Blog

This week, we're introducing a new series for you module developers out there: Building Web Services with Drupal 7. Why? Because you asked for it. We keep a close eye on the suggestion box and one of your highest voted requests was using Services—and for good reason. Web Services are all the rage right now as the demand increases for the delivery of structured data decoupled from its visual display.

I'm sure you've heard by now that PHPtemplate is being replaced by Twig in Drupal 8. If you're a front end developer, you may be excited or afraid about how this will affect you. Let's take a look at the guiding principles behind the Twig initiative and where you can find documentation for theming in Drupal 8.

With the number of internet connected devices increasing rapidly it's important to make sure that your content, and your business, can be read and understood by machines. Creating an Application Programmer Interface, or API, which exposes your content in machine readable formats like JSON or XML is one of the best ways to accomplish this. Next week Joe Shindelar will be hosting a free webinar to show you how to build APIs on top of Drupal 7 with the Services module.

This week's episode of our podcast, Bunny Ears Are Fuzzy, is a bit of a different than our regular podcast. Most of our team has been at SXSW for the last week, and so we didn't get a chance to record a podcast. We didn't want to leave you hanging though by skipping a week, so I went ahead and did a quick solo podcast, in which I do a dramatic reading of a pretty funny Drupal core issue. It's short and funny. Hope you all like it, and we'll be back on a normal schedule for the next podcast.

This week we are wrapping up our Working with Media Module in Drupal 7 series. We complete the site by getting our music views into place and adding YouTube video embeds. In the process of finishing up with our YouTube video content type, we also have to dive into the Media File Type settings. There are several layers to getting Media module displays to look and behave the way we want.

This week, we'll tame images and audio files as we continue our Working with Media Module in Drupal 7 series with Addison Berry. You'll get a guided tour of the maze of configuration necessary for getting images in-line inside your content, understand how one configuration screen affects another, master text formats, and create custom WYSIWYG toolbars. Then you'll move on to to look at HTML5 and Flash-fallback media players to create a media-rich website that rocks!

In our latest podcast episode we have two guests, Klaus Purer (klausi) and Lin Clark (linclark) joining Addi and Joe Fender to talk about the new REST module that has been added to Drupal 8 core. This makes it easy to output your content in multiple formats, including HTML, JSON and XML. Having REST in core makes it easy for non-Drupal, external apps to create and maintain content on your site.

This week we turn our attention back to the Working with Media Module in Drupal 7 series. We have a basic site in place, and now we need to add some features to make it rich with media. These three videos walk through the steps to create good-looking image galleries. They also show how we can work with third-party JavaScript libraries to enhance features on our site. Finally we add a listing page and front page block so users can find our new galleries.

This week, we're wrapping up our series on Webform Basics. In these final lessons of the series, we'll cover administrative tasks such as security, spam control, and results analysis. Even if you're not using Webform, you'll be able to apply the strategies from the "Adding Spam Protection Using Honeypot" lesson to prevent spam on your site.

In a continuation from my first post, "An Introduction to RESTful Web Services in Drupal 8", I now want to explore how Views interacts with REST in Drupal 8. Please join me!

In this week's episode, Object Oriented PHP, I'm joined by Lorna Jane Mitchell and Joe Fender to step outside of Drupal a little and look at the larger PHP landscape. We discuss what all this talk of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) means. Lorna Jane is a PHP and API specialist and has written several books about PHP, and specifically about OO in PHP. Joe is a developer on the Drupalize.Me team who has been digging into Drupal 8.