Blog

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.

I'm sure you've heard by now that PHPtemplate is being replaced by Twig in Drupal 8. If you're a front end developer, you may be excited or afraid about how this will affect you. Let's take a look at the guiding principles behind the Twig initiative and where you can find documentation for theming in Drupal 8.

With the number of internet connected devices increasing rapidly it's important to make sure that your content, and your business, can be read and understood by machines. Creating an Application Programmer Interface, or API, which exposes your content in machine readable formats like JSON or XML is one of the best ways to accomplish this. Next week Joe Shindelar will be hosting a free webinar to show you how to build APIs on top of Drupal 7 with the Services module.

This week's episode of our podcast, Bunny Ears Are Fuzzy, is a bit of a different than our regular podcast. Most of our team has been at SXSW for the last week, and so we didn't get a chance to record a podcast. We didn't want to leave you hanging though by skipping a week, so I went ahead and did a quick solo podcast, in which I do a dramatic reading of a pretty funny Drupal core issue. It's short and funny. Hope you all like it, and we'll be back on a normal schedule for the next podcast.