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Robust content modeling is made possible in Drupal 7 through fields. Attaching the right field types to entities makes it possible to bend your Drupal site to your will and scale it according to your needs. There are a lot of field types and field formatters provided in Contrib that you can download and install as modules to extend your Drupal 7 site. But what if you want to collect, store and format data in a particular way not provided by core or contributed modules? By providing custom fields and formatters through a module, you can control how your data is stored as well as provide one or more ways for the data to be output—through field formatters.

Drupal 8 is moving along at a steady pace, but not as quickly as we all had hoped. One great advantage this has is it gives developers time to backport lots of the features Drupal 8 has in core as modules for Drupal 7. My obvious inspiration for this post came from the presentation fellow Lullabot Dave Reid did at Drupalcon Austin about how to Future-Proof Your Drupal 7 Site. Dave’s presentation was more about what you can do to make your Drupal 7 “ready” where this article is more about showing off Drupal 8 “hotness” that we can use in production today.

This week we are finishing the Our Media news site project from the O'Reilly Using Drupal book. We will complete setting up our section editor access control with the Workbench Access module, by linking our News Section vocabulary to Workbench, and then testing things out.

As you start down the road of learning Drupal 8 module development, one of the first new Drupalisms that you're likely to encounter are plugins. After writing a blog post about creating blocks, which uses the new plugin architecture, I thought it might be interesting to take a step back and talk a little bit more about plugins at a higher level. This blog post contains an introduction to the what and why of plugins to help Drupal 7 developers make the transition to Drupal 8.

Creating a good editorial system can mean many different things. The Workbench module provides the main pieces that make up the heart of this system for the Our Media demo site we're building. Workbench gives us a centralized workspace for the editorial team, a way to control editorial access to content in the various sections of the site, and a very flexible tool to create custom publication workflows.

The Drupalize.Me team has been blogging and podcasting about Drupal 8 discussions, features, and significant milestones on the road to beta. Recently, we compiled our Drupal 8 resources here: drupalize.me/drupal-8

Our latest series, Using Drupal Chapter 7: Managing Publishing Workflows, focuses on the problem of managing content and the review process in a team setting. This week, we'll be introduced to the case study, explore the core Taxonomy module, and get to work categorizing content. We'll also take a look at the Pathauto module, its extensive settings, and we'll set up automatic aliasing to enable "pretty" URLs for content pages.

On Drupal.org, Drupal 8 promotion is in full-swing. Features and benefits are being touted and summarized right and left. One of the categories of improvement summed up on the Drupal 8 features page is "Accessibility." I went digging for more information on how accessibility improvements have been integrated in Drupal 8 and I found a number of resources on the effort to improve accessibility in D8.

This week we'll wrap up the series, Using Drupal Chapter 6: Event Management with these five videos:

Profiling your site is extremely useful not only for debugging and performance testing but also for learning about how your site handles requests.

Symfony 2 comes with a bundle (like a Drupal module but for Symfony) called WebProfiler Bundle which collects information about each request made to your application and allows you to visualize it in the browser.

The Date and Calendar modules are powerful and full of configuration options. When I was first learning how to use these modules, I scratched my head more than a few times trying to make sense of it all.

Last month we asked the Drupal community a few questions. We received 243 responses to our survey, and we'd like to share some of the information. While we're not making scientific generalizations from this data, it is an interesting picture of our community nonetheless. A big thank you to everyone who participated in the survey.

Here are 4 things we learned: