Blog

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:

Give yourself the gift of learning this holiday season -- and get an extra bonus! The first 10 people who sign up for an annual Drupalize.Me subscription before December 31, 2011 will receive a free Roku HD streaming player*. As soon as the first 10 qualifying orders are confirmed, we'll send the Rokus out to the addresses listed on those accounts. That's all there is to it!

Another Drupalize.Me release, another pony. Our Daisyjo release touched lots of little bits and pieces of the site. We implemented a number of changes that many of you have been asking for, as well as adding some things that would let you get to know us a little better.

We Get Around
We just finished our Do It With Drupal conference in Brooklyn, NY. If you missed the event, or were there and missed some of the sessions (there were so many good ones to see), we'll have videos of ALL the sessions on Drupalize.Me in a few weeks. You'll need to be a subscriber to access the videos, so if you're not already, sign up today.

We've just finished posting a new video series introducing you to Drupal Theming in Drupal 7. "Theming" describes the process of customizing the look and feel of your Drupal site, which involves working with Drupal's templating system at the basic level, and writing customized theming functions in PHP at the more advanced level.

We've added a new category to the site, called Community, and we've already added two new free videos to it, Applying a patch to a module and Creating a patch for a module. We got the idea for the new category from a question asked by Paul Johnson on Twitter, and set to work on getting some videos up about patching.