The first release candidate (RC1) of Drupal 8 just went live! This is a significant milestone in the Drupal 8 development cycle.

Developers familiar with Drupal 7 will also be familiar with watchdog(), an API function that allows you to create a log message that appears on the Reports page in the Drupal administrative UI. Implementing D7’s hook_watchdog allows module developers to customize the destination of these log messages. In Drupal 8, both functions are replaced by a PSR-3-compatible logging interface (change notice).

In this Drupalize.Me interview, we talked with Tiffany Tse, front-end developer, Creative Director for Coldfront Labs, Inc., and instructor at Alongquin College. This interview is part of an ongoing series where we talk with a variety of people in the Drupal community about the work they do. Each interview focuses on a particular Drupal role and this interview with Tiffany focuses on the front-end developer and themer role.

In this Drupalize.Me interview, we talk with Jeanne Cost, project manager at Fuse IQ, based in Seattle, Washington. This interview is part of an ongoing series where we talk with a variety of people in the Drupal community about the work they do. Each interview focuses on a particular Drupal role and this interview with Jeanne focuses on the project manager role.

We'll be attending ZendCon 2015 this week, learning about what the PHP community is up to, and sharing our Drupal knowledge.

In this Drupalize.Me interview, we talk with Kate Marshalkina, senior developer at SystemSeed, based in Moscow, Russia. This interview is part of an ongoing series where we talk with a variety of people in the Drupal community about the work they do. Each interview focuses on a particular Drupal role and this interview with Kate focuses on the developer role.

In this Drupalize.Me interview, we talk with Helena Zubkow, front-end developer at Lullabot, based in Orlando, Florida. This interview is part of an ongoing series where we talk with a variety of people in the Drupal community about the work they do. Each interview focuses on a particular Drupal role and this interview with Helena focuses on the front-end developer role.

We're now a LaunchCode Education Partner, and we're thrilled to introduce you to this great organization!

In this series, Object-Oriented PHP Part 3, we'll teach you all about inheritance in PHP, including how that works in classes, abstractions, and interfaces. These concepts are keys to understanding the code you will see in Drupal 8 modules.

Today we're introducing a new learning tool: role-based learning pathways!

Do you want to build Drupal sites? Do you want to work with Drupal themes or become a Drupal developer? If yes, then these pathways are for you. Check them out, and start learning (more) Drupal!

This week we're going to dive into the hands-on configuration for the Working with Drupal Multisite series.

Last year was big for Drupalize.Me. We made a lot of changes to our website, and we increased the number of video tutorials we publish each week. In December 2014, our team met in Atlanta to celebrate these successes and outline a few high-level goals for 2015. The big goal to share is that we want to communicate with you more! We want to hear your suggestions for improvements, and we want to know you as individuals. We look forward to meeting and chatting with you at events like DrupalCon, but we also want to open new channels of communication. We have lots of ideas for this, and we're excited to get started.

Last month, we posted a survey regarding your plans for learning Drupal 8. This was a follow-up to a similar survey we posted back in May, 2014. The responses we received in both instances were remarkably consistent, which is reassuring as we begin to publish our Drupal 8 tutorials. Here are a few big take-aways from our Drupal 8 surveys and some insight into our plans for Drupal 8 tutorials.

This week on the podcast, Amber Matz chatted with Jesus Manuel Olivas about the Drupal Console project. What is Drupal Console? The Drupal Console is, at this time, a suite of tools that you run on a command line interface (CLI) to generate boilerplate code and interact with a Drupal 8 installation.

We're excited to introduce two new team members! Meet Blake Hall and Will Hetherington.

This week we continue our series of presentations on What's New in Drupal 8. We'll explore blocks, the entity API, the all new content authoring experience, and mobile and responsive features in Drupal core.

The Drupalize.Me podcast (formerly the Lullabot podcast) has been running for many years now. During this time, not much has changed as far as what makes the podcast itself. There is theme music, a host, guests, event updates, and now even sound effects. Even when it comes to how we record a podcast, not much is different in either the method or the technology. What can make or break a podcast, though, is the quality of the sound. I'm not talking about if the podcast is HD or anything, but what the overall quality of a person's voice is, the ability to reduce or eliminate background distractions, or even just being able to create a good mix of volumes. All these things are great to be able to have some control over and edit before putting the podcast out to the masses.

This week we continue to explore what's new in Drupal 8. We began this series with the Theming, CMI, and OO-PHP editions of our What's New in Drupal 8 series. Last week, we covered what's new in the Entity API, Blocks, Content Authoring Experience, and Mobile and Responsive Features. This week, we have videos outlining what's new in extending Drupal 8 (where did all the hooks go?), new site building features and workflows, and multilingual features. Finally, as a bonus, we have a free video tour of localize.drupal.org, where you can see how Drupal gets translated into languages from all over the world.

Whether you're a Drupal beginner or veteran module developer, one thing everyone understands about Drupal is the core block system is very limiting. There are lots of modules out there that attempt to make blocks more robust. Heck, site builders have even used Views as a complete block replacement. There is one module that makes blocks a ton more useful and that is the Bean module (Block Entities Aren't Nodes). The Bean module replaces a lot of modules we used in the past to give blocks more power and function. Drupal 8 even works just like the Bean module out of the box. Instead of using Views or making nodes blocks, Bean gives us fieldable block types.

Part of learning Drupal’s API is learning about “what’s in the pantry.” In Drupal 8, that pantry is configured quite a bit differently than before. Instead of getting the whole warehouse of Drupal functions on every page load, functions—well, now methods—are contained in objects which are defined by classes. Most, if not all, of these classes, which exist in their own PHP files, can be extended and many of them are specifically designed to be extended. These extensible classes are the pantries. They contain properties and methods that we can just use in the classes that extend them. When we extend these classes, we need to make sure we peek inside to see what’s available before we go elsewhere for something that might already be in the cupboard.