Blog

This week's podcast, Episode 45: Keeping Up with Drupal News, gets into the why and how of the flow of Drupal community information. We have three guests who are all involved in consuming and sharing the Drupal news they find, through multiple formats: podcasts, newsletters, videos, and Google+ groups. Through the chat we discuss not just the news we share, but where we go to get the news we need as well.

We're welcoming a new member to the Drupalize.Me team this week! Say hello to Betty Tran. She's got a great background in web technologies, but we're particularly excited because she is a great Titanium app developer, coming to us from Appcelerator, the company behind Titanium. We use Titanium to build our iOS and Android apps, and we're looking to make some big improvements here. We figured hiring one of the best to focus dedicated time on our apps was the best way to really turn our apps into an amazing experience for our members.

Today we're excited to roll out a new installment in our series on Building Websites in Drupal 7 with Panels. In the continuation of this series, I will be walking you through modules and functionality provided by Panels, CTools, Page Manager, Views and more.

Are you finding yourself searching for some new icons to use on your latest project? Drupalize.Me loves helping out the Drupal community, and people in general, so for this post I thought it would be fitting to provide you with a carefully designed free icon set.

If you've watched any videos this week you will have noticed that the video player looks very different. We've been working on this update to our entire video delivery system since the beginning of the year, and we hope you're as excited about it as we are. Delivering video content from our servers to your device is one of the core features of this site. As such, we put a lot of time, effort, and thought into making that experience the best that we could. Here's a quick look at the improvements, followed by more in-depth background on the changes and what they mean for you.

Last week, we got started with the Field API. And this week, we'll continue with code-walkthrough videos for Drupal module developers who want to add field widgets, settings, and field formatters to custom fields.

Robust content modeling is made possible in Drupal 7 through fields. Attaching the right field types to entities makes it possible to bend your Drupal site to your will and scale it according to your needs. There are a lot of field types and field formatters provided in Contrib that you can download and install as modules to extend your Drupal 7 site. But what if you want to collect, store and format data in a particular way not provided by core or contributed modules? By providing custom fields and formatters through a module, you can control how your data is stored as well as provide one or more ways for the data to be output—through field formatters.

Drupal 8 is moving along at a steady pace, but not as quickly as we all had hoped. One great advantage this has is it gives developers time to backport lots of the features Drupal 8 has in core as modules for Drupal 7. My obvious inspiration for this post came from the presentation fellow Lullabot Dave Reid did at Drupalcon Austin about how to Future-Proof Your Drupal 7 Site. Dave’s presentation was more about what you can do to make your Drupal 7 “ready” where this article is more about showing off Drupal 8 “hotness” that we can use in production today.

This week we are finishing the Our Media news site project from the O'Reilly Using Drupal book. We will complete setting up our section editor access control with the Workbench Access module, by linking our News Section vocabulary to Workbench, and then testing things out.

As you start down the road of learning Drupal 8 module development, one of the first new Drupalisms that you're likely to encounter are plugins. After writing a blog post about creating blocks, which uses the new plugin architecture, I thought it might be interesting to take a step back and talk a little bit more about plugins at a higher level. This blog post contains an introduction to the what and why of plugins to help Drupal 7 developers make the transition to Drupal 8.

Creating a good editorial system can mean many different things. The Workbench module provides the main pieces that make up the heart of this system for the Our Media demo site we're building. Workbench gives us a centralized workspace for the editorial team, a way to control editorial access to content in the various sections of the site, and a very flexible tool to create custom publication workflows.