Drupal Planet

Like many developers, we get pretty psyched about building stuff. Sometimes it takes us a little longer to get excited about describing the stuff we built... but RedHen has been getting enough attention that it was time to do some communicating, especially considering we recently released version 7.x-1.2 of the module.

Today we published a significant, if not quite complete, chunk of RedHen documentation to Drupal.org here. That documentation can now grow with RedHen!

But I know what you're thinking: "Documentation? Am I having some horrible 2005 fever dream? Where's the video??"

So, ok: I made a little instructional video about getting started with RedHen. It's my first one, so critique gently: it's surprisingly difficult to converse with an imaginary audience.

Update: Version 7.x-1.3 had a couple of bugs: as of March 18, the latest-and-greatest version of Mandrill is 7.x-1.4!

We ThinkShouters have been working away on our Drupal/Mandrill integration module, and released version 7.x-1.3 today. We think it's a pretty significant step for the module: I'll tell you how we got to where we are, what's in this release, and a little about what's next for Mandrill.

If you aren't familiar with Mandrill, it's a transactional email service built around the email delivery system for MailChimp, and it's deliberately built to be used by custom apps and plugins. If you want your Drupal site's automated emails to get sophisticated modern analytics and reporting, be spam compliant, scale to bulk levels, and be more reliably delivered, you can route your email through Mandrill.

After a decade of having day-to-day IT support as one of my job responsibilities (no longer, thankfully!), I feel pretty confident making existing software behave the way I want it to. Until, that is, it's time to set up a development environment: the domain of developers is naturally fraught with some of the most obtuse configuration oddities. So, for all of you out there who just want to get your Drupal development environment running with minimal headaches, I present "Drupal Dev a la ThinkShout in 5 Coherent Steps".