Drupal News

18 April 2013

It's the year 2013 and here at Cocomore we are looking forward to the future of Drupal and the release of Drupal 8.

6 May 2013

Am Wochenende fand die PHP unconference Europe 2013 in Berlin statt. Aber was unterscheidet eigentlich eine unconference von einer normalen Konferenz? Die Idee bei einer unconference besteht darin, dass jeder der anwesenden einen Vorschlag abgibt, über was er eine kurze Präsentation halten könnte oder aber auch über was er gern einen Vortrag hören würde.

8 April 2013
xml3d rubick

The XML3D Module provides a simple and easy way to integrate the XML3D models and applications into Drupal. The current 7.x-1.x version allows to simply enter the XML3D code into a Long Text field that has the XML3D Input Field formatter. The content will then be displayed on the page in the form of an iframe having the same size as the XML3D application.

21 March 2013

Wir schreiben das Jahr 2013 und hier bei Cocomore schauen wir gespannt auf die Zukunft von Drupal und den Release von Drupal 8.

3 March 2013
Modules of the month story banner illustration.

Well, February is always a short month, but this year it seemed like it passed in just a couple of weeks… and now it’s already March and I’m only finally getting around to putting the final touches on this posting for the January “Modules of the Month”. How did that happen? Well, I won’t try to bore you or make excuses. It’s just been one of those months. I’m going to try to keep up my current momentum and evaluate and write up my favorites from February now… hopefully finishing that in the next week or so. If it’s not done by the 15th, it won’t be done till April since I’ll be taking off for my first trip to India in the middle of this month.

But I’m not here to write about myself. This is about some modules which I found might be worthy of notice… specifically those released in January 2013. It’s interesting to see the evolution of a Drupal version and what kinds of modules are being released these days. Almost no modules are being released for Drupal 6 and Drupal 8’s developer API is still far enough from maturity that there are very few modules being released for it, so almost all the focus is on Drupal 7. Almost anything really critical has already been done, so most modules now fit into areas of workflow improvement, integration of third-party libraries, developer tools, and addressing the needs of an increasingly mobile audience (responsive design). There are a lot of new modules for image display, for keeping a closer eye on site administration issues, creating better e-shops, deploying content from one site to another, and managing caching, among other trends. It’s clear that Drupal 7 is a mature product serving the needs of an extremely diverse community and it’s exciting to see all the new ways that, each month, developers encounter new needs and find inventive ways to further extend on the feature-set. So read on to see what new and fun stuff we got in January… (and I promise to try to get February’s review done in the next week or so).

28 February 2013
Am 9. und 10. März findet das globale Sprint Weekend statt. An diesen Wochenende gibt es nahzu weltweit Code Sprints zu Drupal 8, siehe dazu http://groups.drupal.org/node/277768. Neben Berlin und Hamburg wollen auch wir hier in Frankfurt an diesem Wochenende einen Beitrag zu Drupal 8 leisten. Zu diesem Zweck wird am 9. und 10. März ein Code Sprint bei Cocomore stattfinden, bei dem wir an diesem globalem Event teilnehmen werden.
2 January 2013
Modules of the month story banner illustration.

Closing out the year 2012 with a bang, December brought us quite a number of new modules which look promising enough to cover; a few that I’m covering this time are far from ready or even only at the “concept” stage and normally would not be included, but they seemed particularly interesting or unique, and I want to see how they develop. Anyway, this month there were quite a few modules released for mobile support/responsive content. There were also several search-related modules, anti-spam modules, a couple of novelty modules, some interesting commerce-related releases, a number of Features package modules customized for various special-purpose distributions, lots of new “Third-party Integration” modules, theme enhancements, and more… I only wish I had more time so I could actually try out more of them, but there are several I do plan to get back to.

As usual, this post is sorted alphabetically and only covers modules which had their first release, or at least a new project created, in December. Selection for the Modules of the Month is a completely arbitrary process, but normally excludes common or niche items like a new payment method for Commerce that provides connections for a payment system used in, e.g. Romania. We also don’t normally include commercial service integration modules (unless the service looks really cool and is reasonably priced).

Anyway, it seems like only last week that I was putting the final touches on the November “Modules of the Month” story… oh wait, it was only last week: nine days ago, as I write this. Well I promised to try to get December’s published in early January, so I pushed some days around to make this happen. Let’s take a look at the modules, then, shall we? …

23 December 2012
Modules of the month story banner illustration.

November 2012 was a busy month for a lot of people involved in Drupal contribution. It was the final weeks before the “feature freeze” for Drupal 8, so a lot of the focus was on new features for the next great release of Drupal. Many of the “new projects” were simply “namespace reservations” for new core modules or planned contrib modules which relate to Drupal 8; most of which had no project code committed at all (for some, presumably, it’s all in the main Drupal 8 repository). But there were also a number of new feature-enhancing modules released for Drupal 7 (and a few for Drupal 6), several which improve search functionality, a few for delivering mobile-friendly content from a Drupal site, some for commerce, others designed to help manage Drupal sites and ensure that nothing slips through the cracks when moving from “development” to “production”, among other new gems.

It’s fun, too, that we got a couple new “novelty” modules in November: one, Driesday, puts a “Happy Driesday!” message on your site every November 19th; another is a bit more insidious, with a fully-disclosed dependency on Bad judgement: Feature creep allows you to nostalgically hang onto the “good old days” when Features had a few more quirks. So if you want to remember that fun, just turn this module on and, as the module description says, “every time that you export or update a feature the Feature creep module will randomly add an extra component to your feature, what fun!”

Before we get into the module descriptions, of course, I should acknowledge the very late arrival of this month’s release of this column. It’s been one of those months… again. But let me try to hold onto my optimism that I’ll be seeing you with December’s write-up in just a couple weeks. I’ll be aiming for the first week of January. Now let’s have a look at the “new” modules.

23 November 2012
Modules of the month story banner illustration.

October 2012 brought us a nice batch of interesting new modules. Of course I wanted to tell you all about them weeks ago, but without going into excuses and details, I’m afraid getting this published didn’t go as planned. I’d like to get back on schedule to release the next installation of this series in early December, though. Anyway, it’s great to see all of the innovations that have been introduced in the past month. You can tell that Drupal 7 has truly reached maturity by the kind of modules that are being released now. Many, if not most, of the new modules integrate with and extend the functionality of other contributed modules—for example, there are three new modules which provide plugins for the Facet API—or integrate exciting new jQuery plugins to bring a bit of sizzle to your site.

As usual, the list is in alphabetical order and I haven’t tried all of these modules (although I have experimented with quite a few of them and even eliminated a few from consideration since they seemed a bit too “broken” at this point.) Some of these modules might not be ready for use yet, but just show good promise and look worth keeping an eye on. Creating this monthly list is as much for me as it is for you, but I do hope that the modules I select work well for you, if you give them a try, and I look forward to seeing your comments about any of these modules.

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