Blog

Today we're happy to start our dive into the Coding for Views series. Last week we kicked off the series by getting things all set up on our demo site and covering the resources we have available. This week we create a simple module that uses the Views API to export our site's view and store it in code in our module as a default view. With that basic understanding in place, we take a look at an existing module, our Databasics module, that we would like to integrate with Views, so we can dive even deeper in next weeks videos.

Views is without a doubt the most popular module on drupal.org, and one of the reasons for it’s popularity is the plethora of modules that enhance the out of the box views experience. These modules add new display options like a calendar or Javascript caoursel, new formatters for existing fields, and even new backends so you can query things other than MySQL. Like Drupal itself views is written to be extended and it’s not uncommon to need to do just that in order to meet your site specific requirements.

If you didn't listen to the Last Lullabot Podcast last week, you may not be aware that Lullabot is shaking things up a bit on the podcast front. We're renaming the Lullabot podcast to the Drupalize.Me podcast. The Lullabot podcast has been running since January 2006, and we're reviving that legacy with a new bi-weekly podcast, talking about everything Drupal. Today is our first Drupalize.Me podcast, where we have a good chat about DrupalCon Munich with the Lullabot team: Drupalize.Me Podcast: Episode 1. Go check it out!

It has been a few months since we started our site upgrade, and I wanted to give an update on our progress. We are a small team of three, who manage the site and create most of the videos, so needless to say we've gotten a bit waylaid on our schedule. We've also had quite a bit of fun distraction with our Lullabot company retreat (which was sooo fun!) and DrupalCon Munich (which was amazing). So, while we're not as far as we wanted to be, we have gotten a good chunk of work started, and we're through Phases 1 and 2!

We've been doing a lot of work with the Drupal Ladder, and we have two new FREE videos in the Drupal Ladder series. These cover the next two steps of the Ladder, testing and writing patches. Both lessons use a Drupal 8 sandbox site that has a known bug in it. First you walk through the process of testing a patch that someone else has provided, and in the next lesson you learn how to write that patch yourself. There is no crazy coding involved — the patch is changing some help text in Drupal core.

DrupalCon Munich 2012 was a blast! The whole Drupalize.Me team (myself, Joe, and Kyle) went over to Germany and soaked up the Drupal goodness. I had a very busy con, and want to share some of the great things that came out of it. (I'll try to be brief, but wow there was a lot of good stuff just in my little corner of the con!)

The Drupalize.Me team is excited to be going to Germany in just two weeks, for DrupalCon Munich. DrupalCon is always an amazing event with thousands of Drupalers sharing ideas, having fun, and helping to make Drupal even better, both as software and as a community. For our part, we will be involved in several sessions, as well as doing everything we can to make the sprint day successful by providing free training on community tools. What is a "sprint day" you ask? Well let me explain what's going on and why we're so excited.

Our CapitalCamp workshop is all about getting people up to speed with various community tools. We're going to spend three hours walking through the basic things you need to get geared up, and while we're stoked to be able to do this live in DC at the camp, we figured we could also share the resources we're using for others out there who'd like to do this as well. Each session begins with a short, simple, 15-minute presentation, and then we move into demonstration and hands-on work.

If you receive our newsletter, you may have noticed that you recently got a HUGE list of posts we've written recently. Well, except that they weren't all really that recent — some of those we two months old, and every week in between. Our regular newsletter is sent out automatically based on our RSS feed, and it turns out that our RSS feed was broken. Once we tracked it all down and got it fixed, all of the posts that had never gotten queued up for the newsletter shot out in one big go. Sorry about that. Aside from the crazy long newsletter though, I thought I'd share how I got this sorted out, because this is the kind of problem that can happen to anyone, and it is really annoying to track down.

I'm very excited to be headed to Washington, DC next week to take part in CapitalCamp. We're doing a new kind of workshop. It is a free, three-hour workshop on getting up to speed with the Drupal community tools. Kyle and I are going to talk about the tools we have, why they are useful to you even if you don't want to contribute, and then get hands-on with actually using these things. It's gonna be a blast!

This week we are continuing the free Drupal Ladder series with two more steps on the ladder. In the first video in the series we got a local Drupal site set up. In these two videos we move on to the two most important community tools for jumping in: Git and the Drupal.org issue queue.

One of the best parts of doing an upgrade on an existing site is that it gives you the opportunity to fix things that need fixing. Of course, we’re very focused on our users as our first priority when it comes to working on the site, but we, as the site administrators, need some usability love too.