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

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!

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.

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!