In this lesson, we are going to see how the book relates to each of the series we have, and how each of the individual series are organized. We will end up with thirteen series to cover the entire book. Then we will take a look at how you should use the videos with the book. If you don't have the book, not to worry, as the book would only act as supplementary material to the video lessons. You don't need the book to successfully follow these series. If you do have the book however, we want to make sure you understand how the lessons and book relate to each other.
Additional resources
Using Drupal comes with source code intended to be used throughout the lessons to make following the lessons much easier. In this lesson we're going to take a look at what that source code provides for us, where we can get a copy of, and how to use it. We'll go through the installation process, as well as see how we can switch between chapters in the source code without destroying work you've done on previous chapters. It is important to note that using the source code is very important if you want the lessons to match what is in the lessons. Drupal modules can change a lot over time, and the source code is designed to exactly match what is covered in the lessons. Once you've learned the basics of a chapter by working through the source code, you can upgrade your modules and explore the differences in newer versions, with the base understanding you've gained from the lesson.
Warning: Since this Drupal code is several years old, you must use PHP 5.3. PHP 5.4 or higher will not work. You will need to make sure your server is using PHP 5.3 in order to use this code properly. Many all-in-one servers, like WAMP, MAMP, and XAMPP provide older versions of PHP and a way to switch back and forth between versions.
Additional resources
The Using Drupal series of lessons walks through the O'Reilly book, Using Drupal, written by Angie Byron, Addison Berry, and Bruno de Bondt. We use the second edition, which covers Drupal 7. The book starts off with taking a look at Drupal Core and then works through various case studies using a wide range of contributed modules from the Drupal project.
The video series follows along with what's in the book, so if you have the book, the videos are really great supplemental material. Even without the book, you’ll get the full lessons here in the videos.
This series is intended for people who have worked with the web and understand how a website gets delivered, and in particular, how to get a website onto a web server so that people can actually see it and use it. The rest of this introductory series we have here will look at how the book relates to the video series we're going to be creating, and how you can use those 2 together.
Additional resources
Using Drupal Book in Video Lessons
Blog postMany moons ago, back in 2008, several Lullabots wrote the first edition of Using Drupal, published by O'Reilly Media. In 2012, myself and Angie Byron, with the help of Bruno DeBondt, updated Using Drupal with a second edition for Drupal 7. This year we're happy to announce the video version of Using Drupal.
In the latest podcast episode, BDD, Behat, and Drupal, the Drupalize.Me team is joined by Melissa Anderson (eliza411) to talk about Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and using a testing tool called Behat.
Oscon Can Be Worth the Investment
Blog postIn a few short weeks I'll be headed on the road once again for two great events: Twin Cities DrupalCamp and OSCON. On the surface these two events couldn't be more different. One is intimate, inexpensive, and full of Drupal. The other is big, an investment, and has hardly any Drupal. Seems like an obvious win for Twin Cities DrupalCamp, right? Well, let's dive a little deeper into what makes OSCON worth the price tag.
Sass is our base tool, and Compass is almost always used with Sass. Compass provides some great tools for us, but there are a few more resources out there that are worth knowing about and taking a look at. In this lesson we'll take a quick tour of some grid frameworks designed to work with Sass, as well as another popular mixin library.
Additional resources
In this lesson we take a tour of some other tools for working with Sass and Compass. We look at some sites with good information or helpful tools to use, and a few different apps that are made to make your workflow better. We can't cover everything out there, but these are tools that we've used ourselves, or are generally popular right now. There will always be more cool things coming out to help you be more efficient when working with Sass and Compass, but these should get you looking in the right direction.
Additional resources
When you install Compass from the command line, or with certain apps, it comes with a special file names "config.rb" which is where Compass stores the various ways you can configure it to work with your project. Not all apps will create this file for you however, and it is a good thing to create and understand. In this lesson, we'll take a look at this file and explain the most common configuration options.
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When you install Compass, in addition to a large mixin and function library, you are also installing a command line application. The commands that Compass provides make it easy to do common tasks, very quickly from the command line — things like creating a new project, and compiling your Sass into regualr CSS. Even if you are not familiar with the command line, these are very simple to use.
Additional resources
Sass partials are a way to break out your Sass code into multiple files, and then import them to be compiled into one master CSS file. This feature helps you organize your Sass code the way that makes the most sense for you while working.
Setting up Your Developer Environment
Blog postIn my new position at Drupalize.Me I have the luxury of helping a lot of projects in little ways. Being able to context switch quickly helps a lot. This means I've put a lot of time into how my workstation is setup so that I can easily move from one project to another. With the new job I also decided to add OSX to the mix of computers that I use on a daily basis.
In episode 20 of the Drupalize.Me podcast, we're fortunate to be joined by guest Chris Eppstein, the creator of Compass, and part of the core Sass team. We also have three Lullabot front-end developers on the podcast, Micah Godbolt, Kris Bulman, and Carwin Young.
A month or so ago the Drupalize.Me team started a discussion on how to start helping others learn Drupal 8. We knew Drupal 8 wasn't ready for our typical curriculum and video production process, but thought you would be interested to learn along with us about Drupal 8 as it continues to evolve. This blog post is the kick off to that series. As we stated in a recent podcast where we announced this idea, we need everyone to understand that the things we discuss are still in development and could change, or even be removed from D8 altogether.
Functions are another form super-variable, as it were, where you do a bunch of work that is assigned to something you can print out. But in this case you aren't injecting a bunch of CSS, instead you are just printing out a nice, final value. For many things you will want to do with functions, someone else has probably already written it. Sass comes with a lot of predefined functions for you to use, and there are libraries, like Compass, which provide many more. We'll take a look at some of the functions that Sass provides for us and see a function in action, along with our mixin, side by side, to really see the difference between them.
Additional resources
One of the big advantages to using Sass is being able to reuse code. The simplest form of this is using variables. Variables in Sass work just like they do in other scripting languages. You simply assign a value to a variable name and then you can use that variable name anywhere you like. This is super helpful for doing things like defining the hex value for the color "blue" and then you can use the name "blue" wherever you want to use that hex value. This makes it easy to update that value in one place instead of having to find every instance of it and update all of them.
Additional resources
A mixin is a term used for a feature of preprocesors which acts a lot like a super-variable. You can write up larger chunks of CSS and assign them to a mixin name, then when you "include" that mixin, it will inject all of that CSS into the location. This is great for setting up common ways of displaying things, or handling common problems, and then just reusing that same method throughout. You can also add arguments to your mixin so that you can tweak the output according to your use case. This takes the reusable concept of variables up a notch.
When working with your CSS you will often have instances where something should include all of the styling associated with a class, in addition to a few extras that are specific to just that item. In regular CSS you would normally put the general class on the item, and add a more specific class with the additional styling. With the Sass @extend directive, you can have the more specific class inherit the styling of another class, so that you can just use the specific class in your HTML, keeping you HTML markup nice and concise.