Blog

On the eve of DrupalCon Portland, we're happy to be able to get another free community video out, Installing and Using Dreditor. What's more exciting though, is that this video is part of our Community Tools workshop, and in an effort to spread Drupal community involvement further than where we can show up to run this free workshop, we're putting all of our materials and notes online for everyone to use freely, with the Community Tools curriculum.

A Workshop is Born

This Friday's podcast, The Mysterious Drupal Entity has Kyle, Joe, and Blake joined by Greg Dunlap to talk about Drupal entities. What are they? Why do we have them? What do they look like in Drupal 8? We look at it from both the developer and site builder sides to try and get a grip on a topic that leaves a lot of people scratching their heads.

Well, today we finally wrap up our custom entity we've been working with in the Working with Entities in Drupal 7 series. To finish things up, we will be improving our entity property information, so that other parts of Drupal, like Views, can really make the best use of the data we have to present. We'll also explore entity metadata wrappers, which will make it much easier for us, and others, to get access to the info about our entities.

In a few short days we're heading to Portland, Oregon for the annual North American DrupalCon. We're really looking forward to seeing everyone there. We hope you'll stop by our booth (#408) and say "hello!". It will be a great opportunity for us to meet you, and for you to meet some of the personalities behind your favorite videos and blog posts. We're also gearing up for a great sale on annual accounts during the 'con, which you can take advantage of whether you are in Portland or online.

With the addition of Symfony to Drupal core, many Drupal developers are beginning to explore beyond the confines of our own amazing CMS. But where do you start? Conferences can be a great opportunity to step outside of your day-to-day time crunch and learn about new technologies. php[tek] is one of those great opportunities for module developers in the mid-west United States. This conference, now in its 13th year, has over 50 sessions spread over four days, May 14-17, in Chicago, Illinois.

This week in the Working with Entities in Drupal 7 series we work on ways to expand how the content is output by working with Drupal view modes (like full, teaser, RSS, etc.), and integrating our entity with the Views module. With these pieces in place, we turn back to our administrative interface, to clean that up a bit by overriding the default UI Controller to customize our UI.

• Entity View Modes

We've been cranking away on podcasts every other Friday, and in this episode, Funding Drupal Core Development, we've got Greg Dunlap (heyrocker) on to talk about his experience as a core initiative lead for Drupal 8 with regards to making ends meet while working so much on core.

This week's installment of the Working with Entities in Drupal 7 series picks up the work on our new custom entity to work on creating an administrative UI, then dive into more nitty gritty with the entity controller. We'll look at how you can override the default controller to gain more control over how your entity gets rendered, and to add some of our own tweaks to the save processing. We wrap this week up by making our entity fieldable by using bundles.

This week we move on in our Working with Entities in Drupal 7 series to beginning to create our own custom entity. We start by sketching out the use case we will be tackling in this series, which will be to create a video entity, and look at why we want this to be a custom entity instead of a using Drupal's existing node entity. Then we dive into setting up the basics of our entity, and getting an introduction to the entity classes we will be using.

This week we are kicking off a brand new series, Working with Entities in Drupal 7. Entities were introduced in Drupal 7, and are an extremely useful tool, though they have been somewhat confusing for people to work with. In this series we will start out by explaining what entities are, in addition to things like bundles, fields, and entity types. We then spend time understanding how you can use the Entity API to work with existing Drupal entities in you own custom module work.

Recently Drupalize.Me announced that I had joined the Drupalize.Me team. (So exciting!) I'm bringing with me my catalog of training curriculum, including my flagship course, PSD to Theme. The next opportunity for you to take this course is at DrupalCon Portland. This is a full-day course that has sold out every time it's been offered.

We are delighted to announce our two newest staff members: Emma Jane and Andrew. These two fine folks are no strangers to the Drupal community and we're really excited to have them on board.