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This week we're happy to continue two series for you. Coding for Views series continues to dive into fields and handlers, while the FREE Building Websites Using Panels series looks at using variants.

Coding for Views

Last weekend we had a bit of a kerfuffle with one of our video streaming servers which affected those of you on, or connecting to our servers on, the US west coast. And unfortunately it took a bit longer for us to notice than it should have. We're sorry about that and we learned a lot in the process. Now that we've had a chance to fix the problem, understand why it happened, and have a plan for preventing it in the future here's a brief explanation.

This week we are launching a great new series by Jen Lampton, "Building Websites Using the Panels Module," in addition to continuing our Coding for Views series. The Panels module which has been a long requested video series from our members and we are proud to kick that off with this introductory set of videos.

Jen covers everything from the Panels interface to using variants for multi-scenario layouts. She'll cover creating multi-column pages and how the Page Manager module, part of CTools, with Panels gives us a much more flexible layout engine than Drupal alone. This will lay a great foundation for a future, advanced series on how to use code with Panels to really get crazy.

We're happy to present episode 2 of the Drupalize.Me podcast. In this podcast, Addi interviews Jen Lampton, who is a long-time Drupal contributor.

Today we're happy to start our dive into the Coding for Views series. Last week we kicked off the series by getting things all set up on our demo site and covering the resources we have available. This week we create a simple module that uses the Views API to export our site's view and store it in code in our module as a default view. With that basic understanding in place, we take a look at an existing module, our Databasics module, that we would like to integrate with Views, so we can dive even deeper in next weeks videos.

Views is without a doubt the most popular module on drupal.org, and one of the reasons for it’s popularity is the plethora of modules that enhance the out of the box views experience. These modules add new display options like a calendar or Javascript caoursel, new formatters for existing fields, and even new backends so you can query things other than MySQL. Like Drupal itself views is written to be extended and it’s not uncommon to need to do just that in order to meet your site specific requirements.

If you didn't listen to the Last Lullabot Podcast last week, you may not be aware that Lullabot is shaking things up a bit on the podcast front. We're renaming the Lullabot podcast to the Drupalize.Me podcast. The Lullabot podcast has been running since January 2006, and we're reviving that legacy with a new bi-weekly podcast, talking about everything Drupal. Today is our first Drupalize.Me podcast, where we have a good chat about DrupalCon Munich with the Lullabot team: Drupalize.Me Podcast: Episode 1. Go check it out!

It has been a few months since we started our site upgrade, and I wanted to give an update on our progress. We are a small team of three, who manage the site and create most of the videos, so needless to say we've gotten a bit waylaid on our schedule. We've also had quite a bit of fun distraction with our Lullabot company retreat (which was sooo fun!) and DrupalCon Munich (which was amazing). So, while we're not as far as we wanted to be, we have gotten a good chunk of work started, and we're through Phases 1 and 2!

We've been doing a lot of work with the Drupal Ladder, and we have two new FREE videos in the Drupal Ladder series. These cover the next two steps of the Ladder, testing and writing patches. Both lessons use a Drupal 8 sandbox site that has a known bug in it. First you walk through the process of testing a patch that someone else has provided, and in the next lesson you learn how to write that patch yourself. There is no crazy coding involved — the patch is changing some help text in Drupal core.

DrupalCon Munich 2012 was a blast! The whole Drupalize.Me team (myself, Joe, and Kyle) went over to Germany and soaked up the Drupal goodness. I had a very busy con, and want to share some of the great things that came out of it. (I'll try to be brief, but wow there was a lot of good stuff just in my little corner of the con!)

The Drupalize.Me team is excited to be going to Germany in just two weeks, for DrupalCon Munich. DrupalCon is always an amazing event with thousands of Drupalers sharing ideas, having fun, and helping to make Drupal even better, both as software and as a community. For our part, we will be involved in several sessions, as well as doing everything we can to make the sprint day successful by providing free training on community tools. What is a "sprint day" you ask? Well let me explain what's going on and why we're so excited.

Our CapitalCamp workshop is all about getting people up to speed with various community tools. We're going to spend three hours walking through the basic things you need to get geared up, and while we're stoked to be able to do this live in DC at the camp, we figured we could also share the resources we're using for others out there who'd like to do this as well. Each session begins with a short, simple, 15-minute presentation, and then we move into demonstration and hands-on work.