On the Liip blog there's a post from Jon Minder talking about the new Drupal 8 migration API/module and includes a guide to get you started using it in your Drupal application.

We at Liip AG believe, that the migration API is the best and most efficient way to import data into Drupal. [...] The Migrate 8 module in core is only an API. There is no user interface. This makes it difficult for new developer to start with Migrate 8.

I suggest you, to install the [several] extension modules right away before you start developing if you want to realize the full potential of migrate.

The post starts with a list of reasons they see to use the migration module over other methods including the fact that it's sponsored and supported by Acquia. He provides a list of modules to install before getting started with Migrate and links to a GitHub repository if you'd like a "quickstart" environment to follow his examples. He then compares the previous version (from Drupal 7) of the migration handling with the newer Drupal 8 functionality, most notably the change over to YAML configuration rather than PHP code. He helps you understand the structure of these files and gives an example. He shows how to run the migration, gives a more advanced JSON source example and mentions the included process plugin.

On the Ibuildings site there's a tutorial posted talking about working with entities in Drupal 7 and how creating your own classes for them can make them easier to manage.

Developers love object-oriented code. But how can this be achieved with Drupal 7 entities? By default Drupal uses a single class for all entities of a given type. For example, all node objects are standard classes (stdClass) and all entity objects have the Entity type. I personally like to have an entity model that only exposes the functionality that is applicable for the logic of your domain.

[...] Wouldn’t it be nice to create your own classes for entities?

First off, he starts with a refresher on what entities are and how they relate to the database schema. He points out the difficulties in using them and testing their types. He then provides his suggested solution for "all" of your entity problems - the creation of classes for the different entity types. He gives an example using an Article type and how to create/use them in your Drupal code.

Jeff Geerling has an interesting post to his site showing the results of some of his own testing around the performance of Drupal 8 versus Drupal 7...and that 8 comes out to be slower than 7. He also includes some of the things that the Drupal project is doing to help the situation.

When some people see reports of Drupal 8 being 'dramatically' slower than Drupal 7, they wonder why, and they also use this performance change as ammunition against some of the major architectural changes that were made during Drupal 8's development cycle.

First, I wanted to give some more concrete data behind why Drupal 8 is slower (specifically, what kinds of things does Drupal 8 do that make it take longer per request than Drupal 7 on an otherwise-identical system), and also why this might or might not make any difference in your choice to upgrade to Drupal 8 sooner rather than later.

He shares the results of some of his own benchmarking on a cluster (bramble) of Raspberry Pis for the requests per second on the standard setup for each version. He includes the output from an XHProf profiling run too, showing the large call stack on both sides, not just Drupal 8. He then talks about some of the Drupal 8 updates that are included to help mitigate some of these issues: architecture changes, easier caching, authenticated user handing and slow loading content management.

The php[architect] site has a new tutorial posted giving you a step by step guide to sending HTML email with the combination of Drupal 7, Webform and Mandrill (the mail service by Mailchimp).

By default, Drupal is configured to send out plain text emails. For many developers, plain text email is sufficient and preferable to HTML email. HTML email is still, in this day and age, not guaranteed to render the same across email clients, more likely to be labeled as spam, and requires a significant amount of testing to make sure it works. Still, a minimally styled HTML message can be easier for recipients to read and help reinforce your brand/design (if you don’t depend on images to do so). In this article, we’ll look at the modules to install and configure to enable HTML emails and, specifically, how to change the default Webform email template to send submissions as HTML.

The tutorial comes in four different sections, each with plenty of description and some code to make it happen:

• Set up your site to send email
• Allow outgoing email to use HTML
• Formatting Outgoing Email
• Send Webform Submission as HTML Emails

According to this new article to Developer.com mentions, as the deadline for the Drupal 7 release nears, development is stronger than ever to work out the kinks before this next major release.

This week, Acquia, the lead commercial sponsor behind Drupal for which Buytaert serves as co-founder and CTO, announced new training, hosting and distribution efforts -- moves that aim to further spread the growing footprint of Drupal deployments while work on Drupal 7 development continues.

The article talks about Acquia's efforts to spread the Drupal influence out further and further and some of the numbers they're looking for to see Drupal 7 as a success.