It's that time again. October 5th brings the second minor version of Drupal 8 since moving to a semantic versioning release schedule. We've taken the time to dig through the change records and release notes (in order to make sure our tutorials stay up to date) and we want to share some of the new features and functionality you can look forward to when you upgrade to version 8.2.

In part 4 of this series on object-oriented PHP from KnpUniversity, we'll explore static methods, namespaces, exceptions, and traits. Getting a handle on these concepts will not only help you with PHP app development, but will also help you understand what's going on under the hood of Drupal 8.

Drupalize.Me trainer Amber Matz attended this year's Open Hardware Summit in Portland and reports back on what she took away from the event.

I did some load testing to try and answer the question; How did moving our site from Linode to Pantheon affect the performance–measured in response time–of our site for both members and non-members?

You may have heard of a variety of Drupal 8 initiatives during the development cycle leading up to Drupal 8.0.0 being released in 2015. These were officially recognized efforts to get a variety of big changes into Drupal 8, and included projects such as configuration management, Views in core, and multilingual improvements. A lot of work from those initiatives is now part of Drupal 8. Not everything got in though, and as time moves on some priorities for new work will always shift.

When we were considering switching to the Pantheon hosting platform, one of the features that made us confident in our decision is what they call Multidev.

At its core, Multidev is just a method of spinning up complete environments for code that hasn't yet been merged into the main development branch. The main benefit to this is that it makes it incredibly easy to build a complete website environment that parallels your live site where any team member can functionally and visually test changes before they're fully merged.

This blog post covers the Drupalize.Me team's development workflow, and how we're using Pantheon's Multidev to be more efficient.

It’s hard to believe, but it has been 1 year since Drupal 8.0 was released to the world. We’re celebrating Drupal 8’s first birthday on November 19th by giving FREE access to our full Drupal 8 Migration Guide over the celebration weekend! This Saturday, November 19th through Monday, November 21st you can learn how to use the new core migration system to upgrade your Drupal site or import content from external sources. It’s time to get using Drupal 8!

We’re happy to announce a new kind of series on Drupalize.Me which provides a project for you to practice the skills you’ve learned in Drupal site building, theming, and module development. Our free Hands-On Exercises: Movie Project provides you with wireframes and customer requirements for a movie review site. Each exercise in the series has you progressively build the site according to the specifications. To help you along the way, each lesson also lists some tutorials and learning resources that will show you what kind of knowledge you need to have to accomplish the given tasks.

New tutorials covering Drupal 8's plugin API, annotations, and Drupal console were recently added.

We've done a major overhaul of the tutorials in our Drupal 8 configuration management series, re-recording video tutorials, adding written tutorials to complement videos, correcting errors, and adding new information.

We just added tutorials on using Drupal 8's Event API. Learn what events are, how to subscribe to existing events, and how to dispatch new events.

This year Acquia has released 3 new exams in their certification program to cover Drupal 8. We’ve long had a guide page for the original Acquia Certified Developer Exam, and we’ve now updated that to include Drupal 8. We’ve also added 2 new pages for the Front End Specialist Exam and the Site Builder Exam. All 3 exam guides outline the topics covered in the exams and then provide a list of learning materials you can use to study up, in both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.

In order to really get a grasp on Drupal, especially how Drupal models data, it's necessary to have at least a familiarity with the Entity API. We start off with an overview of the terminology associated with the Entity system. We then look at a high level to see how the various components come together to form an API. Our configuration management series already has tutorials on Configuration Entities, but in this series we introduce how to construct your own custom content entity. We will also take time to learn how entities can be created, read, updated and deleted programmatically from elsewhere in our code as well as how to use the entity query service to identify entities matching particular conditions.

This week we continue with the recent theme of teaching you how a module can extend, alter, and enhance Drupal without modifying core code by looking at hooks.

Drupal 8.3 is still a few months away, coming April 5, 2017, but there are already some changes we can look at, most notably in the experimental modules. In December, 2 new experimental modules were added to core, and BigPipe was officially changed from a beta module to stable. The 2 new modules you’ll find in 8.3 are Workflows and Layout. Let’s take a peek at what these are all about.

The 2017 DrupalCon North America will take place in Baltimore, Maryland from April 24-28. The call for session proposals is quickly coming to a close with a deadline of February 1, 2017. Get some tips for submitting a session proposal and an insider's look at what it's like to be a session track chair from Drupalize.Me trainers Joe Shindelar and Amber Matz.

We always love the opportunity to participate at in-person Drupal events, hang out with old friends, make new ones, and just in general share our enthusiasm for Drupal with others. That's why we're headed to MidCamp 2017 in Chicago March 30th - April 2nd, where we'll be offering our Drupal 8 Theming workshop, attending the camp, and participating in the sprints.

Drupal events are happening all over the world, with people doing amazing things. Since events are so important to the success of our community, we like to support and highlight those making the magic happen. The Italian Drupal community is going to have a great mix of different Drupal activities at their DrupalDay Roma on March 3rd and 4th. We’re happy to be a sponsor for the event and to be giving away some free Drupalize.Me memberships as well.

The DrupalCon Baltimore training schedule was announced earlier today and we're stoked to not only be attending DrupalCon, but to also be providing our Drupal 8 Theming workshop, and having Amber, Blake, and Joe presenting sessions. It's going to be a great con!

We've added several new tutorials to our free Hands-on Exercises: Movie Project, which dive into module development. The first 16 exercises covered site building and theming. These latest additions continue to develop the same movie review site. They require you to start building your own custom modules to add a custom form for adding movie information to the site and use an external API to find and grab the information you need.