Drupalize.Me: Looking Back, Looking Forward

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Last year was big for Drupalize.Me. We made a lot of changes to our website, and we increased the number of video tutorials we publish each week. In December 2014, our team met in Atlanta to celebrate these successes and outline a few high-level goals for 2015. The big goal to share is that we want to communicate with you more! We want to hear your suggestions for improvements, and we want to know you as individuals. We look forward to meeting and chatting with you at events like DrupalCon, but we also want to open new channels of communication. We have lots of ideas for this, and we're excited to get started.

We also had internally-focused discussions, which included upcoming hiring decisions and team communication. We talked about creating time and brain space for real innovation in online education, while still iterating and improving Drupalize.Me. We're dedicated to creating the best Drupal tutorial website, but we're also passionate about improving the quality of online education and making it more widely available. During the week, we also took a break to explore the Atlanta Aquarium. As a result of this fun trip, we started naming our website releases after fish. It's actually cooler than you may think. For instance, one recent release was named after the Desert Pupfish. Well, we think it's cool at least....

Lots of Tutorials

In 2014, we published 20 series. This, combined with a variety of individual video tutorials, amounted to 277 videos and 38 hours of new training. It pushed our video library over 300 hours of total training. In 2015, we're hiring 2 new trainers (which you'll hear more about in a few weeks). This will bring our content production team to 6 trainers and 2 video editors. Thanks to your suggestions, we already have tons of new videos in the pipeline. We continue to prepare our base Drupal 8 curriculum plans, and as soon as Drupal 8 is stable enough to record video tutorials, we'll quickly publish the largest and most accurate Drupal 8 collection. In the meantime, we already have tutorials in production, including an overview of What's New in Drupal 8, Multisite and Domain Access, and a new Object-Oriented PHP series by our friends at KnpUniversity. We're also working on a new style of videos for our Project Management series, in which we interview the Lullabot technical project management and sales leadership team to glean real-world experience about managing big Drupal projects. We're also planning fun material on new technologies, including JavaScript frameworks (e.g., AngularJS and Node.js) and decoupled—headless—Drupal.

In addition to video tutorials, last year we published lots of Drupal 8 blog posts and written tutorials, some of which included their own embedded videos. You can see what we amassed on our Drupal 8 resources page. We plan to continue our regular schedule of Drupal 8 blog posts, and we already started mixing in written tutorials for some of our free Drupal 7 videos. You can expect this to increase over the coming months.

Our Website

Early in 2014, we launched a new home page with a slick video introduction that highlights our animation skills. (Some people at SXSW actually thought we were selling animated video services!) We want to play with animation more in 2015 and push our video production quality to an even higher level. We also revamped our video player and delivery system. This resulted in enormous playback improvements. The new player interface is much nicer now; it puts interactive transcripts, captions, and playback speed adjustment within easy reach. This year, we already started updating our search and library pages, and we have a long list of additional features we're adding to make your learning experience more fun and effective.

In order to pick up steam on these website improvements, we're also trying new ways to obtain your feedback. We tried a few methods last year as part of our new video player rollout, and we learned lots from that experience. You'll see more information about this soon; we're very excited to integrate more user feedback and UX testing in our processes.

Supporting Our Community

Last year, we worked to support our members in new ways. We moved to a new support tracking system, Zendesk, and we streamlined our processes. We served over 2,100 support requests from our members in 2014. Additionally, we started a new student discount program to give students a leg up in their Drupal education.

We also continued our regular work in the Drupal community—attending and sponsoring Drupal events around the world, improving the community documentation, working on patches, and creating our regular podcasts on all things Drupal.

We're excited about 2015, and we think our members should be too. It's going to be an amazing year of growth for Drupalize.Me and the Drupal community. Drupal 8 is on the horizon, and the possibilities are endless. We hope you join us for the ride!