The digest of interesting materials from the world of Drupal # 6

Hello!

The most interesting and useful from the world of Drupal over the past 3 weeks.

In Russian

1. Roman Grachev told about the organization of dynamic logic for processing incoming URLs (for example, http://example.com/x/y/z/… , where x / y / z combinations do not fall on hook_menu).
2. From him are a few links on Drupal 8 . If a little, skrolte down, we have a dozen more fresh :)
3. @StingMU wrote on Habr about a quick installation of Drupal . Of course, not without Drush.
4. At @xandeadx, a whole series of notes on the Drupal Commerce ayaxification was typed.
5. How to make a drop-down list of links "as in Views", read the blog of Alexander Shchedrov.

Drupal-lite

1. If you are new to working in the console, and the words “vi”, “mv”, “terminal” mean little to you, then we advise you to familiarize yourself with the series of video tutorials The command line for beginners .
2. If you don’t know how to screw Composer packages to Drupal, then after reading the Drupal publication , Symfony And Friends should have fewer questions.
3. Top Drupal Modules For Views lists some of the most popular Views widget modules.
4. Many do not like the standard administrative interface of Drupal 7. A large set of tips for improving the UX administrative interface of the site is presented in the article Drupal Camp London 2015: Improving the CMS user experience .
5. In the article Drupal 101: Basic site optimisations, the author at a fairly simple level shares his recommendations for supporting Drupal sites in terms of performance, using the latest versions of modules and logging.

All for Drupal developer

1. Drupal Groups sometimes becomes literally a store of interesting information for consideration. In this regard, the discussion on the optimization of the frontend in the topic of DOM hacks for speeding up page download times has become extremely interesting.
2. The publication Memory profiling in hooks is a great start for anyone who wants to understand why this particular site on Drupal eats so much memory or slows down.
3. Imagine that you need through the code to select all nodes that have not selected any Taxonomy term as a category. Standardly, relying only on EntityFieldQuery , it cannot be made. The EntityFieldQuery article , LEFT JOINs and IS NULL conditions provides an amazing overview of the tricks that will help you achieve your goal.
4. A rather concise solution for switching the display (display) Views, for example, from a grid to the list, is suggested in the article Simple Views display switch .
5. It is possible to agree with the authors of article 20 Usability Tips For E-Commerce Websites about the fact that a very large percentage of sites on Drupal in our time is e-commerce, and their number is constantly growing. This article addresses the issues of improving the usability of such sites; which almost automatically leads to an increase in their conversion .
6. If you use statics or reverse-proxy, or just think about performance optimization issues when sharing the same pictures, you may be curious about the article G-WAN as a static Drupal file server , which presents a comparison of different approaches.
7. Google Pagespeed Module and Drupal presents a small experience into the Google PageSpeed module that integrates with web servers and processes all HTML, CSS, Javascript, and more.
8. Drupal 8 launched on a cluster of Raspberry Pi .
9. If you use any profile or distribution kit to work on your sites, then it is likely that it comes with some features that can be an arbitrary exported configuration, for example, content types. Sometimes there is a need to “clarify” basic features, for example, delete or add a new field from (c) some type of content, and, like, overwriting contrib modules and features-with-profiles-and-distributions is not the most encouraged Drupal practice (Drupal way). To solve the problem there are several approaches. For example, you might find the Features Override module, which allows you to modify (alter) an arbitrary basic configuration. (author: there is not the most pleasant experience of using this approach - through features override, especially when the basic feature can be actively updated by developers, however, it is possible that the module will be useful for your project). On this topic recently appeared a wonderful article How To Override Features , where the author compares many approaches.
10. Some interesting uses of Varnish are presented in the Varnish Tips and Tricks article.
11. Quite often, the topic of careful study of roles and access rights is not worked out as carefully as we would like. Some system in this topic is trying to make in the video Preventing Drupal Headaches: Permissions and Roles Checklist .
12. If you plan to use Backdrop CMS in your practice, then check out the series of articles on how to get your ported module with Drupal.org.
13. Just recently, the first DrupalCon in Latin America (Bogota, Colombia) ended. As is often the case, shortly after the famous event, various reviews appear where visitors to the conference share their impressions. We advise you to familiarize yourself with some of them:
    
