Drupal Watchdog Magazine: Extending Drupal, September 2013

Drupal 7 was first released in January of 2011, and remains the current stable version. In this issue, we explore a number of ways it can be extended, and just what that means. Among our feature articles here, Károly 'ChX' Négyesi offers an in-depth tutorial on the forthcoming Drupal 8 release, detailing the changes and new development patterns used to write modules; Larry Garfield introduces us to Composer, a project-agnostic PHP dependency management tool contributed by the Symfony community; and Jeff Sheltren, in an excerpt from his soon to be released book, High Performance Drupal (co-authored with Narayan Newton and Nathaniel Catchpole), explains when, why, and how to simulate website traffic. In "The Long Blade and Saw," Jeremy Rasmussen continues exploring the power of Drush, and using it to upgrade our websites. James Meickle shows us a way to get better performance from code with static caching. Michael J. Ross demonstrates how to build forms with Drupal core and Webform, and walks us through creating content types from code. Holly Ross, the Drupal Association's Executive Director, examines the recent Drupal.org security breach and what is being done to harden security on Drupal's community website. Meanwhile, for anyone needing an engaging diversion, we offer our first-ever Drupal crossword puzzle. In addition to our many articles, we welcome back our regular columnists and introduce some new ones: read on, for fascinating and informative columns covering caching, testing, learning, theming, measuring, and... extending Drupal.