Issue 1 - September 22, 2011

Welcome Drupalers and thanks for your support. This inaugural issue of TheWeeklyDrop includes news from the past few weeks and may be a bit longer than forthcoming issues. But that's enough housekeeping, let's get to it!

Bob Kepford

News

DrupalCon Denver Registration Opens

Get your tickets early. Pricing for registration starts at $350 per person and late pricing begins February 21, 2012 at $400.

So Long, Internet Explorer 6

We say to goodbye to an old, ummmm... friend?

Aegir 1.4 Released

The latest release of this amazing Drupal hosting platform fixes the security vulnerability announced by the Drupal Security Team.

Find a Drupal-ready Hosting Service

The Drupal Association announces changes to drupal.org/hosting making it easier to find a Drupal-ready host in addition to providing a source of revenue to support the community.

Drupal Community Cultivation Grants

Do you need some cash to host a Drupal Camp in your area? Check out the Drupal Association's Cultivation Grants.

Events

Drupal Camp Verona

September 23-24, 2011 in Verona, Italy.

DrupalCampNH

October 29th, 2011 - Manchester, New Hampshire

BADCamp

If you live on the west coast of the United States, you won't want to miss this one. October 21-23 - UC Berkeley, California.

Drupalcamp Atlanta: The Hottest Drupal Camp of the Year

Another beautiful Drupalcamp site. Looks like it's already sold out but there is a waiting list for the October 1st event at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

DrupalCamp Copenhagen 4.0

September 23-25 - Copenhagen.

Articles

Free Software gave me money and we made a short film "What is Drupal"

Steve Purkiss discusses what led to his production of one of the best videos explaining Drupal I have ever seen.

Why you don't like Rules (and why you're wrong)

NodeOne's Johan Falk makes the case for using the Rules module making some solid points that any skeptic of the module should consider.

Does Acquia suck up all the Drupal talent?

Dries addresses the concerns about Acquia's sucking up Drupal talent.

Looking to start contributing to core?

The Drupal superhero Angie Webchick Byron presents 3 ways you can contribute to Drupal core.

Tracking the porting status of Drupal 7 modules

Angie Byron introduces drupalcontribstatus.com, a site that tracks the Drupal 7 upgrade status of the top 60 contributed projects.

JavaScript hygiene in Drupal 7

James O'Beirne of Phase2 Technology has something to say about your Javascript hygiene. A good read full of tips for themers and module developers alike.

Backup Drupal sites and their databases using bash script automatically

Looks like a handy little script.

5 days, 5 challenges for Drupal

Drupal: 5 Day Challenge Jakub Suchý offers a challenge to the Drupal community. For the next 5 days, contribute 30 minutes of your own time to the Drupal community.

The "Novice" tag: helping new Drupal contributors with their first patches

Every project has long hanging fruit and Drupal is no different. Angie Byron introduces the "Novice" tag as an introduction to contributing to the Drupal project.

Fixing the talent gap with Drupal training for the masses

Chris Shattuck explains what lead him to create BuildaModule.com.

Free Software gave me money and we made a short film "What is Drupal"

Steve Purkiss discusses what led to his production of one of the best videos explaining Drupal I have ever seen.

Why Acquia acquired Cyrve and GVS

There's a whole lotta acquiring going on! Dries gives us more info about some of Acqui'a recent acqusitions.

Learn the Rules framework

Now that Johan Falk has changed your mind about the Rules module, find a comfy chair and let him show you what the module can do in this extensive series of screencasts.

The Drupal Community and Front End Performance

Matt Farina points out the importance of front end performance and presents ideas to help the Drupal community address this issue.

Only you can prevent anonymous functions!

Katherine Senzee makes the case against using anonymous functions in your Javascript

Navigating with Krumo

Naxoc shares a super handy tip for getting at those deep form arrays drupal loves to spit out using a obscure feature of the Devel module Krumo library.

CDN module without a content delivery network

Modules

Commerce subscription products

A feature module implementing Commerce subscription products using Rules, Rules Scheduler (part of Rules) and Fields.

FitVids

FitVids is a module that uses the FitVids.js library to allow for fluid width video embeds in those of so trendy responsive themes.

Select (or other)

Provides a new Forms API element which is a select/radios/checkboxes element that has an 'other' option. When 'other' is selected a textfield appears for the user to provide a custom value.

Achieve Releases the Media Update Module

Media Update module greatly improves the sometimes painful process of updating files managed by the Media module.

MediaElement

The MediaElement module brings the MediaElement.js html5 player plugin to Drupal. MediaElement is a jQuery based JavaScript plugin that enables the video and audio tags using h.264 to work under browsers that do not support the tag or the codec and provides a consistent interface across all browsers