    • DrupalCon Latin America 2015 Bogotá will live on one of the classics
    • Drupal 8, Console, Flag And Blink At Drupalcon Bogota
    • Drupalcon Latin America 2015 - A Recap

Drupal 8

1. The seventh beta of Drupal 8 has been released. At the time of publication, about 49 critical issues remain before the first release candidate.
2. In the article Backdrop Does a Disservice to Developers, the author continues a long-time holivar on the topic of whether Backdrop CMS is good or not. As the main argument, the risk is raised that developers who are “lazy to retrain” have an additional incentive to never switch to 8, but on the other hand it is noted that the skills of working with Drupal 8 (Symfony) can be more widely used .
3. The article Responding to Events in Drupal 8 tells you how to properly respond to emerging events in Drupal 8 using the Symfony Event Dispatcher .
4. Using REST Export With Views In Drupal 8 shows how easy it is for Drupal 8 to now export Views data in JSON format.
5. Another story of the migration of your site to Drupal 8 from the studio Cheppers.
6. The article Install Drush 7 for Drupal 8 without throwing away Drush 6 shows how to make it so that you can work simultaneously with two versions of the Drush: the sixth and the seventh.
7. Demo of a Free Drupal 8 material Theme created with LibSass & Gulp is dedicated to creating your own theme for Drupal 8 using newfangled frontend technologies such as Gulp , Sass and other Browsersyncs .
8. A remarkable article, A Content Staging Solution for Drupal 8 (and more) , covers in some detail the theme of content replication between different Drupal 8 environments.
9. Cache API in Drupal 8 has a number of features compared to the seven. Exploring the Cache API in Drupal 8 tells about them.
10. In a short sketch of Drupal 8 + Twig: More Secure, More Power tells you about the benefits of the SensioLabs Twig template engine.

Business and community

1. It is no secret that many organizations and studios involved in the development of Drupal sites often conduct audits of other developers' decisions (read, competitors). One of these studios recently published a prospectus on this topic. On the website of this studio there is also an interesting material. How do you rate Maintainability? dedicated to such an important attribute of software quality as “serviceability”.
2. Very soon (on March 9), voting will begin for the post of director of communication with the Drupal Association community. More than twenty candidates proposed their candidacies .

Interesting modules

1. Asynchronous Prefetch Database Query Cache module, using MySQL native driver for PHP , optimizes Drupal work with MySQL database, in particular, performs preliminary processing of caches (prefetching), fixes deadlock problem in cache tables, changes engine to MEMORY for semaphore table and much more .
2. Another attempt to implement a full-fledged system preview of the site status (site preview system) is waiting for us in the Preview Sync module. The authors came up with an extremely original solution to the problem: Preview Sync simply clones the current database into a remote environment, and there it performs all the necessary operations for previews, such as switching the status of Workbench Moderation , all with the help of Drush.
3. One of the normal practices in auditing a site on Drupal is to check whether someone managed to get into the contrib code or the core of the system and make their own edits there. Hacked module ! allows you to automate this process. (QA: http://dru.io/question/698 ).
4. If you need a field that stores the numbers “From” and “To”, that is, a range, then use the Range module. There is also a video tutorial dedicated to this module.
5. Virtually all Drupal developers will sooner or later encounter the need to crop a large image when pasting, for example, when we are interested in a rectangle of 200 by 200 pixels somewhere near the center of a 2000 photo by 2000. The problem is that standard Drupal tools (image styles) do not allow to specify the preferred area. Module Focal Point helps with the solution of this problem. There is also a great article on working with the module.

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Do you write articles about Drupal for the benefit of the community? Please contact us: Oleg Kot , Katya Marshalkina .