Round 2 of the Drupal Grand Prix will take place at Daytona Milton Keynes on Saturday 6th July. It's a great outdoor karting circuit that can host up to 35 drivers on the track at a time, and it's open to any UK Drupal companies and freelancers. (It's open to anyone outside the UK too, if you're up for the trip!)

Today we have rolled out the newest version of Drupal, released recently: Drupal 7.22. This update contains no new functionality and no security fixes, but we're committed to keeping Drupal up to date to ensure it's running smoothly.

This affects you if you have a Drupal 7 site with us, although there is nothing you need to do, and neither you nor your visitors will notice any difference when using your site.

Writing standards-compliant code in Drupal 7 doesn't have to be hard! Using the power of a modern IDE, it can help to show you where you're going wrong, and ensure that all your code is standards-compliant. Here, we'll take a look at setting up JetBrains PhpStorm (our favourite IDE) to show you coding standards problems, but any IDE with CodeSniffer support will be able to do this, so it's likely Eclipse, NetBeans, and others will also help you out in the same way.

Created in 2012, Blue Drop Awards is an independent, community-nominated, event that aims to publicly recognize the excellent individuals, companies and projects that have pushed the limits and maximized the capabilities of the open-source content management system, Drupal.

“We got a great response from the Drupal community during the inaugural Blue Drop Awards campaign so we are excited to do it bigger and better in 2013,” said Ben Finklea, CEO, Volacci. “The Blue Drop Awards are a great way to highlight and celebrate Drupal developers’ stellar innovations.”

It seems we're using an ever-increasing number of modules on our Drupal 7 sites, which are getting progressively more complex as clients (understandably) want more features, more eye candy and more value for their money. Some modules are downloaded from drupal.org, some are modified, some are written completely from scratch, and even features are modules. We've come up with a simple organisational method which we think ought to keep everything organised, and we thought we'd share this and let you have your say.

On 26th January 2013, the first Drupal Karting Grand Prix was held in Warrington, near Manchester, at speedkarting. It was organised by IXIS and featured 19 drivers (sorry Matt!) from various Drupal companies across the UK.

Being a fully indoor circuit, we anticipated no issues with the snow outside, but thanks to quite a few leaks in the roof, the track was wet in places, which just served to make things more interesting.

Today we updated Drupal to 6.28 and 7.19 to ensure security is kept up to date. These were releases made by the Drupal team to address minor security issues, and if you have a site or sites with us, you won't notice any difference in its day to day operation. If you do want to know more about the changes, or our security practice in general, do give us a call on 0800 019 9860 and we'd be happy to go into it!

When using contextual filters in Drupal's views module, you can get information from the page's URL, and use it to affect the view. This works fine if your view is a page, such as a page of blog posts, but what if your view is a block, embedded somewhere else?

For example, what if you want to add a 'recent posts' block to each user profile, to show the top 10 posts they have made recently? By default, you wouldn't be able to do this, as views 3 in Drupal 7 cannot 'see' the page URL if the view is inside a block. Luckily there's a way round this.

Today we released Wildfire onto drupal.org. This means you can download the module, create yourself an account, and start using it yourself to create email campaigns.

We're really excited by this because it means more exposure for Wildfire, more users, and therefore more opportunity for us to throw resources at making it even better and adding features.

Of course, it also means that the increased number of users will help to find all the final tiny niggles in the system and create a more polished module.

We just got back from DrupalCamp Oxford at the weekend, and there were a lot of good sessions. When you consider the ticket price was only £50 and included two 3-course lunches (both of which were way above and beyond the usual "Drupal event" food quality), it was a real bargain, but with so much information to take in, we thought we'd provide a quick summary of the key bits we took away from it.