Issue 76 March 7, 2013

News

The Second Annual Blue Drop Awards Celebrates Innovation

The Blue Drop Awards highlight the best Drupal sites and the people that have built them. Nominations are now open so head over to the site and nominate your favorite Drupal sites. Open community voting to identify winners in each category will kick-off on April 15th and will last until May 5. Winners will be announced on May 22nd at an awards ceremony held at DrupalCon Portland.

What’s new on DrupalCommerce.org

DrupalCommerce.org announced a list of new features of the project’s web site. The new features include a new extensions listings which includes themes, modules and distributions, an updated questions and answers section, and turbo tickets. Turbo tickets are basically paid support from Commerce experts.

Announcing Community Plugin Toolkit for Open Atrium 2.0

The new toolkit provides documentation and examples showing how to extend Open Atrium 2.0 which is built with Drupal 7.

Drupal 8 News

WSCCI at Freeze

Crell gives an update on the Web Services and Context Core Initiative.

Drupalcon

DrupalCon Portland Sessions Announced!

Mentors Needed For New Contributor Sprint at Drupalcon Portland, Sign-up

15 Secrets to Rocking Your Drupalcon

Shannon Vettes shares great tips for DrupalCon old-timers and newbies alike.

Articles

Automatic Drupal Deployment with Maven or Phing

Project Retrospectives: The Basics

Not Drupal specific but still worth a look for you project managers and architects out there.

A Pragmatic Guide To The Branch Per Feature Git Branching Strategy

My First Time Usability Testing Drupal (ps. new dreditor has simplytest.me button for patches)

Very cool addition to Dreditor. I need to check that project out.

Automated Drupal Testing with Github Pull Requests

The Heart of Content Strategy

Not Drupal specific but still a good read from Jessica Hui of Chapter Three.

Tutorials

Twitter API v1 Will Be 410 Gone

Drupal 7 Installation Profiles

Advanced Drupal 7 Form Element Theming

Debugging Drupal With Xdebug

Drupal How-To: Find Great Beginner Tutorials on Drupal 7

Adding Meta Tags to Drupal Content - OSTraining

Alter Module Or Theme Information With A Drupal Hook

Modules and Projects

ChecklistAPI Modules in Drupal

Cool modules. I was not aware of the Performance and Scalability Checklist module and QA Checklist module.

Using Static 404 Module

Module Monday: Smart Trim

100 jQuery Plugins That You Can Use | Part 2

10 awesome SEO modules for Drupal

A nice list from Web Omelette.

Drupal 7 Views Data Export Module

Project Review Wednesday: Webform Pager

Using Workbench Email Module

Podcasts

Using Mailchimp and Mandrill to Send Newsletters in Drupal with Lev Tsypin - Modules Unraveled Podcast

A really good episode and a must listen if you are interested in building sites that send newsletters or email of any kind.

DrupalEasy Podcast 100: Vice President of Drupal

Congrats to the DrupalEasy crew on 100 episodes.

Announcements

Introducing Fluxkraft - Web Automation Simplified With The Power Of Rules!

Think ifttt.com but with Drupal and Rules module. I know.

Walkthrough.it Crowd Funding Campaign Launched!

Walkthrough.it is an interesting project seeking crowd funding to build a tool that makes it easy to create and use web site walk throughs. The video demo is pretty compelling and guess what they are using? Drupal and Selenium.

Jobs

List Your Job Here

Wanna get the word out about your great Drupal job? Getting your listing in TheWeeklyDrop is easy using our self service posting system.

Finally

Staffing Changes at the DA: Thank you Neil and Marta

Holly Ross announced staffing changes at the Drupal Association letting Neil Kent and Marta Betts go. This decision along with the announcement has been met with a fair ammount of backlash as you can see in the comments. I wish the best to both Neil and Marta and hopefully this will prove to be a good move for the Drupal community as a whole.