Blog

This week, we've got five shiny new videos in Addison Berry's series, Using Drupal Chapter 5: Product Reviews. If you've been following along, in this series we're building a website containing product reviews using Drupal 7. So far, we've reviewed the case study and site requirements and added the Amazon module so we can integrate data from amazon.com into our Drupal site. Now it's time to add ratings using the Voting API and Fivestar modules and add simple yet useful style to our product reviews using the CSS Injector module, a CSS styling tool for site builders. If you're new to building sites in Drupal 7, this, along with rest of the Using Drupal video collection are a great way to jumpstart your way to becoming a Drupal site building rockstar.

DrupalCon Austin is rapidly approaching and the big question on my mind is: What Drupal 8 sessions do I need to put on my radar? To figure that out, I've mined the schedule for Drupal 8 related talks and events and organized them a bit to help me – and hopefully you – find the Drupal 8 sessions not to be missed.

In this week's release, we kick-off a new video learning series, Using Drupal Chapter 5: Product Reviews. In this series, you'll learn how to create a product reviews website, complete with integration with Amazon.com data and a rating system. You'll also get the chance to flex those Views muscles, as Addison Berry walks you through how to create product review lists that rock.

We're excited to release the first four videos in this series:

Drupal 8's out-of-the-box mobile friendliness creates quite the buzz. "Mobile friendly," "responsive," "squishy" — all words to describe the behavior a site invokes on different devices or different screen sizes. Mobile friendly can also mean content first. From a big screen to a little screen, things look different. Images change sizes, menu items become drop-downs, columns are pushed around to locations that make sense with content being the supreme real-estate. So if Drupal is mobile friendly out of the box that must mean I am 100% good to go with all my websites using Drupal 8.

In this week's episode, 42: Content Delivery Systems (CDNs), Addi is joined by two bots, Joe Shindelar and Ben Chavet, along with Will Hetherington, who is a network consultant for Drupalize.Me. We chat about what a CDN is, why and how people use them, and share some information about how we have our CDN set up here for Drupalize.Me.

So far in the Mapping with Leaflet series, we've taken advantage of the field formatter provided by the Leaflet module to display a map on a page for a piece of content containing location data. This resulted in a single marker on a map. But what about a map of multiple locations? For this, we'll get to use Views and the Leaflet Views module that is included in the Leaflet project download. We'll also address a common problem of transforming postal addresses into geocoded data that a map can use. For this, we'll look at a solution that integrates Geocoder and Address Field modules. As a bonus, I'll walk you through the process of configuring a Feeds Importer to work with the esoteric and possibly confusing Address Field targets and I'll demonstrate how to import .CSV text file of postal addresses into Address Field, which is then geocoded and displayed on a Leaflet map.

When I am theming a Drupal site, I need to know which variables are available on a template file. In Drupal 8, the template engine is Twig, so we’re going to need to know a little bit of Twig to make this work. So, if Twig is totally new to you, don’t worry. Today, you’ll learn some Twig!

In Episode 41, Virtualization with Vagrant, Emma Jane Westby and Erika Heidi chat about creating virtual environments with Vagrant. Through their light-hearted approach to technical topics, we hope Emma and Erika are able to make Vagrant seem a little more accessible, if not downright fun.

The concept of blocks has been around in Drupal since the earliest versions. Chunks of information that can be placed into the regions provided by a theme and re-used throughout your site. The system for defining blocks in code has changed quite a bit for Drupal 8 though so it's worth taking a fresh look at how to create blocks in your own module. Especially since in my experience it's one of the first things we need to know how to do as module developers.

Curious about Leaflet? Join Drupalize.Me Trainer Amber Matz for a live tutorial on how to add Leaflet maps to your Drupal site during this Acquia hosted webinar on May 1, 2014 at 1:00 PM EDT.

If you have worked with the Field UI in Drupal 7 you will know that you are able to prevent fields from being displayed when viewing entities (e.g. content, users etc). It was fairly simple, you would go to the Manage Display tab of an entity and move the field to the ‘Hidden’ region as shown in the screenshot below.