Blog

As mentioned in my previous blog post "Catching the Community Train" Lisa, Bojhan and myself will be working on a website to better facilitate the process of designers contributing to Drupal. Following my last blog post we sent out a questionnaire to current and previous contributors in order to gain some valuable insights that will help us move forward. In this blog post I will analyze the answers we received and share what they mean to me and how they will be instrumental in our success of helping designers more easily get involved in Drupal.

In this week's Episode 38: Lessons from Distributed Companies, we talk to a few attendees of the Yonder conference about what it means to be a distributed company and how that works. Yonder was a small conferenece for leaders of distributed companies, hosted by Lullabot. Lullabot (and therefor Drupalize.Me) is a fully distributed company, with no central office.

Are you ready to dive into creating RESTful Web Services? In this next set of videos on Building Web Services with Drupal 7, Joe Shindelar provides an overview of the Services UI in Drupal 7 and shows you how to set endpoints, enable resources, and test those resources using cURL on the command line and the Chrome REST plugin.

In Drupal 8, the entire block system got an overhaul, and there are lots of goodies in there. I took a tour of the new system with a short video. Some of the biggest changes to see are that you can now use blocks more than once on your site, and there is a new Custom block library that lets you create block types, which are very much like content types for blocks. They let you add fields to blocks, and give you more fine-grained control over how those fields are displayed depending on the location. Check out the video to see some of this in action.

This week, we're introducing a new series for you module developers out there: Building Web Services with Drupal 7. Why? Because you asked for it. We keep a close eye on the suggestion box and one of your highest voted requests was using Services—and for good reason. Web Services are all the rage right now as the demand increases for the delivery of structured data decoupled from its visual display.

I'm sure you've heard by now that PHPtemplate is being replaced by Twig in Drupal 8. If you're a front end developer, you may be excited or afraid about how this will affect you. Let's take a look at the guiding principles behind the Twig initiative and where you can find documentation for theming in Drupal 8.

With the number of internet connected devices increasing rapidly it's important to make sure that your content, and your business, can be read and understood by machines. Creating an Application Programmer Interface, or API, which exposes your content in machine readable formats like JSON or XML is one of the best ways to accomplish this. Next week Joe Shindelar will be hosting a free webinar to show you how to build APIs on top of Drupal 7 with the Services module.

This week's episode of our podcast, Bunny Ears Are Fuzzy, is a bit of a different than our regular podcast. Most of our team has been at SXSW for the last week, and so we didn't get a chance to record a podcast. We didn't want to leave you hanging though by skipping a week, so I went ahead and did a quick solo podcast, in which I do a dramatic reading of a pretty funny Drupal core issue. It's short and funny. Hope you all like it, and we'll be back on a normal schedule for the next podcast.

This week we are wrapping up our Working with Media Module in Drupal 7 series. We complete the site by getting our music views into place and adding YouTube video embeds. In the process of finishing up with our YouTube video content type, we also have to dive into the Media File Type settings. There are several layers to getting Media module displays to look and behave the way we want.

This week, we'll tame images and audio files as we continue our Working with Media Module in Drupal 7 series with Addison Berry. You'll get a guided tour of the maze of configuration necessary for getting images in-line inside your content, understand how one configuration screen affects another, master text formats, and create custom WYSIWYG toolbars. Then you'll move on to to look at HTML5 and Flash-fallback media players to create a media-rich website that rocks!

In our latest podcast episode we have two guests, Klaus Purer (klausi) and Lin Clark (linclark) joining Addi and Joe Fender to talk about the new REST module that has been added to Drupal 8 core. This makes it easy to output your content in multiple formats, including HTML, JSON and XML. Having REST in core makes it easy for non-Drupal, external apps to create and maintain content on your site.