Issue 3 - October 6, 2011

It's hard to believe that we are already three weeks into this Drupal Newsletter. Once again we have a bunch of Drupal Camps to announce in addition to some cool news on the Drupal.org feature front.

I'd love to hear what you think about the newsletter, so if you have any suggestions you can email me at bob@theweeklydrop.com

News

How YOU (yes, you!) can help make Drupal.org awesome

Webchick outlines yet another way to get involved in the Drupal community.

Aegir development - phase: next

The porting of Aegir to Drupal 7 has begun! If the Aegir Project is new to you it is a hosting system for managing networks of Drupal web sites. It has made managing the Drupal sites I manage much easier. Glad to see it moving forward.

All authenticated users can now post local inline images on drupal.org

Achievements 7.x-1.3 Released

Version 7.x-1.3 of Achievements looks very cool with many new features including leaderboards.

Services 6.x-3.0 Released

Too many new features to list. If you are new to Services this is a good time to check it out.

Events

Conference Organizing Distribution (COD) Code Sprint

October 8 - 9 in Los Angeles and IRC.

Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit 2011

October 14 - 16 in Portland, Oregon.

Drupalcamp Derry

October 22 - 23 in Derry, Ireland.

Chapter Three and Lullabot join forces on Drupal training

November 7 -11 in Providence, Rhode Island.

DrupalCamp Michigan

December 3 in Novi, Michigan.

Articles and Tutorials

As a Drupal developer, I want to make my modules fully multilingual friendly

Gábor Hojtsy walks us through language support and how to handle translation in Drupal.

Responsive Theming: How to Apply Responsive Design Techniques to a Drupal Theme

Suzanne Kennedy has written a good articles for themers wanting to dip their toes into the responsive design pool.

9 Essential Tools for Professional Drupal Development

Norman Bucknor gives a short list of modules every Drupaler should be aware of.

9 Drush links to take you from beginner to advanced

Not sure what's up with the number 9 this week but Scott Hadfield gives us a good list of links about the Drupal shell, Drush.

Pluggable Search Components with Search API and FacetAPI

Drupal As A Workforce Program

If you have tried to find a Drupal developer recently you are aware of the Drupal staffing shortage. There just aren't enough Drupal devs to meet the growing demand. Anello Consulting has an interesting idea. Offer a training program for out of work IT-savvy Space Shuttle workers in Florida.

Drupal Business & Governance in the Age of Acquia

Zivtech CEO Alex Urevick-Ackelserg discusses some of the positive impacts that Acquia has had on the Drupal community as well as concerns that have been raised about where Drupal is headed.

Drush screencast: help and topic commands

I love good screencasts and Owen Barton of CivicActions delivers with some valuable tips for using Drush help. If you use Drush check out his other Drush screencasts as well.

Using Git bisect to figure out when brokenness was introduced

Webchick shows us how to use bisect to search through your previous commits.

Features Part 3 - Re-usable features

Scott Hadfield shows us how to take a simple Drupal Feature module and make it configurable in a way that won't put your feature in an overriden state.

A simple CCK formatter for on/off checkbox fields

If you've ever been frustrated by the results of using an on/off CCK checkbox you will find this post by Sheila Mullins very valuable. Learn how to improve the user experience with a simple CCK formatter.