One of our favorite sessions at DrupalCon Portland was the Future of Views from Tim Plunkett. Since we returned last week, this session – which addressed upcoming changes for Views in Drupal 8 – has been on our minds; so we decided to recap a few high points along with thoughts and opinions from the New Target team. If you were in the session and have additional comments, please chime in!

The most prominent change is that Views will no longer require a separate download and installment. Drupal 8 will include Views as part of the core which essentially enables it as a default setting for all websites. Our team considers this a major improvement… particularly, because Drupal 8 will simplify the process for overriding the default views template and because Views will be stored as configuration files.

The Views bulk operations (VPO) has been a helpful module operating as an add-on for Views. As part of the core Drupal 8, various operations like changing entities and updating nodes can be done in bulk by using VBO.
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Scenario: It is Wednesday, May 22nd and the Views vulnerability patch is released in middle of Matt Chapman’s session on “Making Drupal the best REST server for Single-Page Apps.” Can’t call home, office lines are dead, nobody is responding. You have to handle this on your own, Special Agent Burt Macklin.

Challenge Accepted!

1. Slowly pull out your smartphone, launch SSH app (ConnectBot) and connect to development server.

2. Once shelled in, run drush up -n | ‘SECURITY-UPDATE’ to get a list of pending security updates. It should only be the newly released Views update.

3. Run drush and create backup of database. drush sql-dump –gzip –result-file=/var/www/yoursite/filename-$(date +%m%d%y-%H).sql.gz
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Over the years, we have launched over 100+ Drupal sites and when it’s time to deploy we use our time-tested comprehensive deployment checklist.

Each site is very specific so the list generated for each deployment is different depending on the website’s modules and features. From a small 1,000 node site to an enterprise Drupal implementation with 100,000+ nodes, these are a few of the most common deployment checklist items.

Did we miss anything? Leave us a note in comments and we will add them to our list here. (PDF)

=== Drupal 7 Deployment Checklist === … »

The development team at New Target is gearing up for DrupalCon Denver and even though there are still 52 days left before the March 20th conference start date, we can’t help but get excited!

DrupalCon, the official conference of the Drupal Community, is always relevant to web developers around the world and the Denver theme -”Collaborative Publishing for Every Device” – is particularly applicable this year with mobile and tablet use skyrocketing.

If you’re on the fence about attending, here are a few reasons we are sending our developers: … »