Blog

Ever wonder what it means to host your site in "the cloud"? This week's Drupalize.Me podcast, Drupal in the Cloud, uncovers these mysteries. We discuss: what differentiates cloud providers; what it takes to get Drupal in the cloud; and what the future of cloud computing looks like.

With the release of Drupal 8 approaching, it’s time again to answer and update the age old question: What is Drupal?

If you are looking for good community event ideas, or just want to understand some of what goes into planning an event, check out this week's Drupalize.Me podcast on The Story of the TCD'OH Drupal Unconference. Addi and Joe Shindelar hop on the line with Barry Madore and Tim Erikson to discuss why they did an unconference, and how they pulled it off. As a hint, it is less work than a DrupalCamp, but still requires a little thought about how to structure the unstructured day.

In fewer than eight weeks DrupalCon will be upon us. Those registering for Breaking Down Component-Based Web Design before May 2nd will also receive a FREE annual membership from Drupalize.Me.

As you may know, a significant vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library was discovered this week. Unfortunately this software library is used to encrypt most of the Internet, including the servers on which Drupalize.Me resides. But our team took immediate action to patch this bug, and our servers are no longer vulnerable. The same can be said for our payment processing software, which stores your financial information.

This week, we're wrapping up Joe Shindelar's latest series Building Web Services with Drupal 7. In these last four videos, you will learn how to use Views to build your API, how to create your own services resource in a custom module, and best practices for how to document your API. Next week, Emma Jane Westby guides you through the process of setting up Vagrant as a local development environment in her series Introduction to Vagrant.

This week, you'll take your HTTP response and request skills to the next level as you learn how to tackle common use cases such as filtering returned data to get only what you need and authenticating requests to get data behind a login. In this installment of our series, Building Web Services with Drupal 7, Joe Shindelar will walk you through how to query, test, and authenticate your D7-backed web services.

As mentioned in my previous blog post "Catching the Community Train" Lisa, Bojhan and myself will be working on a website to better facilitate the process of designers contributing to Drupal. Following my last blog post we sent out a questionnaire to current and previous contributors in order to gain some valuable insights that will help us move forward. In this blog post I will analyze the answers we received and share what they mean to me and how they will be instrumental in our success of helping designers more easily get involved in Drupal.

In this week's Episode 38: Lessons from Distributed Companies, we talk to a few attendees of the Yonder conference about what it means to be a distributed company and how that works. Yonder was a small conferenece for leaders of distributed companies, hosted by Lullabot. Lullabot (and therefor Drupalize.Me) is a fully distributed company, with no central office.

Are you ready to dive into creating RESTful Web Services? In this next set of videos on Building Web Services with Drupal 7, Joe Shindelar provides an overview of the Services UI in Drupal 7 and shows you how to set endpoints, enable resources, and test those resources using cURL on the command line and the Chrome REST plugin.

In Drupal 8, the entire block system got an overhaul, and there are lots of goodies in there. I took a tour of the new system with a short video. Some of the biggest changes to see are that you can now use blocks more than once on your site, and there is a new Custom block library that lets you create block types, which are very much like content types for blocks. They let you add fields to blocks, and give you more fine-grained control over how those fields are displayed depending on the location. Check out the video to see some of this in action.

This week, we're introducing a new series for you module developers out there: Building Web Services with Drupal 7. Why? Because you asked for it. We keep a close eye on the suggestion box and one of your highest voted requests was using Services—and for good reason. Web Services are all the rage right now as the demand increases for the delivery of structured data decoupled from its visual display.