Issue 230 - March, 10th 2016

News

"Voting is now open for the 2016 At-Large Board positions for the Drupal Association! If you haven't yet, check out the candidate profiles and review the Meet the Candidate sessions (we ran three) that we held. Get to know your candidates, and then get ready vote."

Vote for one of three finalist sessions for the Thursday Keynote on DrupalCon New Orleans.

Learn about the Drupal 6 end of life, Composer support for Drupal, managing your Drupal.org notifications, organization contributions, and more in this informative post.

From Our Sponsor

Articles

As a diehard commandline nerd I often slag off GUIs but Damien is correct that Acquia's Dev Desktop is an easy way for people to get a local server running for development with very little fuss.

In the first of a series of posts about REST in Drupal 8 Larry Garfield discusses the changes in how Drupal 8 responds to requests and why that's important. A good read for anyone interested in Web Services in Drupal.

In this series Heather James discusses the various ways you can configure images to work well on different devices.

An interesting look at the contribution data that has been collected on Drupal.org.

Sponsored

Often times, user interfaces limit dev productivity by not offering the level of automation needed to be efficient. Developers are often required to jump between pages in order to switch environments, move between code databases and files, and monitor website health. Join us for this webinar to learn about how a fast, responsive UI can eliminate these inefficiencies and optimize productivity.

Tutorials

Sponsored

After numerous site audits, we’ve compiled the top lessons learned and tips for creating and maintaining a Drupal site. Learn about best practices and common mistakes in 5 crucial areas: architecture, security, performance, infrastructure, and website lifecycle.

Greg Boggs shows us how to add the current page to your Drupal breadcrumbs.

A great list of resources for new Drupalers from Heather James.

I highly recommend code sniffing your code. It's just a good development practice that will make you a better coder.

Projects

"In many cases, the mobile web is a slow and frustrating experience. The AMP Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere. "

This post describes a module that provides methods to assist in the management of deployment tasks like, enabling, disabling, and uninstalling modules. It also will revert features, import menus, update node values, and set Drupal variables.

"Drupal Console is a command line interface (CLI) tool that helps you as a developer by helping you with Drupal 8 code: generating boilerplate code (aka the basic “scaffolding” you need for every module you write), and interacting with and debugging Drupal 8 code. Drupal Console also lets you download and install modules; create dummy data, tests, and database logs; and debug not just registered services, but also various D8 subsystems like the configuration, routing, and state subsystems--all via the command line."

"If you still have a Drupal 6 site and use the 'update' module, you probably noticed that you're no longer getting accurate information about security updates on the "Available updates" report." David Snopek shares the alternative update module by myDropWizard that is free to use without being one of their customers.

Releases

Video

Custom blocks are becoming one of my favorite new features in Drupal 8. Learn more about how to use them in these OSTraining videos.

Events

April 1-2, 2016 in Stanford California.