The Week in Drupal: June 28, 2013

Wayne Eaker

A look back at interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last week: June 21 - 28, 2013.

Drupal News

Dries Buytaert: Drupal 8 alpha releases

xjm: Technical debt in Drupal 8 (or, when will it be ready?)

Great Posts and Tutorials

Drupal 8 Module Development, Part 1: Getting Started

Improving Drupal Site Performance - Part I

Why Cheap Drupal Themes Suck

The Current State of Drupal Admin Themes

Solving Drupal Problems With Error Logs

Simplify your development workflow with Drush and scripts

How Procurement Can Shape Software

Field Guide To Open Source Communities

AJAX Buttons and how to make Drupal less dumb about which was clicked

Interesting New Modules

Media Desk - An extension to the Drupals Media module and together with other modules like plupload, manual-crop and media multiselect it provides a slick drag-and-drop interface to work with many images in an article.

Rules Session Variables - Allows the Rules module (http://drupal.org/project/rules) to read and write values from the user's $_SESSION array.

Views Result Once - Using this module you are able to restrict results/output from views to be presented once (and only once). This is useful when generating incremental reports, or sending out subscriptions, and other kind of updates, which you want to be sent only once to users without any duplicates.

Manual Crop - Exposes a set of image style effects that enables users, if enabled in the widget settings, to crop (and scale) an image after uploading.

Formatters - Allows site builders to easily define new field Formatters without having to write code. Each Formatter is a set of simple configurable components which will be called one by one to generate the output. It is highly inspirated by the core Image module.

Clone Noderef Chain - Extends the Node Clone module (http://drupal.org/project/Node_Clone), with the feature of cloning of all referenced nodes recursively.

Tradestall - Provides a webform component which allows selecting a numbered box from an image of multiple boxes. Examples of this module's use are theatre seats, restaurant tables and room selection.

Views Filter Harmonizer - Allows your view to ignore contextual filters once the user has selected an exposed filter.

Views Sort Null Field - Provides an additional sort for FieldAPI fields, which sorts by whether the field is empty or not. This allows empty (i.e. NULL) values in fields to be sorted last.

Scaffolder - Provides an user interface to create a module and its associated files for developers.

OG LDAP API - Provides Organic groups integration with LDAP servers.

Chess Annotation - A chess module that creates a custom content type for displaying annotated chess games. It uses Chesstempo.com's JavaScript library to parse the PGN.