Logstash is a great tool to centralize logs in your environment. For example we have several drupal webheads that write logs into syslog. It would be really nice to see those logs somewhere centrally to find out about your system's health status and debug potential problems.

In this article I would like to show how easy to start using logstash for local development.

Panels standard renderer has very flexible undocumented feature of controlling the sequence of panels being rendered.

By default you have possibility to use 'render first' and 'render last' in your content type definition so you already can control what pane should be rendered for example last. Undocumented part is more interesting that is hook_panels_panes_prepared_alter() that runs after all panes were set up. So you can alter the array of panes in which way you can control sequence of panes being rendered. This feature is super handy when you have dependent panes.

Because our IT sphere develops so fast it is so easy to wake up one morning and understand that your knowledge about things got outdated. I have personally decided to restart my habit of reading technical books. Lately I have completed book about Varnish (https://www.varnish-software.com/static/book/) that I highly recommend to everyone dealing with web development.

Services module is a great tool for exposing API's of your website to other applications.

When we work with Services module most of of the changes can be done only in code. But sometimes clients ask to have configurable interface for GET calls we expose. For example client needs some "export" call for his another application that imports data from our site. This is where Services Views module can play its very nice role.

There is more or less standard way of building Slideshows in drupal -- Views Slideshow module.

Module really works great and I would like to thank all people involved in it.

But what we should do when we want to change some of the behaviors of the javascripts of it? In my case the task was to change image style (imagecache preset) of the active page thumbnail. By default image style all thumbnails where grayscale, but we needed to make active thumbnail colorful. Like on screenshot image below.

One of new drupal 7 projects I had the task to add new step in checkout process. In this article I would like to share how easy it is now with Drupal Commerce