Blog

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.

As some of you may know, we're in the process of upgrading the cuddly panda that we all know and love as Drupalize.Me to Drupal 7. There will be other blog posts giving a better insight into the actual upgrade but, I'll be talking about what that means for the design of the site.

An interesting thing occurred last weekend on Sunday morning. Really, really early. A leap second was applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and Linux admins everywhere were suddenly awakened as their servers started pegging CPU's and setting off alarms. Oops. Looks like there is a bug in the current Linux kernel that caused a bit of havoc. You can read all about it, but I'll leave understanding the details of the bug as an exercise for those of you that are interested in those kinds of things.

Our latest launch, the Junebug sprint, brings us some changes and enhancements to the closed-captioning we introduced last month. We now have interactive transcripts and the ability to display translations. We also made a little interface tweak for our closed-captioning.

Interactive transcripts

Drupalize.Me trainers Kyle Hofmeyer and Michelle Lauer will be bringing Drupal learning to you live in Providence, RI on June 22! As part of Drupal Global Training Day, we'll be hosting a full-day Intro to Drupal workshop from 10am-5pm at the Lullabot Activity Center in Providence, Rhode Island.

We'll be covering:

• An overview and background of the Drupal project
• Basic terminology
• How sites get built with Drupal
• Finding your way around the community
• A live site-building demo

This week our team got together and started to focus on a new project: upgrading our site to Drupal 7. Drupalize.Me was originally built on Drupal 6 back in 2010 and the site is running very well, but we’d love to move up to Drupal 7. Aside from just playing with the great new features in Drupal 7, we also want to take a fresh look at the site and clean up a few things.

We need to do a number of upgrades to our website server, so we will be taking the site off-line for two hours, from 03:00 to 05:00 UTC on June 6 (find your local time). The upgrades should not take the full two hours, but we want to make sure to give our team enough time to get it all shiny. We apologize in advance for the inconvenience.

For this Wednesday, we continue the Calendars with Drupal 7 series by diving in to a variety of things. First we look at adding multi-day striping and a legend block to our calendars, then we move on to creating iCal feeds so that people can add our calendar to their own personal calendar applications. We wrap up this week by digging in to ways to customize the calendar display.

• Striping and Legend Block
• iCal Feed

More likely than not, the reason you're visiting this website is to watch one of our awesome videos. You open the site in your browser or using one of our apps on your mobile device and sift through the hundreds of videos available until you find the one you want to watch. You click the "play" button and sit back and learn some Drupal. But what happens after you hit that play button, and how do all those bits and bytes get transferred from our servers to your screen? It's probably not something you actually think about or worry about too much unless it's not working.

Our latest sprint, Cheerilee, brings about two new great features dedicated to our subscribers. We want to hear about what you'd like to see, and once we have the videos you're looking for we want to make it easier for you to find them, and walk through them in a logical order.

We're very excited to announce that we now have closed-captioning enabled on our videos. In addition to the help it provides for those who are deaf or hard of hearing, many learners find that they understand new concepts better if they can read what the instructor is saying, as well as hear it. This is especially true for those for whom English is not their native language. This is something we've been wanting to do for a long time, and our subscribers have asked for it, so we're happy to be able to provide it.

This release Wednesday sees us kicking off yet another new series! The Calendars with Drupal 7 series picks up after our Dates with Drupal 7 series and walks through everything you need to know about setting up, configuring and customizing the Calendar module.

We're starting off with the first three videos: