Catching Up With Drupal 8
Project leader Dries Buytaert kicked development of Drupal 8 into high gear by naming his new co-maintainer: Nathan Catchpole! "Catch" was one of the top 5 contributors to the Drupal 7 development cycle, spearheaded that version's performance optimization work, and was recently interviewed on Lullabot's Drupal Drama podcast. Moments after the announcement, the new commits started rolling in... Three cheers for Catch!
With This Node, I Thee Wed
Developer Scott Hadfield is giving a detailed look at how he created a hosted web platform with Drupal. The service, Wedful, lets engaged couples whip up a wedding site in no time flat, and it's powered by install profiles, features, and all the other tools Drupal users know and love. Parts one, two, and three cover the details of building, managing, and re-using shared platform features.
Oh, Oracle
Software giant Oracle announced that some new features for the MySQL database system will only be available to paid enterprise clients. Monty, one of the original founders of the MySQL project, weighs in and explains why he's now working on MariaDB, an open source MySQL alternative. Meanwhile, Oracle has gotten itself into a press release scuffle with another enterprise company, and industry-watchers are eagerly popping their popcorn for the show.
You Can Never Have Enough Lipsum
Back in June, the Roundup featured a collection of novel dummy-text generators for cheeky site builders. The Internet doesn't stand still, and even more have appeared since then: Hipster Lipsum was cool until everyone started using it, while Samuel L. Lipsum generates decidedly text that's decidedly unsafe for most client projects. For an extra dose of geeky fun, check out Stocking Is The New Planking: it features people recreating their favorite stock photos.
Webby Business
The team behind the Pantheon Project got some love this week: their cloud-based Drupal hosting service was covered by the industry blog TechCrunch. Meanwhile, writer Dan Lyons weighed in on new changes to Facebook's APIs, features, and (of course) privacy policies. Finally, Amazon announced its Kindle Fire tablet; it includes a new cloud-powered web browser named Silk. QA teams anticipating yet another engine to test for breathed a sigh of relief at news that it's based on WebKit, the same engine that powers Safari and Google Chrome.
A Wretched Hive of Scrum and Villainy
If you're looking to scare the Project Managers in your life, check out developer Pete Sergeant's essay on the perverse incentives that can cripple Agile and Scrum software projects. To cheer them up, tell them about Scrummage, a new project management tool that's tailored to Agile/Scrum methodology. It's currently in beta, and the Lullabot PMs are eagerly evaluating its potential...
Make a Friendly Future
A group of well-known designers, web standardistas, and developers have penned the Future Friendly manifesto. Preparing for the future isn't about focusing on one platform, they say, but getting the data right and designing tools on top of it. Future Friendly signatories Includes Luke Wroblewski, often linked to in our roundups, and Josh Clark, mobile app expert and author of the book Tapworthy. Josh will be a keynote speaker at the Do It With Drupal conference; if you're still on the fence, time to register is running out. Friday Roundup readers can get a sweet $100 discount by using the promo code DIWD-ROUNDUP!