Issue 25 March 8, 2012

DrupalCon Denver is now less than two weeks away and this week was a busy one. A new release of Drupal 6 and a new distro aimed at the Education world in addition to a bevy of articles and tutorials covering our favorite blue CMS. Happy reading. ~ Bob

Headlines

Drupal 6.25 Released

This is a a maintenance release. Make sure you upgrade your Drupal 6 sites.

Introducing Julio

The friendly primates over at FunnyMonkey have just announced Julio, a Drupal distribution aimed at schools. Bill and the crew over there do good work and this looks like a great tool for education.

Blue Drop Awards Nominations Deadline Extended

The deadline for nominations has been extended through the end of Drupalcon Denver (March, 22nd).

Commerce Guys Receives $5 Million in Funding

It's great to see another company from the Drupal world receiving funding.

From Our Sponsor

DrupalCon Denver

Solving Problems and Finding Solutions in Education

This will be a Panel Discussion at the Drupal in Education Unconference on Monday, March 19th in Denver. I plan on attending and if you work in education you should as well.

Nonprofit, Government and Education Track at DrupalCon Denver

Rick Nashleanas of Monarch Digital shares a good list of not to miss sessions at Drupalcon Denver.

Drupal 8

Configuration Management System Now in Place for Drupal 8

Major progress was made this week on the dev -> stage -> prod problem for Drupal 8. This is so good to see.

Drupal 8: Blocks & Layouts Everywhere

Kris Vanderwater outlines the goals and plan for the new Blocks & Layouts Everywhere Initiative. This initiative was originally a part of the WSCCI (Web Services and Core Context Initiative) that we covered here in previous issues.

Articles

Add Stuff to a Node and Configure it Like Fields

Over at ComputerMinds.co.uk James Williams shows us how to add things such as a Facebook like button to your node display and use the fields UI to manage their display.

Control your Drupal Page Layout with Context and Delta

Kendall Totten expounds on the virtues of the Omega theme and the Delta module. Using the combo together allows you to exercise some serious control over your theme when used with the Context module. Definitely worth a read.

Add HTTP Headers Using #attached in Drupal 7

EntityFieldQuery: Let Drupal Do The Heavy Lifting (Pt 2)

Getting Views Bulk Operations working with Draggable Views.

Lee Rowlands shows us how to get two great Drupal modules to work together. For those new to these modules Views Bulk Operations is a powerhouse that allows you to perform various operations on a list of content and Draggable Views lets you re-order lists of content. Now you can use the two together.

Workflow and Tools for Developing with install Profiles and Drush Make

Kosta Harlan describes his workflow in detail and includes some nice scripts.

Handling Long-Running Background Tasks in Drupal 7

In part two of Chris Svajlenka's post about using the Drupal Batch API he describes how to kick off batched jobs with cron.

How Do Open Source Communities Govern Themselves?

Randy Fay continues his look into governance and how other open source projects are structured.

In Search of a Better Admin Experience for Drupal 7 Users

Lars Olesen shares a list of Admin modules that can improve the user experience in Drupal 7.

Displaying Tweets on High Traffic Websites

Tobby Hagler outlines the pros and cons of various methods of displaying Twitter content on high traffic site.

Overcoming Long Views Rendering Time on Drupal Sites

2bits.com is my go to site for Drupal performance info. This time they remind that you can enable views caching to greatly speed up your views rendering times.

Video

Using Nginx Locally for Development on OS X

Over at Got Drupal Matt Petrowsky shows us his Nginx setup on OS X.

Drupalize.Me: Our local Web Server Videos are Now Free!

The folks over at Drupalize.Me have released videos covering setting up your local dev environment. The videos cover Mac OS X Lion, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 11.10.