Blog

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.

In these five lessons wrapping up Chapter 5: Product Reviews, Addison Berry covers how to make your product reviews findable with Drupal's Search module as well as exposed filters in Views. She also reviews several modules that you might want to use to take your product reviews site to the next level and concludes the series with an overview of what tools and techniques were used to build a product reviews site for the Super Duper Chefs case study.

I thought that for my newest blog post I would try something different, and something I have been asked to do in the past, a video tutorial of a Drupal 8 inspired illustration. I realize this is different from most of our Drupal 8 blog posts, and might not be for everyone, but I do hope you enjoy it.

In this week's episode, 43: Web Services, Addison Berry along with Lullabots Sally Young and Joe Shindelar discuss the Services module for Drupal.

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.