The digest of interesting materials from the world of Drupal # 2

Hello!

In this issue you will find more than 30 news, materials, interesting modules - all the most interesting and fresh from the world of Drupal.

In Russian

Let's start with the materials in Russian:

• Would you like to tie the popular HTML, CSS framework Boostrap to your site? We advise you to familiarize yourself with the cycle of articles from Angarsky.ru:
  
  • Drupal and Bootstrap framework: customize, use Sass.
  • A bunch of modules Panels, Views and Bootstrap Framework.
• Some tips on speeding up Drupal from afi13 .
• Since the release of the first digest, xandeadx.ru has published more than 10 new notes and useful snippets.
• Roman Grachev shares his experience of using CasperJS for testing drupal projects .
• Published photos and videos from the conference DrupalCamp MSK 2014.
• In the St. Petersburg Drupal community, the contest “ Projects of Russian Developers ” has ended. Be sure to look at the comments, which lists the modules themselves.

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All for Drupal developer

Drupal news and articles from all over the world in our main heading:

• "All technologies of the future have one common feature: the developers of the first prototypes consciously build systems with the possibility of innovation from future users." Perhaps a controversial, and too strict statement, but maybe this explains the success of Drupal 7? Very interesting material is waiting for you in the article Adaptive Architecture: Leave Room to Evolve .
• Drupal has several popular "basic" themes. The author explains why he chose Bootstrap: Which Base Theme We Use (and Why) .
• Don't know what a hook is? This note is an example of a simple module specifically for beginners.
• In Drupal, as in any full-fledged framework, there is always room for non-trivial things, pitfalls, rakes, bicycles, etc. In this regard, the collections of Gotcha are very interesting - this time from the developer Wunderkraut - Bernt's Drupal Gotchas .
• Does the client ask you for CRM ? Do you yourself need a customer relationship management system? Make it on Drupal, but do not reinvent the wheel, because more than 7 different solutions are already available, to which a separate review is dedicated.
• If you are developing a multilingual website and want to translate individual fields, including headers, and not all the material, be sure to read the article Setup Entity Translation the right way .
• Parsing third-party sites? Face the problem of regular expression matching and the like? Try using the Import.IO service. Especially since it integrates normally with the Feeds module.
• About the flexible and powerful module Views can talk endlessly. At this time, we offer you a detailed instruction how to configure a tricky filter on the type of file without a single line of code.
  If the task cannot be solved from the admin, the Views API comes to the rescue. In an article from Appnovation, an example of customizing an embedded field with code.
• “Drupal in active search” - I wanted so much to name this digest! :)
  
  1. A great introduction to faceted search (with video).
  2. A series of articles "Apache Solr and Drupal". Already out the first and second parts.
  3. Another manual for installing Apache Solr , an option for development.
  4. Search API integration with RESTful approach .
• Are you studying AngularJS or just planning to do it? Not sure how to tie it to Drupal? Check out the article AngularJS in Drupal Apps , where you create a block with a list of nodes and search for them, which works absolutely asynchronously.
• Security issues on sites will always be relevant, especially since the number of utilities that collect vulnerable sites in semi-automatic mode is constantly growing. Article Drupal Security Tips for Developers helps to move in the right direction.
• The article How to improve security on Drupal sites provides a number of ways to hide the fact that Drupal is being used, so as not to attract the attention of automatic utilities for scanning for vulnerabilities.
• If you have not heard about the concept of Offline-first, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with the presentation Let's Take Drupal Offline! The idea, at least, is curious, although not very applicable at the moment, out of the box.
• Sometimes you look at the standard forms of editing content in Drupal and you understand: “something is not right”. Yuri Gerasimov has a few ideas on how to significantly improve UX Drupal.
• Do you know about user_multiple_role_edit() ? A short note on how to programmatically assign roles to a user is at your service.
• We continue the coder theme with two curious helper libraries for those who write a lot of code: Wrappers Delight and Distill .
• Where Drupal is, there is Drush. The author of the article Advanced Drupal User Management With Drush showed a couple of examples of working with users directly from the console. For the complete set, the user-login command is missing.
• Almost always, when working with different environments, for example: local, aging server, production, one has to deal with the fact that each of them uses either his or her own credentials to connect to the database, as well as a variety of settings, which ultimately leads to the need to have one giant settings.php file or many different ones, for example, settings-prod.php. Everything is good, but the problem is that each developer’s local environment may have its own - and this means that even having a local settings file, let's say settings-local.php, everyone will have their own version, which will lead to unnecessary git status changes. This problem has a solution, and it is covered in the article on configuration and overrides .
• If you were wondering how to make your own “widget” in Panels, we recommend reading the article How to Create Ctools Content Types in the Drupal 7 article.
• In general, Panels is one more thing. Yuri Gerasimov tells in his blog how you can manage the sequence of rendering panels from the admin panel and from the code. Live and learn!
• Interested in how to work with multimedia in Drupal? We have for you an interesting series of articles about the Scald module: Part 1 (review of solutions) and Part 2 (introduction to Scald) have already been published.
• A detailed manual on how to make friends with the Media and YouTube module was written by lullabot.
• We also highly recommend that you read the Resource Guide: Managing Media in Drupal . It presents a compilation of the most famous modules and practices on this topic.

