The Week in Drupal: April 15, 2015
A review of interesting modules, articles and other Drupal news of the last week: April 8 - 15, 2015.
Drupal News
The New "Try Drupal" Program on Drupal.org
A list of hosting providers that provide free, quick spin-ups of new Drupal sites for new users. It sounds pretty good, but will there be any walk-though of what people should do once they get it running? Drupal 7 out of the box is pretty confusing for new users.
What's new on Drupal.org - March 2015
Drupal 8
Drupal 8 now has page caching enabled by default
There are also a bunch of improvements to the default caching system, detailed in the post.
Responsive Breakpoints in D8, the breakdown
Tutorials
How to Use WordPress Style Shortcodes in Drupal 7
Using Composer to build your Drupal 7 projects
Hmm...interesting. You can basically use it as a replacement for Drush Make.
Connecting Drupal to Salesforce in Three Easy Steps
Covers how to integrate Entityform and Webform with Salesforce.
Big Manual for creating CTools popups in Drupal 7
A lot of options in here.
Blog Posts and Podcasts
Top Drupal 7 Modules: Final Edition
This is a great list, but I'd support NavBar over Admin Menu. I've always found Admin Menu hard to keep open all the way down in a deep tree of links. (Maybe I'm just a bad mouse driver.)
How and why you should update PHP to PHP 5.5 with Drupal
If you're running something older than 5.4, you could see 50% reduction in memory consumption. What other reason would you need? (It's faster too.)
Web-Consulting's Dirty Little Secret
Great post, summarized by this quote: "In my experience about 75% of website decisions are made because of one of two things (on all size projects mind you.) 1) What makes the stakeholder(s) look good (i.e. Quarterly goals, friends, buzz words). 2) What their competitors are doing. What websites SHOULD be based on: 1) What benefits users most. 2) What meets long-term goals"
Drupal and the Internet of Things
We just need an Amazon Dash like button to order things from Drupal Commerce.
Drupal as an Inbound Marketing Platform
Interesting New Modules
Views exposed form layout
Oh man, this looks like it makes doing custom formatting of Views exposed forms so much easier. Will be definitely giving this a try on the new project that requires it.
Panels Preview
Shows you a preview of what your panel will look like in the popup for selecting new panes.
Google Calendar Sync (sandbox)
Allows you to sync events on your Drupal site with a Google Calendar.
Letter Default Avatar
Gives your users color + letter default avatars, similiar to contacts without photos on iOS or OS X. That's handy for scanning through a thread of comments or something when users don't always add an avatar.
Views List Sort
Allows a view to be sorted by a List type field's allowed values. You'd want this if your allowed values are stored in a non-alphabetical order, and you want to present your view results in the same order as your allowed values listed. Like, all the time.
Upcoming Drupal Events
Drupal Dev Day NYC - April 19, John Jay College, NYC
DrupalCon Los Angeles - May 11 - 15