Blog

During the recent Drupalize.Me site upgrade, we removed the ability to put temporary holds on memberships with an automatic billing reactivation. (Curiously, this functionally created more problems than it ever solved; lesson learned!) Now, we're giving you control by having you cancel your billing, and reactivate it when you are ready.  If you wish to stop your membership for any length of time, simply cancel billing via your account dashboard.

This week, we're finishing up our Using Drupal, Chapter 4 series, which covers media management with Media 2. We finish off our site by adding the ability to embed YouTube videos on the site very easily. This introduces us to the Media Internet Sources module and the concept of stream wrappers. Once we've finished building the site, we take a look at some ways to extend the site further on your own, and then summarize everything we've done to get to the final product.

A very long time ago I was an account manager for a very tiny web development firm. We managed about 100 accounts, although at any given time there were only a dozen or so active projects. I enjoyed the juggling and the coordination of the tasks, but I grew impatient with our developer, and taught myself more and more coding skills so that I could take on more and more of the tasks myself. Since then I've worn many hats, and coordinated many projects, but this year was the first time I officially wore the hat of "Project Manager" in my new position at Drupalize.Me. I learned a lot along the way about how to work with an internal project team. Most of it was obvious, but it took the school of hard knocks to bring me back to basics. Here are a few of the truisms I wish I'd remembered sooner rather than later.

During DrupalCon Prague I had the pleasure of giving a presentation about teaching Drupal 8 as part of the core conversations track. In the presentation I talked a lot about providing a good learning environment for people starting with Drupal 8, and removing the fear and uncertainty that are so counter to learning. One of the key points that I made during the presentation was that I want to see the leaders in our community step up and promote the things that they are excited about in Drupal 8.

After a brief break from our video schedule, we are back on track this week, picking up the trail on the Using Drupal Chapter 4, Media Management series. In these three lessons we'll take a look at how to get media into the body of our content, instead of as a separate field in our nodes. We'll look at what general solutions are out there for web development, by taking a look at tools like BUEditor, Markdown, and CKEditor and explaining what WYSIWYG is all about.

You may have noticed that we don't have any new videos out for this week. We're taking a short break in our video production schedule so that we can focus on our brand new site that we just launched last week. We're really proud of the work we've done, and we've gotten lots of great feedback from our members. We still have a number of outstanding bugs we need to iron out, and our plan is to keep rolling out bug fixes this week. So keep your eyes peeled for more cool stuff on the way!

Well, last week we launched the new version of our website, and while overall the feedback has been great, we also realize that we had a few mistakes on the site as well. We've been working hard to nip lots of little bugs over the last week, and we've also heard your feedback about watching the videos that belong to a series. I'm happy to say that we've just pushed a release that addresses some of our most pressing feedback.

We launched our new site this week! It was a lot of work, and there is still a ton more work to do. We decided to get on podcast episode #30 and talk about what the process has been like for us, and share some of what has changed on the site, along with some lessons learned. If you'd like to hear more about various aspects of the site, or our upgrade process, please do let us know, and we'll try to get it into another podcast soon.

We redesigned the site and upgraded to Drupal 7! A lot of the site and features remain the same, but we do have some changes we'd like to point out.

Last week we started off two new series on Media module, each covering a different major version. This week we are plowing ahead with the Using Drupal Chapter 4: Media Management series, which covers Media version 2.x. These lessons will give you an overview of the Media Module and the various things it will do for us. After that, we're going to dive right in to building our music review site by building out the review content type, and playing around with our field display to make sure things are looking the way we intend.

We're happy to give you Episode 29 of the Drupalize.Me podcast, with Christophe Galli and Miro Dietiker, to talk about Translation Management. This is a great project, available as a module on Drupal.org, that works with various multilingual modules to help you keep your site translation organized. There are a lot of moving pieces in a multilingual site, and these guys have been up to their elbows with it for a long time.

This week we are starting off two new series at the same time to cover a very important topic for web sites today: Media Management. Almost every site out there needs to work with media in some way, whether it is just uploading images in your blog posts, or having to work with audio and videos in a variety of ways. In Drupal 7 the Media module has become the go-to solution for handling the full range of media needs.