Issue 248 - July, 14th 2016

Three critical security releases were announced on Wednesday. If you have any of these modules in your production code base update them immediately.

News

Coder - Highly Critical - Remote Code Execution - SA-CONTRIB-2016-039

RESTWS - Highly Critical - Remote Code Execution - SA-CONTRIB-2016-040

Webform Multiple File Upload - Critical - Remote Code Execution - SA-CONTRIB-2016-038

Drupal 7.50 Released

This release contains a variety of new features, improvements, and bug fixes (no security fixes). Quoting the post on d.o "Yes, there is a version jump compared to the previous 7.44 release; this is to indicate that this Drupal 7 point release is a bit larger than past ones and makes a few more changes and new features available than normal." The change I'm most excited about is the support for full UTF-8 including emojis on MySQL.

From Our Sponsor

Articles

A Roadmap for Making Drupal More API-First

If you care about REST and/or web services you should read this post from Dries Buytaert. There are some great additions coming to Drupal 8 over the next couple years.

Best Practices = Efficient Government Transitions

The web development team at the Iowa Public Employees Retirement System is a great example of how internal teams can ensure effectiveness and efficiency as they switch to Drupal. It starts with making the right choices the right way, and concludes with properly training up internal staff. DrupalEasy shares their story.

Drupal's Weak Link

"Mere entity references severely limit our ability to create rich, rational content type architectures and force us to jump through additional hoops and write more custom code than ought to be required. I believe that Drupal having only entity references to forge relationships between content types is a major shortcoming."

Git Branch Strategy Meets Continuous Deployment

"Our branch strategy based on Git Flow did not survive. It was getting a bit old in the tooth, but the final blow was automation."

How to Grow Your Own Team

Jody Hamilton shares her thoughts on investing in your team. Good stuff and worth reading if you lead a team or if you are on team. It's a teaser for a white paper which I just downloaded. Good job Jody! You sold me.

Selling the Drupal Community to Those Here for the Code

"Throughout the software development world there are many “evangelist” roles who sell the code to the community, but maybe we need the other side? Maybe we need to sell the community to the those who..."

The ABC's of Drupal: Aliases, Blocks and Content Types

A high level and non-technical look at some key Drupal concepts. On another note, the folks at FFW must being doing something right. They think their articles instead of writing them :) See if you can find what I'm talking about.

The Hidden Power of Documentation

Why We Don’t (Continuously) Update Our Drupal Websites

Good and valid reasons for not automatically deploy Drupal updates from Drop Guard.

24 Things About Drupal 8 Every CTO Should Know - Part 2

Tutorials

Create Custom Entity Type in Drupal 8 for Better Content Management

Getting Emoji and Multibyte Characters on Your Drupal 7 Site with 7.50

You know you want to use emoji on your Drupal sites. I'm kinda excited about this.

How to Display PDFs on a Drupal Site

Managing Media with Drupal 8

Supercharging Drupal UX with React

The JavaScript renaissance of the last few years has yielded a number of innovative frameworks, libraries, and other tools. By combining these technologies with Drupal, developers can create highly interactive and engaging experiences. This webinar will provide a brief introduction to React, case studies of successful integrations with Drupal, and practical information on how best to leverage its potential for any site.

Ramping Up with the AMP Module in Drupal 8

If you need to get AMP going on your Drupal 8 site this tutorial is for you.

Refactoring Drupal Batch API Callbacks to Increase Testability

"Our goal here is to end up with a method that we can test with PHPUnit, without an installed Drupal and without the service container. "

Projects

Explore Drupal Commerce 2 with Commerce Demo!

Acquia/waterwheel:

A generic JavaScript helper library to query and manipulate Drupal 8 via core REST.

Alexdesignworks/dcr

A CLI tool for Drupal code reviews on your current git branch. Haven't had a chance to test this out yet but it looks pretty good.

Releases

big_pipe 8.x-1.4

config_single_export 8.x-1.1

Drupal 7.50

Drupal 8.1.4

Drupal 8.1.5

Drupal 8.1.6

Features 8.x-3.0-Beta6

field_formatter 8.x-1.0

Languagefield 8.x-1.1

Linkit 8.x-5.0-Beta1

Mailsystem 8.x-4.1

Plugin 8.x-2.3

Video

Mediacurrent: Friday 5: 5 Quick Ways to Check Your Site's Health

In this video Stuart Broz highlights some great tools including Drupal's internal reporting, Contributed auditing modules, Google Webmaster Tools, Google PageSpeed Insights, and WAVE's accessibility check.