Blog

Most of the Lullabot team was at DrupalCon Denver this year, and we had a great time. Lullabots are pretty good at hugging, so seeing each other in person is a great eperience. We did notice, however, that not everyone at DrupalCon feels comfortable, or has practiced enough, with their hugs. As a service to the Drupal community, we'd like to help you out with a free video. Trainer extraordinaire Joe Shindelar is not only an expert in Drupal, he's also an expert in hugging.

Today we're continuing our Site Building with Drupal 7 series by looking at some of the major building blocks for putting a site together. Once you have a site installed, and you have the hang of adding contributed modules, you need to get into the site and start playing with the pieces. The newest videos in the series are:

• Building content types in Drupal 7
• Using Taxonomy

The whole Drupalize.Me team was at DrupalCon this past week, and we certainly had a blast! I spent most of my time chatting with people, and handing out our sparkly pony stickers, so I didn't get to see many sessions. One session that I did go to, though, was the Boston Initiative presentation about the Drupal contribution ladder (Learn Drupal), along with one of their BoFs.

Recently we released a number of videos showing how to set up a local web server so that you can build and develop a web site on your own personal computer. This is a HUGE help when working on a site since you have everything you need locally, and you can play, break, and test things in a safe environment. It's also super handy when you need to get some work done but you don't have an internet connection handy. This is really such a basic tool for working with the web that we've decided to make the three server installation videos FREE for everyone.

This is what happens when you take the Drupalize.Me team and tell them that they need to run the sponsor booth during DrupalCon Denver. We started thinking about what we could do at the booth, things like rig up a TV so that people can watch Drupalize.Me videos played via our Roku app, and maybe an iPad or two so that we can show off the mobile capabilities... and wait just a moment. What if we get a big cardboard box and cut a TV out of it and just re-enact videos? It'll be hilarious! And thus Drupalize.Me Live was born.

In our latest sprint -- Sparkleworks -- we sprinkled some magic pony dust (and also wrote a little code) to make more improvements to the Drupalize.Me site. The two main improvements we made for this release have been popular member requests; we've added a listing of your entire video history, and we've added newest and most popular video lists. Today we also have a new video for our Wednesday release day, Tips for writing secure code.

To round out our local development web server videos, we've added a companion video to the recent Installing a web server on Ubuntu. In Ubuntu web server configuration we learn how to configure the various pieces of our local development web server. We'll get clean URLs working by enabling the Apache rewrite module, and increase various settings for MySQL and PHP.

Following on last week's videos about setting up local development web servers on Windows and Mac, we also have one for Ubuntu: Installing a web server on Ubuntu. This video is not explaining how to set up a big, beefy web server where you would host your real website. This video is just like the Mac and Windows ones, in that it helps you get your own personal web server on your desktop or laptop, to use for development and playing around with things.

Ever peer at the laptop next to you while flying cross county and wonder how someone can work on developing their website when there is no Internet at 35,000 feet? They are developing it locally! All personal computers can be turned into personal web servers so that you can develop a website on your machine before pushing the code into a production environment. In this set of videos, Addison Berry walks you through how to:

Happy New Year! The Module Development series is wrapping up by working our way through another major API in Drupal, the database layer. We have five videos to walk you through it.

• An overview of the database layer in Drupal 7 is an excerpt from our Overview of Drupal 7 roundtable discussion, led by Angie Byron, the Drupal 7 co-maintainer.

For this Wednesday, we're adding more videos to the Module Development for Drupal 7 series. We have three new videos for you:

• Altering forms with hook_form_alter introduces you to one of the most used hooks in Drupal development. It lets you change any form in Drupal and is a great tool in your kit.

It's that time of the week again! This week we are continuing two of our series: Module Development for Drupal 7 and Introduction to Drush.

For the Module Development series, we are wrapping up the discussion of the Render API with a look at integrating with the theme system. Then we move on to four videos about the Form API system and how to do some fun things with it: