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Getting coding into the curriculum in Minnetonka Schools

Today, we're releasing the next installment of our series, Getting Started with Responsive Web Design in Drupal with me, your hostess, Amber Himes Matz. Up until this point, we've been focusing on making our site's layout more flexible and ensuring that our typography is expressed in relative units, not pixels. Now, we'll explore a newer feature of CSS that enables us to create blocks of CSS that apply under certain conditions, called media queries. We'll learn about viewport meta tags, breakpoints, flexible images and video, and a Drupal contributed module that provides mobile-friendly navigation.

Today we kick off a new series design to get you started with responsive web design in Drupal. We'll take a fictitious site to use as our case study, The Anytown Farmers Market. This site was built using the Drupal theme, 960 Robots, a theme based on a 960px grid and designed for the desktop. (You might recognize this theme from our series on theming).

One of the the things I like most about Drupal 8 as a site builder is how quickly you can get up and running on creating a new site. Although the installer takes a tad (insert jokes here) longer than Drupal 7, you get so much more out of the box. No need to install Drupal and head to Drush to download/enable a handful of modules just to get your site ready. For example, just to get something like an email field was yet another download. Of course, there is Views in core, but another great thing is a much larger plethora of field types. Now in Drupal 8 there are a handful of useful fields in core:

Our latest podcast, Episode 52: Drupal Community Leadership, has Addi joined by Larry Garfield (Crell), Greg Dunlap (heyrocker), and Gábor Hojsty (Gábor Hojsty); three people who have been publicly involved in recent conversations about community leadership problems and potential solutions. They sat down to hash out where the conversation comes from, the current challenges they see us facing, and their thoughts and ideas for how to approach them.

This week, Leanna Pelham of KnpUniversity continues to show you how to become a Twig expert by demonstrating Twig goodies such as template inheritance, functions, tests, for and if syntax, debugging techniques, macros, and other advanced tips and tricks. Each lesson is a bite sized tutorial and includes downloadable site code that will get you up and running with Twig without getting overwhelmed.

This week we have a ton of new tutorials for you to enjoy. We're very happy to bring back our friends from KnpUniversity to provide a great little series on the Twig templating system, and we're also wrapping up the entire O'Reilly Using Drupal book series with the final tutorials.

Something that's super fun about my job is that occasionally I get tasked with things like, "Learn how Twig works so you can tell us how it fits into our curriculum plans.". And I get to spend some time exploring various new features in Drupal 8, with an eye towards being able help explain them.

You may have heard some news about the fact that a new theme has been added to Drupal, named Classy. But what kind of theme is it exactly? Is it a pretty new look for Drupal 8? Well, no. You will still see Bartik as the default theme on your Drupal 8 site, so why another theme? Classy is a new base theme in core, which Bartik and Seven will then use as their bases. The idea here is to provide more flexibility to themers when it comes to choosing default CSS classes.

Today we've got a bit of something for both site builders and developers: we'll wrap up our multilingual series based on Using Drupal, 2nd edition and release a brand new series of Symfony tutorials from our partners and PHP/Symfony training experts over at KnpUniversity.

With Halloween just around the corner, I thought it might be fun to hand out some tasty treats. Don't worry, you're not getting fruit or pennies. It's something much more fun! I designed a custom Halloween icon set, which is free to download and use however you want. With Drupalize.Me's scary good Drupal training, it's fitting that these icons can spook, sweeten, or surprise your next project.