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All this excited talk of Drupal 8 has a lot of people dreaming of the day they get to start working with it. Some people get to build new sites from scratch all the time, but a lot of Drupal work out there is maintaining and upgrading existing sites. How will the Drupal 8 upgrade path work, and will it be as shiny as Drupal 8 itself? Well, upgrades will be radically different in Drupal 8, and I'd say it has all the shiny you could possibly want.

So far from PHP for Beginners, Part 1 and PHP For Beginners, Part 2, we have a basic site that uses a JSON file to create a list of pets in our store. Now in PHP for Beginners, Part 3, we're going to dive into the world of databases and PHP. We'll get an overview of working with MySQL databases and how to connect them with a PHP-based site.

What is D8 Accelerate? In episode 54 of the Drupalize.Me Podcast, Amber Himes Matz chats with Angie Byron and Holly Ross about this new pilot program from the Drupal Association to put $125,000 of community funds toward resolving critical issues and accelerating the release of Drupal 8.

Listen now to D8 Accelerate podcast episode.

Happy holidays, members! We’ve been working hard this month, and we have lots of new features to show off. Read about them here!

Got some Drupal 7 modules that use the Form API lying around? Want to learn how to port them to Drupal 8? The process could just be the crash course you've been looking for in Drupal 8, object-oriented, module development.

Happy Release Day! Today we are wrapping up the Getting Started with Responsive Web Design in Drupal series. We're going to look at a responsive Views-based slideshow plugin based on the Flexslider Javascript library and refactor our Views Slideshow with Flexslider instead. Then, we're going to tackle a variety of "clean-up" tasks. It's all about the details, right? First, we'll update the styles of our search form so that it doesn't break out of its sidebar region. Next, we'll take a critical look at our header and navigation content on a mobile-sized screen and make room for more important content as well as update the styles of our responsive menu provided by a contributed module to better match our site's design. Finally, we'll look at an option for making our content contained in an HTML table more reader-friendly on smaller, but important, devices. We'll also address a problem of up-scaled images and have a bit more fun with media queries.

YouTube is a great service for storing and managing your videos. While this is handy, many people want to be able to display their videos within their own website as well. In this tutorial we'll see how the Media, Media Internet Sources, and Media: YouTube modules can help give you a nice, seamless way to integrate YouTube videos into your site, and give really nice control over how those videos look, along with some built-in media management tools.

Getting coding into the curriculum in Minnetonka Schools

Today, we're releasing the next installment of our series, Getting Started with Responsive Web Design in Drupal with me, your hostess, Amber Himes Matz. Up until this point, we've been focusing on making our site's layout more flexible and ensuring that our typography is expressed in relative units, not pixels. Now, we'll explore a newer feature of CSS that enables us to create blocks of CSS that apply under certain conditions, called media queries. We'll learn about viewport meta tags, breakpoints, flexible images and video, and a Drupal contributed module that provides mobile-friendly navigation.

Today we kick off a new series design to get you started with responsive web design in Drupal. We'll take a fictitious site to use as our case study, The Anytown Farmers Market. This site was built using the Drupal theme, 960 Robots, a theme based on a 960px grid and designed for the desktop. (You might recognize this theme from our series on theming).

One of the the things I like most about Drupal 8 as a site builder is how quickly you can get up and running on creating a new site. Although the installer takes a tad (insert jokes here) longer than Drupal 7, you get so much more out of the box. No need to install Drupal and head to Drush to download/enable a handful of modules just to get your site ready. For example, just to get something like an email field was yet another download. Of course, there is Views in core, but another great thing is a much larger plethora of field types. Now in Drupal 8 there are a handful of useful fields in core:

Our latest podcast, Episode 52: Drupal Community Leadership, has Addi joined by Larry Garfield (Crell), Greg Dunlap (heyrocker), and Gábor Hojsty (Gábor Hojsty); three people who have been publicly involved in recent conversations about community leadership problems and potential solutions. They sat down to hash out where the conversation comes from, the current challenges they see us facing, and their thoughts and ideas for how to approach them.