The digest of interesting materials from the world of Drupal # 12

Hello!

The most interesting and useful from the world of Drupal for the past month in our twelfth release.

In Russian

1. On Habré published an article " Comparison of the speed of execution of Drupal code for PHP 5.3-5.6 and 7.0. "Battle of code optimizers" apc vs xcache vs opcache ".
2. And immediately a practical note on the inclusion of Opcache from Roman Agabekov.
3. More about performance, but at the level of the Drupal Form API: Views caching with products in Drupal Commerce .
4. Several interesting modules and a bit of code in the article “ Making uploading images to Drupal more convenient ”. Wherever views are used!
5. “ We change the style of image output depending on the number of files + colorbox ”. This time the author connected to the Rules process.
6. If CKEditor seemed too complicated and cumbersome to you, look at the note: How I set up CKEditor ...
7. Ibid at dru.io kalabro shared her experience in writing Drush scripts .
8. After mastering Drush, you can take on shell scripts .
9. From the same blog you can find out how the node_grants access control mechanism works.
10. Working with locale_custom_strings: Replacing strings (text) by default, without using a translation system.

Drupal lite

1. It seems we found the best book on Drupal: Drupal 7 Deconstructed . The author explains the kernel code in simple English. Four chapters have already been written and we are waiting for the fifth about the Form API!
2. A good tool is half the success. InternetDevels is a list of useful developer tools.
3. Learning to make mass mailings from your sites using Mailchimp . The second part .
4. Another developer tool - Theme Developer - will help debug your themes.
5. A simple example of using Views: Defining Drill Downs in Drupal Views .
6. Detailed manual on using Mini Panels. There is a video version .

All for the developer

1. New versions of Drupal 7.39 and 6.37 have been released , which include important security updates. Be sure to update!
2. Extending Views Bulk Operations with your own actions - an article for those who prefer to write their code using Rules.
3. Use the Fences module to generate cleaner HTML in Panels.
4. Continuing the theme, we are improving the HTML code generated by Views , using the built-in capabilities of the Views itself.
5. Many have already managed to catch on the administrative theme Adminimal . She recently switched to Material Design .
6. Significantly speeding up the rendering of pages using critical CSS .
7. Advanced image optimization with ImageAPI Optimize .
8. What to use to build projects: Drush Make or Composer?
9. An interesting way to keep track of applied patches with the help of the Drush Patch File (and automatically apply them), if in the previous paragraph you refused to Drush Make.
10. Probably everyone has seen the good old article of A Beginner's Guide to Caching Data in Drupal 7 . Its author went further and connected to the Doctrine Chained Cache (with the help of Composer, by the way).
11. A small Blackfire.io promo service for performance profiling. The guys tell how they managed to find some unobvious bottlenecks in their project.
12. We conclude the performance theme with the most valuable compilation of patches and modules. Drupal 7 functionally .
13. Drush-recipes + Drupal Console - ideas for the development of console management from the author of Drush Recipes.
14. Contextual control of access to materials .
15. Developing online stores on Drupal has never been easy. An interesting approach is to transfer all ecommerce functionality to a third-party service, for example Shopify . Quite promising enough, judging by the reviews.
16. If you decide to stop at Drupal Commerce, then read the “ Creating custom commerce products and line item types “ guide on how to correctly create new products for your store.
17. Sometimes the process of publishing materials on sites can be very complicated when, after the moderation process, not one specific, but a whole collection of entities or changes must be applied at a certain point in time. In principle, all this was realizable by special modules, but for a long time there was no possibility of previewing the state of the site in the future tense. This article is devoted to the article “ Back to the Future ”. We add that the architect of the CPS system considered in the article is Earl Miles (merlinofchaos).
18. Last month gave us a lot of publications on the topic of “reckless” Drupal. You can learn about the advantages of this approach in the article “ Decoupled CMS: Why“ Going Headless ”Is Becoming So Popular , and with disadvantages in“ Decapitated Drupal: The Downsides of Decoupling ”. Next, you should read a series of articles on the topic of creating a RESTful API in Drupal 7 on the backend and complete it with interesting and relevant material on the frontend in two parts ( one , two ).
19. Update robots.txt to get rid of the error “ Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS on your Drupal site ”.
20. The redesign of Lullabot.com was accompanied by a number of interesting technical nuances, in particular the use of CouchDB and React.

Drupal 8

1. A brief overview of the latest changes in the core of Drupal 8 .
2. The article “ Configure PHPStorm to debug Drupal 8 ” tells about the IDE configuration of PhpStorm for debugging Drupal 8.
3. The story about the creation of the conference site on Drupal 8 . No shoals not done.
4. The publication “ D8FTW: Storing data in Drupal 8 ” provides an overview of all kinds of data in Drupal 8.
5. We work with mail in Drupal 8 .
6. A concise introduction to the theme of Drupal 8.
7. Understand how Drupal uses symfony HTTPKernel .
8. The architecture of Drupal 8 is service, with active use of DI and IoC. This makes it easy to override various aspects of the kernel without modifying its files directly. A good insight into this topic is presented in the article Overriding Drupal 8 Services . The study can be continued with “ Overriding services in Drupal 8 - advanced cases ” in order to consolidate your knowledge.

Business and community

1. Tips for creating and developing your own web-studio .
2. Two quite large and well-known Australian companies, Code Drop and PreviousNext, merged . In general, in 2015 there were a lot of similar mergers.
3. Lullabot, the most famous drupal-company, is pleased not only with technical articles, but also with advice on the assessment of the complexity of projects .
4. Dries Buytart collects ideas for their sessions at the upcoming DrupalCon Barcelona conference.
5. Larry Garfield performed an analysis of speakers at PHP conferences to try to debunk some existing myths, for example, that “there are a circle of thieves :) who always and everywhere speak.”
6. Recently, one of the fairly frequent requests from customers has become a request to conduct an independent audit of a solution being created by someone else. The article " Auditing, Ethics, and Drupal Sites " discusses the ethical issues, open and unspoken rules associated with this important activity.
7. We work with customer complaints.

Interesting modules

1. Wordpress menu
   Attempt to transfer the menu from Wordpress'a.
2. Entity data
   If you need to expand any other entities and store additional information in them, be sure to use this module - it should make your life much easier. The article on the topic is “ A Simple Entity Data API for Module Builders ”.
3. Views fast forward
   Immediately redirect the user if Views returns only one single result.
4. Minify HTML
   This module removes extra spaces in the resulting HTML, reducing the size of the page.
5. Field Collection AJAX
   Alternate table widget for Field Collection.
6. Space launches
   The module receives information about planned space flights with a NASA server.
7. exFeedback
   Generation and sending to the server a screenshot of the user-selected area of ​​your site along with a text message (a kind of feedback tool).
8. Info plugins
   The module allows developers to use Ctools-plugins instead of standard info-hooks ( article ).
9. Icon API
   If you do not want to mess around with icon fonts, then try Icon API. Article in the set .

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This time I would like to discuss the Headless approach. Our term is not yet so popular. What do you think about the removal of frontend from drupal? Do you use? If so, how do you implement the API for interacting with the front end?

PS Readers of our newsletter already know about the pilot Drupal podcast based on the last digest. Thank you all for the feedback and wait for the new releases!

Oleg Kot and Katya Marshalkina worked on the issue.