

DrupalCon Denver

Friday March 23 is Drupal Core Mentoring Day!

If you're at DrupalCon Denver and wanna get into Core dev don't miss this.

DrupalCon Draws Thousands to Denver This Week to Learn and Collaborate on One of Largest Open Source Projects

DrupalCon Munich: Grab it, Snap it!

Get your DrupalCoasters at the Closing Plenary of DrupalCon Denver (Thursday 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm).

Articles

Drupal, HP Cloud, and PHP

Matt Farina explains why Drupal Devs should be looking at HP Cloud as a platform for hosting Drupal sites.

Drupal’s Experience Gap, Part 2

In part two Michael Anello of DrupalEasy continues to look at the issue of the Drupal experience gap making the point that the community needs to invest more in bringing up junior developers.

Finding Our Path In The Mobile Wild

Drupal 8 Mobile initiatives lead John Albin Wilkins talks about mobile context, responsive design, and performance.

How To Use The Drupal 8 Configuration System

Installing XHProf on a Mac with Homebrew

Introducing the Acquia Cloud API and Drush CLI

Video

Rules Mastery Training Videos

The screencasts for the training on Monday by Johan Falk (Itangalo), Wolfgang Ziegler (fago), Dick Olsson (dixon_) and Klaus Purer (klausi) coving Rules module are all online. If you want to learn Rules module you should check this out.

Drupalize.Me: Introduction to Site Building with Drupal 7

PHP Programming Basics

Many up and coming Drupal devs are new to PHP or maybe even completely new to programming. With this in mind BuildaModule.com is releasing a series cover PHP. The first two videos are free.

Podcasts

DrupalEasy Podcast 76: Rooftop Party

The DrupalEasy crew chats with Chris Strahl from the office of the CTO at Acquia.

Modules

Automatically Exporting Contexts

The Context module is a great module and when combined with the Features module it make exporting your features really easy. But there is one annoying thing about the way Features module works with Contexts. If you select a Context when creating a feature, Features module will export any views connected to your context. That may not be what you want. This module allows you to export the context without anything else.

Introducing Nodequeue Extras