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In Episode 28: Getting Excited for Drupal 8 - The Donkey, Human, Ant, Chameleon CMS, Larry Garfield and more join us.

Today we finish up the Importing Data With Migrate and Drupal 7 series. In four hours of lessons we've covered everything from Migrate module concepts to writing your own custom data migration. To wrap things up this week, we are going to take a look at using other data sources, like CSV files, as well as different destinations aside from nodes.

Drupal 8 has come a long way since Drupal 7 to being easier to use out of the box. When I built sites for people using Drupal 7 the biggest complaint was the lack of a WYSIWYG editor. At some point installing WYSIWYG module and adding an editor role just became part of my usual installation of modules. This process wasn't complicated, but it was rather annoying.

First you had to install the module, then download the third party WYSIWYG files from another website. Once you had all the components you needed, you then had to setup text formats to use the editing interface, and also configure the role for your content managers to assign correct permissions. My favorite part of the process was the web page of check boxes of buttons you could add to the toolbar. The page was hideous and not very configurable if you'd added any extra add-ons to your WYSIWYG.

It is that time of the week when we publish a new Drupalize.Me podcast. You're excited. We're excited. Unfortunately we don’t have one for you today. We recorded a great podcast on getting involved with Drupal 8 with Joe Shindelar, Juampy, Alex Bronstein, and Larry Garfield. It was a fun podcast talking about all the new things that excite us about Drupal 8. Somehow the final recorded audio file turned bad about 10 minutes into it. Normally we have a fall-back plan which involves two people recording the podcast.

Very few migrations are simple and straight-forward enough that a simple field mapping gets all of the little bits you need. In this week's Importing Data With Migrate and Drupal 7 lessons, we take a look at some complicated field mappings. We are going to add some new data we need to import, with team information. The team data is related to our player data through a relationship, and a player can have multiple teams they've played for.

We are super excited to introduce you to our new Interactive Designer, Justin Harrell. Justin started with us right before DrupalCon Prague, and so came over to Europe with the rest of the team for an intense introduction to the Drupal world.

In this week's lessons for the Importing Data With Migrate and Drupal 7 series we get a good look at our field mappings. This is the time that we make sure our source data is being properly handled and getting to the right destination fields in our Drupal site's database. We walk through basic field mapping, and see how that looks and works in the site UI, as well as with Drush. Then we explore different ways we can transform source data during the migration process, so that it matches what our destination field is expecting.

The entire Drupalize.Me team went to Prague, along with a number of other Lullabots, for DrupalCon Prague. In our latest podcast episode a few of us share what it was like, and the excitement and energy of new things on the horizon.

When is Drupal 8 coming out? What's going to change in the new version? How do I keep track of it, and most importantly, how am I going to learn what I need to know? These are the questions we're going to answer in a Drupal Association webinar on October 22. Joe Shindelar is going to give an update on where things are with Drupal 8, covering a raft of new features and changes that you'll want to know about. He's going to look at it from different perspectives — as a site-builder, themer, and module developer.

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.