Blog

Amber Matz and I had the awesome opportunity to be part of the programming team for DrupalCon Baltimore. Both of us served as local track chairs. Amber worked on the Horizons track, and I worked on the Being Human track. We thought it would be fun to share some of our experience as track chairs helping with session selection.

If you’re looking for a great experience learning Drupal this month, there are many varied opportunities at Drupal camps. It takes a lot of volunteer hours to run them, and we’re grateful to everyone who contributes. We’ve partnered with a few camps this month as sponsors, and have contributed some coupons and memberships. We’re proud to be involved with these June events.

Drupalize.Me will be offering our Drupal 8 Theming workshop at Twin Cities DrupalCamp on June 22nd, as well as delivering sessions and attending the sprints. We would love to see you there.

We've added the last 13 tutorials for our free Hands-on Exercises: Movie Project, which covers building an entire Drupal 7 site, including site building, theming, and module development. The project is covered in 36 exercises, with the first 16 exercises focused on site building and theming. The remainder of the series has exercises that require module development, along with some performance testing.

Today marks the start of another Google Summer of Code, which is the 12th year that Drupal has been selected to work with a terrific group of bright and eager students. In this great program, Google pays students to work on various open source projects for 10 weeks. Our 8 students are working on some pretty cool projects with 15 community mentors. They have spent the last few weeks getting oriented in our community, and the actual coding work begins today. The deadline for their projects is August 29th. Drupalize.Me is proud to support these students by providing them with free memberships for the duration of the projects so they can dive right into Drupal 8.

Recently we bolstered our Drupal 8 Module Development Guide with a few new tutorials. In particular I'd like to highlight 5 of them today that all have to do with Drupal's Field API from a developer perspective.

Earlier this month another regularly scheduled version of Drupal core was released. The current stable version of core is now 8.3.2. In this blog post we're going to take a look at some of the new features that have been added to this feature release and some of the tutorial updates we've made to make sure we're staying on top of the ever moving drop.

This month sees the best European front-end conferences for Drupalers going down in Athens, Greece. Frontend United started 7 years ago with a group of Drupal front-enders and themers who wanted to focus on their specialty. Today it has become a very popular place to be for front-end developers, themers, and site builders from many different backgrounds.

Drupal 8 was many years in the making and is gaining in popularity as it matures. One of the aspects of Drupal 8 development that keeps many people from jumping in is that there are still a fair number of contributed projects (modules and themes) that have not been upgraded yet. To recognize the people who do the hard work of creating and maintaining contributed projects, and to encourage more people to upgrade projects to Drupal 8, we will give free Drupalize.Me memberships to Drupal.org project maintainers and the folks listed in Drupal 8's MAINTAINERS.txt file. This will provide a top Drupal 8 training resource for the people on the front lines, making Drupal 8 available to the world.

This time of year you can find Drupal events happening all over the world. While everyone knows about the big DrupalCon in Baltimore that just happened last week, there are a ton of great camps taking place as well. We're thankful to the volunteers who support the community by running camps. We've partnered up with several of them as sponsors and to give away free Drupalize.Me memberships. Here is a list of upcoming events that we're proud to be involved with.

Thursday, April 27th is the last day of sessions and our team will be presenting a session about these Alexa flash briefings and more fun, and a core conversation about learning Drupal, with Mateu from Lullabot leading another core conversation as well.

Drupal, Alexa, and Big Mouth Billy Bass Walk into a Bar by Amber Matz and Blake Hall at 10:45 a.m, API-First Initiative by Mateu Aguiló Bosch at 10:45 a.m. and Why Is Drupal So Hard to Learn? by Joe Shindelar at 1 p.m.

If you're at DrupalCon today and want a chance to win an Echo Dot, go to twitter.com, slash drupalize me, and retweet our tweet about the Drupalize.Me flash briefing. Contest closes at 1pm.

We'll wrap up DrupalCon with the closing ceremony at 3:30 p.m and then have a great night with the classic and always fun Drupal Trivia Night.

Don't forget that there is also a full day of sprints happening on Friday, April 28th, which includes a First Time Sprinter workshop and plenty of mentors to help you get started.

On Wednesday, April 26th there are a number of great sessions by Lullabots you don't want to miss:

• Advanced Web Services with JSON API by Mateu Aguiló Bosch at 12 p.m.
• Drupal in the Public Sphere by Matthew Tift at 2:15 p.m.
• Virtual Reality on the Web - An Overview and How to Demo by Wes Ruvalcaba and David Burns at 3:45 p.m.
• Decoupled from the Inside Out by Sally Young at 5 p.m.

This evening don't miss the 9th annual Lullabot DrupalCon party, which this year, is partnered up with Pantheon, and will be held at the Maryland Science Center, starting at 8 p.m. Come meet the Drupalize.Me team and have some fun!