This week we have a ton of new tutorials for you to enjoy. We're very happy to bring back our friends from KnpUniversity to provide a great little series on the Twig templating system, and we're also wrapping up the entire O'Reilly Using Drupal book series with the final tutorials.
Release Day: More Twig Tutorials
Blog postThis week, Leanna Pelham of KnpUniversity continues to show you how to become a Twig expert by demonstrating Twig goodies such as template inheritance, functions, tests, for and if syntax, debugging techniques, macros, and other advanced tips and tricks. Each lesson is a bite sized tutorial and includes downloadable site code that will get you up and running with Twig without getting overwhelmed.
Today we kick off a new series design to get you started with responsive web design in Drupal. We'll take a fictitious site to use as our case study, The Anytown Farmers Market. This site was built using the Drupal theme, 960 Robots, a theme based on a 960px grid and designed for the desktop. (You might recognize this theme from our series on theming).
Drupal 8 Core, Now with More Fields
Blog postOne of the the things I like most about Drupal 8 as a site builder is how quickly you can get up and running on creating a new site. Although the installer takes a tad (insert jokes here) longer than Drupal 7, you get so much more out of the box. No need to install Drupal and head to Drush to download/enable a handful of modules just to get your site ready. For example, just to get something like an email field was yet another download. Of course, there is Views in core, but another great thing is a much larger plethora of field types. Now in Drupal 8 there are a handful of useful fields in core:
Our latest podcast, Episode 52: Drupal Community Leadership, has Addi joined by Larry Garfield (Crell), Greg Dunlap (heyrocker), and Gábor Hojsty (Gábor Hojsty); three people who have
We recently completed making updates to our incident response plan for Drupalize.Me and I wanted to share some of what we learned along the way, and help you write your own. An incident response plan is all about being prepared. So that in the moment, under pressure, when everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong, you can remain calm, cool, and level-headed. If you've ever had to write a social media message, or respond to a support request during an un-planned site outage you know how easy it can be to misstep—even if your intentions are good.
Today, we're releasing the next installment of our series, Getting Started with Responsive Web Design in Drupal with me, your hostess, Amber Himes Matz. Up until this point, we've been focusing on making our site's layout more flexible and ensuring that our typography is expressed in relative units, not pixels. Now, we'll explore a newer feature of CSS that enables us to create blocks of CSS that apply under certain conditions, called media queries. We'll learn about viewport meta tags, breakpoints, flexible images and video, and a Drupal contributed module that provides mobile-friendly navigation.
So far from PHP for Beginners, Part 1 and PHP For Beginners, Part 2, we have a basic site that uses a JSON file to create a list of pets in our store. Now in PHP for Beginners, Part 3, we're going to dive into the world of databases and PHP. We'll get an overview of working with MySQL databases and how to connect them with a PHP-based site.
Happy Release Day! Today we are wrapping up the Getting Started with Responsive Web Design in Drupal series. We're going to look at a responsive Views-based slideshow plugin based on the Flexslider Javascript library and refactor our Views Slideshow with Flexslider instead. Then, we're going to tackle a variety of "clean-up" tasks. It's all about the details, right? First, we'll update the styles of our search form so that it doesn't break out of its sidebar region. Next, we'll take a critical look at our header and navigation content on a mobile-sized screen and make room for more important content as well as update the styles of our responsive menu provided by a contributed module to better match our site's design. Finally, we'll look at an option for making our content contained in an HTML table more reader-friendly on smaller, but important, devices. We'll also address a problem of up-scaled images and have a bit more fun with media queries.
Podcast Episode 53: Coding in Schools
Blog postGetting coding into the curriculum in Minnetonka Schools
YouTube is a great service for storing and managing your videos. While this is handy, many people want to be able to display their videos within their own website as well. In this tutorial we'll see how the Media, Media Internet Sources, and Media: YouTube modules can help give you a nice, seamless way to integrate YouTube videos into your site, and give really nice control over how those videos look, along with some built-in media management tools.
Got some Drupal 7 modules that use the Form API lying around? Want to learn how to port them to Drupal 8? The process could just be the crash course you've been looking for in Drupal 8, object-oriented, module development.
Changes in the Form API in Drupal 8
Blog postIn my previous post, I documented the first of my Adventures in Porting a D7 Form Module to Drupal 8. In that article, I documented how I used the Drupal Module Upgrader to convert my Drupal 7 module, Form Fun, to Drupal 8 and what I learned along the way about how Routes and Controllers replaced hook_menu
, and what I gleaned from change records about other API changes. This article is a continuation of that post, so you might want to pop over and give it a read so that you're up to speed with what we're doing here.
Today we kick off a new series on writing tests for Drupal 7 using the SimpleTest framework included with Drupal core. This week introduces the concept of testing, some terminology specific to the SimpleTest framework, and walks through locating and running existing tests.
Continuing on the knowledge that we learned last week, this week's release includes more tutorials in the testing Drupal 7 with SimpleTest series. This week covers, writing your first test, different types of assertions, navigation with the SimpleTest browser, and user authentication.
This week we're going to wrap things up in our testing Drupal 7 with SimpleTest series. And it's a doozy. We'll cover, submitting AJAX forms, uploading files, writing unit tests, and the SimpleTest 7.x-2.x contributed module.
This week we're continuing PHP for Beginners Part 3 , which is working with databases in PHP. Last week, we started off my covering the fundamentals of SQL and working with a MySQL database. Today we hook this up with the PHP site we're building. Additionally, we have a bonnus lesson YAML.
Release Day: Wrapping up PHP Part 3
Blog postWe've covered a lot of material in the three parts of PHP for Beginners. Today we are wrapping up Part 3, on databases. This week's tutorials are more focused on the PHP side of things, taking a look at PHP function arguments and query parameters, along with an example of how PHP function scope works. We finish up this series with a very important lesson on SQL injection attacks, and how to make your PHP database code secure.
December Tech Update
Blog postHappy holidays, members! We’ve been working hard this month, and we have lots of new features to show off. Read about them here!