Issue 185 - April, 16th 2015

News

Announcing Drupalcon Los Angeles Keynote Speaker Whitney Hess

I haven't had the pleasure of hearing Whitney Hess speak but I hear really good things about her from my collegues.

What's New on Drupal.org - March 2015

If you haven't noticed, Drupal.org has had some improvements added recently.

From Our Sponsor

Articles

How and Why You Should Update PHP to Php 5.5 with Drupal

Sean Hamlin makes the case for upgrading. I know I have seen improvements from upgrading a few servers I manage.

Top Drupal 7 Modules: Final Edition

A great list from Mediacurrent's Jay Callicott of his most often used modules.

Drupal Association CTO: Year 1

Drupal Association CTO Joshua Mitchell shares many of the improvements to the Drupal.org and supporting techonolgy around it that have been added over the past year. It's quite a lot actually.

Another 5 Drupal Resources You Might Have Missed

A nice list of Drupal resources and services, some I have linked to before a few I haven't.

Drupal and the Internet of Things

Identifying Mentors at Sprints

YesCT shares some tips for sprint organizers and mentors. I love her example of using creative t-shirts at DrupalCon Latin America.

Why Good Markup Matters

We Stole This Site, You Should Too

An interesting post from Penn State's Bryan Ollendyke.

Drupal 8

Drupal 8 Now Has Page Caching Enabled by Default

The tl;dl is that cache tags in Drupal 8 will make Drupal caching much better and faster. This is great great news. Oh yeah, and this "By default, Drupal 8 is now between 2 and 200 times faster than Drupal 7 for anonymous users". Pretty great.

Tutorials

Integrate Elasticsearch with Silex

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series A Silex and Elasticsearch app powered by Drupal 7 for content management. Silex is a great PHP framework. I highly recommend it.

Managing Variables in Drupal 7

Dave Hall shares a few ways to manage variables in Drupal with a bit of humor.

Projects

How to Use Wordpress Style Shortcodes in Drupal 7

Using Third Party Wrappers

A handy module for working with thrid party content.

Releases

Advagg 7.x-2.8

Bufferapp 7.x-1.4

Commerce_Kickstart 7.x-1.35

Drupress 7.x-1.0-Alpha10

Features 7.x-2.5

Features 8.x-3.0-Alpha1

Manualcrop 7.x-1.5

Openchurch 7.x-1.17-Beta2

Restaurant 7.x-1.0-Beta12

Restful 7.x-1.0

Stage_File_Proxy 7.x-1.7

Super_Login 7.x-1.0-Beta7

Video

Composing a Drupal 7 Site

You've probably heard of Composer right? The package manager for PHP. Yeah, you can use it with Drupal 7, not just Drupal 8. In this video from Allan Chappell;s MidCamp 2015 session he covers it.