Blog

This week we are finishing the Our Media news site project from the O'Reilly Using Drupal book. We will complete setting up our section editor access control with the Workbench Access module, by linking our News Section vocabulary to Workbench, and then testing things out.

As you start down the road of learning Drupal 8 module development, one of the first new Drupalisms that you're likely to encounter are plugins. After writing a blog post about creating blocks, which uses the new plugin architecture, I thought it might be interesting to take a step back and talk a little bit more about plugins at a higher level. This blog post contains an introduction to the what and why of plugins to help Drupal 7 developers make the transition to Drupal 8.

Creating a good editorial system can mean many different things. The Workbench module provides the main pieces that make up the heart of this system for the Our Media demo site we're building. Workbench gives us a centralized workspace for the editorial team, a way to control editorial access to content in the various sections of the site, and a very flexible tool to create custom publication workflows.

The Drupalize.Me team has been blogging and podcasting about Drupal 8 discussions, features, and significant milestones on the road to beta. Recently, we compiled our Drupal 8 resources here: drupalize.me/drupal-8

Our latest series, Using Drupal Chapter 7: Managing Publishing Workflows, focuses on the problem of managing content and the review process in a team setting. This week, we'll be introduced to the case study, explore the core Taxonomy module, and get to work categorizing content. We'll also take a look at the Pathauto module, its extensive settings, and we'll set up automatic aliasing to enable "pretty" URLs for content pages.

On Drupal.org, Drupal 8 promotion is in full-swing. Features and benefits are being touted and summarized right and left. One of the categories of improvement summed up on the Drupal 8 features page is "Accessibility." I went digging for more information on how accessibility improvements have been integrated in Drupal 8 and I found a number of resources on the effort to improve accessibility in D8.

This week we'll wrap up the series, Using Drupal Chapter 6: Event Management with these five videos:

Profiling your site is extremely useful not only for debugging and performance testing but also for learning about how your site handles requests.

Symfony 2 comes with a bundle (like a Drupal module but for Symfony) called WebProfiler Bundle which collects information about each request made to your application and allows you to visualize it in the browser.

The Date and Calendar modules are powerful and full of configuration options. When I was first learning how to use these modules, I scratched my head more than a few times trying to make sense of it all.

Last month we asked the Drupal community a few questions. We received 243 responses to our survey, and we'd like to share some of the information. While we're not making scientific generalizations from this data, it is an interesting picture of our community nonetheless. A big thank you to everyone who participated in the survey.

Here are 4 things we learned:

There are lots of goodies coming in Drupal 8. A lot of work has gone into bring Drupal up to modern web standards. In addition to digging into Drupal-specific problems, a lot of work has gone into removing some of the custom overhead we have by incorporating a number of external libraries—that is, code that other communities have created and maintain, and does not live on Drupal.org. Adding external libraries means that we are working with these other open source communities to maintain our code, and that lets us focus on the Drupalisms we need, instead of re-inventing the wheel all over the place. This is the biggest growth for exernal libraries that we've ever seen, and I decided to take a look at what we have in core now.

Case studies can provide a much needed context when learning a new concept or technology. Each learning series based on the book Using Drupal, 2nd edition outlines a case study that our trainer, Addison Berry, uses to provide something akin to client requirements for a Drupal 7 site build. Our latest series, Using Drupal Chapter 6: Event Management, features a local book club that wants to provide an events calendar and list of upcoming events on their Drupal 7 website.