Blog

The Drupal 8 development cycle has definitely been a long one. There are several exciting features on the way, but the improvements to the authoring experience in Drupal 8 have definitely drawn a lot of attention. (I know Amber is clamoring for in-place editing for this blog.) The Spark project is the home to much of this work. Several new core modules that contribute to these improvements (Contextual, Quickedit, Toolbar, CKEditor and to a lesser extent, Tour) leverage a pair of popular javascript libraries Backbone.js and Underscore.js.

Both Backbone.js, and its dependency Underscore.js were committed to Drupal 8 two years ago! Let's take a quick look at both Backbone.js and Underscore.js, how they're used in core, and how you might be able to use them to simplify some javascript for your site.

The Drupalize.Me podcast (formerly the Lullabot podcast) has been running for many years now. During this time, not much has changed as far as what makes the podcast itself. There is theme music, a host, guests, event updates, and now even sound effects. Even when it comes to how we record a podcast, not much is different in either the method or the technology. What can make or break a podcast, though, is the quality of the sound. I'm not talking about if the podcast is HD or anything, but what the overall quality of a person's voice is, the ability to reduce or eliminate background distractions, or even just being able to create a good mix of volumes. All these things are great to be able to have some control over and edit before putting the podcast out to the masses.

As Drupal 8 approaches, our team has been growing and really pushing ourselves. Over the past few weeks, we released some impressive tutorials and site updates. Here's an overview.

This week we continue to explore what's new in Drupal 8. We began this series with the Theming, CMI, and OO-PHP editions of our What's New in Drupal 8 series. Last week, we covered what's new in the Entity API, Blocks, Content Authoring Experience, and Mobile and Responsive Features. This week, we have videos outlining what's new in extending Drupal 8 (where did all the hooks go?), new site building features and workflows, and multilingual features. Finally, as a bonus, we have a free video tour of localize.drupal.org, where you can see how Drupal gets translated into languages from all over the world.

Drupalize.Me and Lullabot together have made a donation of $5,000 to the Drupal 8 Accelerate Fund, becoming an anchor donor of this critical funding initiative. We heartily believe in funding core development and are so excited to be a part of providing a much needed final push to a Drupal 8 stable release. Learn more about how you can be a part of accelerating the release of Drupal 8.

A new podcast, Drupalize.Me 2015 Spring Update, is ready for a listen. The Drupalize.Me team typically gets together each quarter to go over the past goals and create new ones.

This week we continue our series of presentations on What's New in Drupal 8. We'll explore blocks, the entity API, the all new content authoring experience, and mobile and responsive features in Drupal core.

Vagrant Drupal Development (VDD) is a ready-to-use development environment using a virtual machine. Why use it? It provides a standard hosting setup, contained in a virtual machine, for developing with Drupal. This allows you to get up and running really, really quickly, without knowing anything about server administration.

Part of learning Drupal’s API is learning about “what’s in the pantry.” In Drupal 8, that pantry is configured quite a bit differently than before. Instead of getting the whole warehouse of Drupal functions on every page load, functions—well, now methods—are contained in objects which are defined by classes. Most, if not all, of these classes, which exist in their own PHP files, can be extended and many of them are specifically designed to be extended. These extensible classes are the pantries. They contain properties and methods that we can just use in the classes that extend them. When we extend these classes, we need to make sure we peek inside to see what’s available before we go elsewhere for something that might already be in the cupboard.

In this week's episode, DrupalCon Bogotá Recap, Addi is joined by Lullabots Joe Shindelar, Chris Albrecht, Mike Herchel and Daniel Dalgo to talk about their awesome trip to Bogotá, Colombia for the first DrupalCon Latin America. We talk Drupal, highlights from the 'con, and some of the great things about Bogotá.

This week we're going to dive into the hands-on configuration for the Working with Drupal Multisite series.

Whether you're a Drupal beginner or veteran module developer, one thing everyone understands about Drupal is the core block system is very limiting. There are lots of modules out there that attempt to make blocks more robust. Heck, site builders have even used Views as a complete block replacement. There is one module that makes blocks a ton more useful and that is the Bean module (Block Entities Aren't Nodes). The Bean module replaces a lot of modules we used in the past to give blocks more power and function. Drupal 8 even works just like the Bean module out of the box. Instead of using Views or making nodes blocks, Bean gives us fieldable block types.