Business and community

Drupal out of code:

• The results of Drupal-year, very briefly, but very capacious: Six Things We Learned About Drupal in 2014
• To speed up the work on Drupal 8 recently created a fund Drupal Accelerate Fund in the amount of $ 125,000. Now any person or organization can apply for a grant if they are ready to organize a sprint to support the core of the system. Also, Dries and the Drupal Association seek help from organizations that are willing to sponsor this fund in the future. Set an ambitious goal to collect an additional $ 65,000.
• The Drupal.org team is actively working to make the main Drupal site convenient for all its users. To this end, the Drupal association conducted a series of interviews with developers at various levels from beginner to master. The Russian community was represented by Katya Marshalkina aka kalabro : Meeting Personas: The Drupal Expert .
• There is another division of Drupal developers: Site Builder, Themer and Module Develper. What is the difference, read the article What is a Drupal developer?
• Would you like to download for Drupal 8, but there is neither a mentor, nor a suitable project? Join the initiatives to translate local community sites to Drupal 8: drupal.ru and drupal.ua, respectively.

Drupal 8

News from the front lines of the next version of Drupal:

• Beta4 released.
• Cheat sheet on configuration yaml-files , which now stores all the settings of the site.
• Porting a module from seven to eight using the Drupal Module Upgrader module.
• As you know, Drupal 8 includes a number of PHP components, probably familiar to web developers from other frameworks, such as Symfony. Kris Vanderwater provides an overview of the main ones:
  
  • Composer
  • Guzzle
  The series will continue.
• With the development of Drupal 8, not everything is so simple , perhaps due to the fact that the main focus of the system has shifted to moving towards the enterprise world, which naturally led to a complication of the system and raised the bar for contributing. Interestingly, in this regard, it looks like the fork from Drupal 7 - Backdrop CMS . However, the majority of respondents are optimistic for 2015.

Interesting modules

And finally, several modules that are worth paying attention to:

• Taxonomy Term Status allows you to set the status of "published" / "unpublished" for taxonomy terms, just like a node.
• Default file settings for easy management of default file field settings.
• Classy Panel Styles for advanced control panel styles ( videos and slides ).
• Views EVI (Exposed Value Injector) is a new module that allows you to pass arguments to filters.
• Reroute Email is needed to redirect all mail to dev servers ( article ).
• The Drush Registry Rebuild extension will help move the module (even without turning it off) to another folder and not see fatal PHP errors.
• If you are an active user of the Panels module, you’ve probably come across the Fieldable Panels Panes module , which allows you to create entities with an arbitrary set of fields directly when editing the panel, which are literally reusable. Recently, the Fieldable Panel Panes Bundles module has appeared, which allows you to create bundles, similar to content types.
• In the video review on CodeKarate , the Smart Paging module is disassembled in detail, which is used to paginate the contents of a node by the number of characters, words or a special placeholder.

Oleg Kot and Katya Marshalkina worked on the issue. Email us with any questions and suggestions!



All the best! See you in the new year!