Three days of sessions, discussions and meetings, one day for community, businesses, publishers and practices, and another day of code sprints - Drupalcon Vienna was a blast! It was very special experience for all our team members to have Drupalcon in town and we are proud to be among the supports of the event.

While the Drupalcon webseite has a good few pointers to the well-known major tourist attractions, as locals we'd like to share our knowledge about some of our favourite places with you! Check out the list of our recommendations!

The first Drupal IronCamp took place in the beautiful capital of the Czech Republic in Prague at the end of November 2016. More than 200 attendees from 27 countries took part in four days of sprints and two days of sessions.

The web’s most powerful and versatile digital experience framework just got better. On November 19, 2015 Drupal announced the release of its latest version, Drupal 8. Drupal is the open source, digital experience framework behind millions of websites and applications. It powers many of the web’s most influential platforms. Drupal 8 changes how those platforms create and deliver the world’s best digital experiences.

Last October Drupal Austria organized a full day long free workshop for getting started with Drupal 8 in Vienna. drunomics sponsored the event and I had the favour of presenting on Coding with Drupal 8. Meanwhile, Drupal Austria has got the recordings of the workshop up, the result: 4 hours of high-quality Drupal 8 training material in German.

Last week we had to pleasure to join 2300 other Drupals to visit Drupalcon Amsterdam. Besides the usual great number of sessions and BoFs, the highlight of the conference was the first Drupal 8 beta release.

Also, the conference was a great opportunity to present together with Kristof De Jaeger (swentel) and Yves Chedemois (yched) about about the recent Entity Field API improvements. The session was a revival of the gorgeous presentation we did in Portland and a great success. If you missed it, check out the recording.

Today is a big day for the #d8rules initiative! Our crowd funding campaign was successfully funded and reached 100 % on Drupalfund. We really want to thank all you great 125+ supporters from the community: together you made this happen. Fago & Klausi may continue with the progress that has been made already for porting Rules to Drupal 8 now and we are looking forward to gather additional funds in order to make sure that all 3 milestones can be reached in time!

#d8rules reaches 100% on Drupalfund

Last Tuesday, I had the honour to talk about the Drupal 8 Entity API improvements at Drupalcon Austin. In case you missed it, you can find the slides and the recording here.

Since the DrupalDevDays in Szeged we've worked a lot on getting the remaining beta blockers of the Entity system done, which are mostely centered around an unified field repository and entity storage improvements; i.e. automatic schema generation for your content entities!

Today, I've the pleasure to introduce the #d8rules initative, our combined effort to get the Rules module ported to Drupal 8 in time!

Drupal 8 is coming...

Fortunately, the first beta of Drupal 8 is coming closer so it's time to make sure all the modules are ported and ready for Drupal 8. Unfortunately, the Rules module - my long term number one contributed module - is about to be left behind. I've worked a lot on Drupal 8 to get critical Entity API improvements like the new Entity Field API (called Entity Property API at the time of the introduction) as well as the new Typed data API done. Of course, the work on core is time intensive, not "done" yet and won't stop - so there is not a lot contribution time left for my contributed modules. :/

So where is Rules for Drupal 8 now?

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!