For my Blocks & Layouts presentation at our local Drupal Austria Meetup, Drupal Dev Days Szeged & recently at DrupalCamp Donetsk, I have reached out to the community to gather some data. 60 participants provided their input on favorite Drupal 7 layout tools and what they expect from Drupal 8. It's time to share the results.

vagrant is great when it comes to pre-configuring reproducible, and portable development environments for Drupal - in particular in combination with Ansible. However with sites of a decent size the performance of Drupal projects running on the NFS share vagrant uses for shared folders has become more and more of an issue - at least with Virtualbox. syncd forms a simple, pre-configurable solution that automatically syncs changes into the vagrant box, such that the files can be served from the regular VM filesystem instead.

Last week was a packed experience of sprinting, presenting & exchanging at Drupal Developers Days Szeged 2014. Here are our favorite picks.

Neben unserem Training "Learn Rules in a day" durften wir auf der DrupalCon in Prag auch eine Session zum Thema "Automating and linking together Web Services and APIs using Rules" halten.

Recently, the Drupal 7 Rules module has received some new functionality - mostly thanks to the development of the fluxkraft project. Quite some of them are under-the-hood improvements available to developers, but there is new stuff for site builders as well. So let's have a look at what's new for everyone using Rules and at what's in for developers also:

Configurable bundles for entity events & support for event settings

With Rules 2.4 events may define an event settings form via an optional event handler class. This might be useful in various scenarious, one of which Rules already implements: It's now possible to restrict entity related events to certain bundles immediately when adding an event. Compared to the previous way of adding a generic entity event plus a separate condition to check the bundle (e.g. "After saving new content" plus "Content is of type" condition) it's way nicer to just select the content type directly while adding the event!

During DrupalCon Prague we are offering a training called "Learn Rules in Day". Attending the training you’ll get to know one of Drupal’s most powerful extension - the Rules module.

Vielleicht habt Ihr es bemerkt, es hat sich viel getan in letzter Zeit auf drupal.org bzgl. fluxkraft. Wir haben inzwischen alle erstellten Module veröffentlicht und daraus eine Drupal Distribution zusammen geschnürrt.

The Rules module is one of the most powerful site building tools in Drupal contrib space besides Views. You may already be familiar with creating reaction rules to perform custom actions after certain events. In this blog post, I will show you different ways of how you can leverage the Rules module to process lists of data.

Three times a year DrupalCons bring the international Drupal community together and provide a great opportunity for coding on the next Drupal release, sharing knowledge or networking.

So schnell kanns gehen: Lange Zeit ging nichts ohne SAAS oder cloud-basierten Anwendungen. Mit den Enthüllungen über PRISM und co scheinen sich die Zeiten zu ändern, jedenfalls scheint man sich endlich wieder vermehrt Gedanken über Datensicherheit zu machen.

Im ersten Blogpost über das fluxkraft Projekt haben wir die grundsätzliche Idee vorgestellt. Aber was sind nun unsere konkreten Fallbeispiele? Welche Anwendungen sollen mit diesem Tool ermöglicht werden? Was sind die Ziele des aktuellen Projektes und welche Erweiterungen können wir uns sonst noch so vorstellen?

„drunomics“ – dies ist der Name eines Unternehmens, welches eine klare Zielsetzung verfolgt: Drupal - am Beispiel von einigen europäischen Ländern - zum vorherrschenden System für den Aufbau von Webseiten in Österreich zu etablieren.

Vielleicht habt Ihr ja bereits Gerüchte über ein Tool namens "fluxkraft" gehört: So etwas wie ifttt.com, aber mit Drupal? Tatsächlich ist fluxkraft eines unserer neuesten drunomics Lab Projekte, finanziert von Netidee.

As previously announced on the IKS blog I’ve been recently working together with Stéphane Corlosquet on integrating the tools provided by the IKS project to do semantic content enhancements in Drupal as part of the IKS early adopter program.

The Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS) project is an open source community which got funded by the EU to build an open and flexible technology platform for semantically enhanced Content Management Systems. Thanks to IKS, open source projects like Apache Stanbol, VIE.js or Create.js got started. While VIE.js and Create.js are already on their way to Drupal 8 via the Spark initiative, our focus was on integrating Apache Stanbol with Drupal 7. In short, Apache Stanbol is a java web application that leverages tools like Apache Solr, Apache Tika or Apache OpenNLP to provide a set of reusable components for semantic content management via RESTful web services. On the front-end side, VIE.js (“Vienna IKS Editables”) is the JavaScript library for implementing decoupled Content Management Systems and semantic interaction in web applications.

While the conversion to full CRUD for entities and classed objects for Drupal 8 made good progress, we’ve not yet reached the goals of fully translatable entities and having a default entity serialization for import/export, content staging and web services. For those points we need to know what’s in an entity! Yes we can look up the fields, but there are also base entity properties and further stuff modules put on entities, which both are no fields so we do not know anything about them. That is what the new Entity Property API is supposed to change!