Blog

This week we're finally ready to dive in and write our first custom migration with the Migrate module. To get things set up, we need to get our source data, and create the content type in our Drupal site so that we have a destination. Joe walks through grabbing some baseball stats in SQL format for the source, and then building out the content types we'll need for teams and players.

This week, we are continuing our Importing Data With Migrate and Drupal 7 series, by getting oriented with the Migrate module. We take a look at two different ways of working with our migrations, through the UI and by using drush. Then we open up the Migrate example module to get an overview about what files are needed, and the main pieces of code used, to create a migration. This sets us up with a foundation to begin writing our own custom migration next week.

With so much data in so many places on the web, more and more site builders find that they need to get external data into their Drupal sites. It's a common problem with many ways to solve. One of the best ways to tackle this in Drupal is to use the Migrate module. The new Importing Data With Migrate and Drupal 7 series will teach you how to use the Migrate module to take data that exists in different source locations and import that into a Drupal 7 website.

Today we are going to wrap things up on the Using Drupal Chapter 3: Job Board series. We've created a site that meets the Epic University requirements, and learned the fundamental building blocks of putting together a Drupal site. In our last two lessons we are going to look at modules we could use to make our site even better, and then we are going to do our final tour and review of the site we've built, looking at what we've done, and how we built it.

In Episode 25 of the Drupalize.Me Podcast, Kyle Hofmeyer takes time to gather some Lullabots to discuss "developer workflow".

We are getting close to completing our site in the Using Drupal Chapter 3: Job Board series. This week we are going to finish up our requirements by building out the Applications view. This view gets a little tricky though, because we need to create three very different displays, and control who has access to some of those displays. This means we'll be doing a lot of overrides in our different displays. We also get to work with Views relationships to pull even more information into our view.

You've probably heard of this magical land of version control where you can undo bad things, start over, and share your work effortlessly. It's a wonderful place that, let's face it, actually takes a bit of work to get to. It's a lot like Drupal: the more time you spend with version control, the more you forget how hard and complicated it was at the very beginning. And even when you understand it, you can still get yourself into a fuddle sometimes.

There has been a lot of talk in the Drupal community recently about Gittip. Gittip is a way to donate money to people who are doing good work. The part that really makes Gittip different from other donation or crowd-funding plans is that it is set up to provide regular, weekly payments. One-time gifts are great, but a steady source of income is what a lot of people really need, especially folks who are mostly unemployed and working essentially for free on projects you care about. A few weeks back we had Alex Pott on the podcast (Episode 23: Alex Pott and Working on Drupal Core) to talk about his work, and the fact that he has been self-funding himself to be able to focus on Drupal core. We think this is a really, really important conversation in the Drupal community, and definitely recommend you listen to the podcast for more insight.

In this week's installment of the Using Drupal Chapter 3: Job Board series, we get into the world of Views. The Views module is the most used contributed module in Drupal 7. It is so popular in fact, that it has been included in core for Drupal 8. Views lets us list content on our site. It can be used to accomplish so many tasks when it comes to building your site that you really do need a good foundation with this to understand many Drupal site-building concepts.

In Episode 24 of the Drupalize.Me podcast, Addi is joined by Bill Liao, co-founder of CoderDojo, and Drupalers and CoderDojo volunteers Heather James (heather) and Mike King (emkay).

This week we are moving on to the next chapter of the O'Reilly Using Drupal series with Using Drupal Chapter 3: Job Board, where we will build out a job board to get familiar with the two fundamental building blocks of Drupal sites: Fields and Views. Through this series we'll create two new content types with a variety of fields, and then explore using Views to create custom lists of that content, including creating dynamic, contextual listings.

In this week's episode Addi gets to chat with Alex Pott, who is one of the few people who can commit code directly to Drupal core.