Issue 285 - April, 13th 2017

News

Drupal 8.3.0 Is Now Available

"Drupal 8.3.0, the third minor release of Drupal 8, is now available. With Drupal 8, we made significant changes in our release process, adopting semantic versioning and scheduled feature releases. This allows us to make extensive improvements to Drupal 8 in a timely fashion while still providing backwards compatibility."

Drupal.org Blog: Technical Advisory Committee Update

"The TAC's mandate is to recommend a direction for the future of our tools on Drupal.org. Megan will evaluate this recommendation, make a decision, and prioritize that work in the development roadmap of the Drupal Association engineering team."

From Our Sponsor

Community

Building a Community That We Want to Be a Part Of

Some good thoughts from Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire as well as a community survey he is doing.

Dries Buytaert: An Apology to the Drupal Community

"I want to deeply apologize for causing grief and uncertainty, especially to those in the BDSM and kink communities who felt targeted by the turmoil. This incident was about specific actions of a single member of our community. This was never meant to be about sexual practices or kinks, so it pains me that I unintentionally hurt you. I do support you and respect you as a key part of our community."

Dries Buytaert: Next Steps for Evolving Drupal's Governance

In this post Dries announced plans to update the governance policies and specifically change his authority level with community membership decisions. More specifics will be discussed at DrupalCon Baltimore.

The Drupal Community Working Group: What It Is, What It Isn't

Angie Byron offers some insight into the community working group and how it works from the perspective of a former member.

Articles

ES6 for Drupal Developers: Arrow Functions, Concise Methods, and Other Syntactic Features

If you are working on the web you probably should be learning Javascript. If you think you know Javascript well but haven't kept up, you should read this series by Acquia's Preston So. He does a good job highlighting the new concepts introduced in ES6.

Remote Presentations

A great idea from Dave Hall for those that might find it difficult to attend community tech events. While I manage a user group and live near many cool tech meetups he has me thinking I should try this remote presentation idea.

Don’t Have an in-House Webmaster? 4 Ways to Get By!

The Problems with Config Entity Overrides

"Config overrides seem very handy, but can be pretty problematic when used for config entities. If you are using them in this way, you should make very sure that there aren't any unintended side effects. And if you maintain a contrib module that defines a config entity type, you should make sure they're safe to use with config overrides."

Using Ubuntu Bash in Windows Creators' Update with Vagrant

"It's not a panacea. But it is something. And things are improved significantly from where we were one year ago, as far as open source devs who develop in Windows (by choice or by dictum)."

Tutorials

Advanced Drupal 8 Configuration Management Workflows

Drupal 8's configuration management system is very useful but sometimes we can hit the edges of it's features. One such case is supporting different configurations for different server environments like dev, prod, and local. In this post learn how to use config split to solve some of these problems.

Calling Drush from Another Drush Command in Drupal

If you aren't using Drush site aliases you don't know what you're missing out on. "Sometimes you need a drush command to call a different drush command, maybe even from a different Drupal instance. This is quite easy if you have drush site aliases configured for each site. In this example, we add a drush command that compares variable values across two different instances."