Blog

A funny thing happened last week. On Wednesday, we performed our weekly code deployment and released a handful of new features/bug fixes to the site. And then, about an hour later, someone on the team found this:

Drupal 8 is coming in 2014. There is a lot of work to do and a lot to learn. We've decided to dedicate a minimum of five hours per week towards Drupal 8 for each person on the Drupalize.Me team. We are now a hefty group of eight people, and everyone will be diving in for a total of 40 hours per week dedicated to Drupal 8. (At least until Drupal 8 launches, and hopefully even beyond that.) Everyone is picking their own projects and ways to get involved. We just started dedicating this time in December, and folks have been spending time sorting out where things are and where to jump in.

This week we're chugging along with our PSD to Drupal Theme series, with a look at getting our CSS system setup and figuring out our Drupal elements for theming. Now that we have a style guide, we want to start stubbing out the CSS files we'll use to represent it with our grid framework, and then we'll get our layout rules into place. With the CSS basics in place we're going to run through creating our Drupal element checklist to make sure we know which design components map to which Drupal pieces.

In 2008 I started on my big Drupal theming adventure by co-authoring Front End Drupal with Konstantin Käfer. Since that time thousands of people have learned Drupal theming through this book, and my presentations and workshops. My most popular workshop, PSD to Theme, is now available as a video lesson series here at Drupalize.Me.

We're super excited to release a new series this week, which has been a highly requested one on our suggestion list: PSD to Drupal Theme. This series walks you through the process of converting a static design into a Drupal theme. We'll be covering strategies for breaking down your design into Drupal pieces, extracting your design assets, and working with those components in your CSS. Along the way you're going to also be introduced to grid frameworks, Sass, and other very helpful general web development tools. At the end you will have a theme that you can install and enable on your Drupal site. Having a little bit of Drupal site building experience, and a little bit of Web experience (HTML and CSS) will be helpful but it's not required, so if you find the world of Drupal themes mysterious, this is a great series to clear the fog.

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!