Blog

This week, instead of publishing a regular podcast episode, we recorded a short update about the podcast itself. We're not producing any more episodes for the rest of 2015, but you can look forward to a new, better podcast in 2016.

We've recently switched from weekly releases to working towards releasing an entire series all on the same day. The Object-Oriented PHP Part 2 series is the first one we're doing with this. You get access to the complete series today! This second part of three on object-oriented PHP, provided by KnpUniversity, continues on from our Introduction to Object-Oriented PHP series.

Most written text has a lot of functional words, like "a", "the", or "is" which are important to the person reading the content as they help it flow in a cohesive manner, but aren't necessary as important to someone searching the content of your site. In this tutorial we'll look at ways to ignore those words in our search index.

It's that time again! Here's an overview of what we've been working on recently at Drupalize.Me.

React.js, CouchDB, Node.js, de-coupling Drupal; if any of that sounds cool to you, then this is the podcast for you.

This week we'll be continuing our Using MailChimp with Drupal 7 series. And like last week, all the tutorials are free. Last week we looked at creating, and collecting contacts for, a MailChimp mailing list. This week we'll look at all the different ways we can send email to our lists.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to place panels in any region of your theme using Drupal's Blocks UI and a module packaged within the Panels project: Mini Panels. This tutorial is based on a free video in our library, Placing Panels in Blocks with Mini Panels

This week we're kicking off our new, and completely free, Using MailChimp with Drupal 7 series. This series will teach you everything you need to know about integrating Drupal with the MailChimp email marketing service.

Siege is a useful load testing tool to add to your performance testing tool kit. From the website: "Siege is an HTTP load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It lets its user hit a server with a configurable number of simulated clients. Those clients place the server 'under siege.'"

Load testing is useful for testing the performance of your site, and the infrastructure that it runs on. There’s nothing worse than having one of your blog posts end up on Hacker News and then having your site crumble under the load. Siege can simulate activity on your site, and you can then use your site from your browser as you normally would, while your siege is running and really get a feel for how your site responds under load.

This blog post will cover installing Siege on OS X and Linux, and running a basic load test with Siege.

This week we are wrapping up our Introduction to Project Management series. We've talked with the Lullabot sales and project management teams about many aspects of working with people, and setting your project up for success. As we wind things down we're going to discuss dealing with problems and and red flags that may be taking the project off course, along with different ways of adding quality assurance. We'll then get to talk about demoing your work and conducting retrospectives to review your processes. Finally, we get to tips for a successful launch and the importance of celebration!

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is way of organizing your code to be more efficient, and it takes advantage of some really nice features in modern versions of PHP. One of the basic concepts of OOP is, not surprisingly, an object. Directly related to working with objects is understanding PHP classes. Drupal 8 is taking big steps to move to an OOP architecture, and so you will get very familiar with both of these as you start to jump into Drupal 8 development.

This tutorial, based on the video Create a Basic PHP Class, will explain what a class is, show you how to set up a class, and look at a PHP object. By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to create a class, an object, add a property to your object, and set the value of the property inside the class.