Blog

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.

This week, we're kicking off a new series, Working with Drupal Multisite. We're also releasing a new video in our Drush series, Installing Drush with Composer.

We're excited to introduce two new team members! Meet Blake Hall and Will Hetherington.

This week on the podcast, Amber Matz chatted with Jesus Manuel Olivas about the Drupal Console project. What is Drupal Console? The Drupal Console is, at this time, a suite of tools that you run on a command line interface (CLI) to generate boilerplate code and interact with a Drupal 8 installation.

Events in Drupal allow various system components to interact and communicate with one another while remaining independent, or decoupled. The event system is built on the Symfony event dispatcher component, and is an implementation of the Mediator design pattern. This post takes an in-depth look at how module developers can subscribe to events in Drupal.

Last month, we posted a survey regarding your plans for learning Drupal 8. This was a follow-up to a similar survey we posted back in May, 2014. The responses we received in both instances were remarkably consistent, which is reassuring as we begin to publish our Drupal 8 tutorials. Here are a few big take-aways from our Drupal 8 surveys and some insight into our plans for Drupal 8 tutorials.

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.