Issue 127 - February, 27th 2014

News

Need a Scholarship to Get to Drupalcon?

Don't be shy. Read this post and apply!

Modernizing Testbot: Introduction

Jeremy Thorson summarizes the proposed architecture as presented at BADCamp 2013 and discusses next steps.

Announcing Acquia Lift

Dries announced a new product from Acquia this week called Lift. Lift sounds a lot like what Dries talked about at DrupalCon Portland last year. At it's core, Lift centers around contextualization and personalization.

From Our Sponsor

DrupalCon

Drupalcon and the Value of “Being There”

If you haven't seen the video "2013 Drupalcon Face to Face in Prague" from Blink Reaction you need to find some time this week to watch it. Very well done and I have to say I really agree that being at DrupalCon has real value.

Project Management, Team Management, Communication and Strategy Sessions Wanted

Not a designer or developer? We still need your knowledge at DrupalCon Austin. Please consider submitting a session about what YOU do!

Sign Up to Be a Mentor at Drupalcon Austin Sprint

They are estimating that 75 mentors will be needed.

Articles

5 Mistakes to Avoid on Your Drupal Website - Number 3: Performance

Solid performance tips from Heather James of Acquia.

Creating a Multilingual Site with Panopoly

Annika Clarke explains how Deeson Online configured Panopoly to be a multilingual site.

Static Prototyping and Keeping Drupal Simple (Kds)

Fredric Mitchell's suggestions are not a silver bullet but should rather be taken with a grain so project specific salt. Fredric is dead right that many of the modules used by Drupal site builders add a lot of complexity.

The Battle for the Body Field

On A List Apart Jeff Eaton discusses the challenges faced when trying to build a narrative-friendly CMS while maintaining structured content.

Theme It Once

This is an interesting post from Four Kitchens's Elliott Foster where he describes a novel approach to frontend and backend templating. The concept is this, rendering some templates on the server while others are rendered by Javascript in the browser. As Elliott mentions, this is something Twitter and others are doing.

Drupal 8

Drupal 8: Start Contributing with the Drupal Ladder

Addison Berry shares how you can combine to awesome things FTW!

Several Upcoming Opportunities to Sprint on Drupal 8 Multilingual Improvements

Gábor Hojtsy invites you to be a part of one of the many upcoming Drupal 8 sprints.

This Fortnight in Drupal Core - February 21st 2014

This week in Drupal Core is a must read if you want to keep up with the work on Drupal 8.

Your First Restful View in Drupal 8

In this post on Drupalize.Me Joe Fender demonstrates how to create a view that returns a list of content in JSON via the REST API in Drupal 8.

Introducing New Videos on Symfony 2 and Drupal 8

If you want to get prepped for Drupal 8 check out Chris Shattuck's BuildAModule.com series. Not all of the videos are free but they are well worth the cost.

Drupal South Presentation: Everything You Wanted to Know About Drupal 8 but Were Too Afraid to Ask

Lee Rowlands' slides from Drupal South.

Tutorials

A Beginners Guide to Drupal Sub-Themes - Ostraining

Automate Drupal Site Updates with a Deployment Module

Blair Wadman makes the case for creating a deployment module that serves the purpose of storing hook_updates_N. If you are not familiar with hook_update_N it is a hook used by modules to perform database updates. Great post if you are looking to learn about this handy hook.

Building a Drupal Commerce Store with Almost No Coding

It is truly amazing what can be built with Drupal and almost no custom code.

How Do I Remove the "Authoring Information" on My Page?

While this is a pretty basic Drupal task but I know some of you are pretty new to Drupal and might find this useful.

How to Master Contextual Links on Your Drupal Website

A super handy tutorial from Andrei Jechiu on the Propeople blog. At some point you will need to add custom links to a contextual menu like. These contextual menus are seen in blocks, views and many other places. Adding your own links can be a big usabablity win for site managers. This is a good thing to know how to do.

Making Sense of the Drupal Hacked! Report

The hack module. A friend to the Drupal developer who has inherited an existing Drupal site of questionable origins. Learn how to use it in this post from Shakib Mostafa.

Using SQL-Sync & Rsync in Drush

So you started using Drush but you aren't using it's sync capabilities? That should change today. Read this post from the Promet Source blog.

Projects

Drupal Tools: Variable Files & Devel

The Variable module is pretty slick way to manage your custom module's variables. Jose Reyero just released the Variable Extra module that extends it even further.

Module Monday: Synonyms

A very useful module for mantaining clean free tagging vocabularies.

Releases

Coder 7.x-2.2

Drupal 8.0-Alpha9

Fitvids 7.x-1.15

Flag 7.x-2.2

Openacademy 7.x-1.0

Pushtape 7.x-1.0-Beta5

Redhen 7.x-1.7

Zurb-Foundation 7.x-4.0

Podcasts

Drupaleasy Podcast 123: It’s Got Berdir

Ryan Weaver and Jeffrey A. Mcguire Compare Notes on Open Source - Acquia Podcast

The Template Picker Module with Bryan Braun - Modules Unraveled Podcast