In fewer than eight weeks DrupalCon will be upon us. Those registering for Breaking Down Component-Based Web Design before May 2nd will also receive a FREE annual membership from Drupalize.Me.

This week, we're wrapping up Joe Shindelar's latest series Building Web Services with Drupal 7. In these last four videos, you will learn how to use Views to build your API, how to create your own services resource in a custom module, and best practices for how to document your API. Next week, Emma Jane Westby guides you through the process of setting up Vagrant as a local development environment in her series Introduction to Vagrant.

As you may know, a significant vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library was discovered this week. Unfortunately this software library is used to encrypt most of the Internet, including the servers on which Drupalize.Me resides. But our team took immediate action to patch this bug, and our servers are no longer vulnerable. The same can be said for our payment processing software, which stores your financial information.

If you have worked with the Field UI in Drupal 7 you will know that you are able to prevent fields from being displayed when viewing entities (e.g. content, users etc).

If you are looking for good community event ideas, or just want to understand some of what goes into planning an event, check out this week's Drupalize.Me podcast on The Story of the TCD'O

With the release of Drupal 8 approaching, it’s time again to answer and update the age old question: What is Drupal?

Ever wonder what it means to host your site in "the cloud"? This week's Drupalize.Me podcast, Drupal in the Cloud, uncovers these mysteries. We discuss: what differentiates cloud providers; what it takes to get Drupal in the cloud; and what the future of cloud computing looks like.

Curious about Leaflet? Join Drupalize.Me Trainer Amber Matz for a live tutorial on how to add Leaflet maps to your Drupal site during this Acquia hosted webinar on May 1, 2014 at 1:00 PM EDT.

The concept of blocks has been around in Drupal since the earliest versions. Chunks of information that can be placed into the regions provided by a theme and re-used throughout your site. The system for defining blocks in code has changed quite a bit for Drupal 8 though so it's worth taking a fresh look at how to create blocks in your own module. Especially since in my experience it's one of the first things we need to know how to do as module developers.

In Episode 41, Virtualization with Vagrant, Emma Jane Westby and Erika Heidi chat about creating virtual environments with Vagrant. Through their light-hearted approach to technical topics, we hope Emma and Erika are able to make Vagrant seem a little more accessible, if not downright fun.

When I am theming a Drupal site, I need to know which variables are available on a template file. In Drupal 8, the template engine is Twig, so we’re going to need to know a little bit of Twig to make this work. So, if Twig is totally new to you, don’t worry. Today, you’ll learn some Twig!

So far in the Mapping with Leaflet series, we've taken advantage of the field formatter provided by the Leaflet module to display a map on a page for a piece of content containing location data. This resulted in a single marker on a map. But what about a map of multiple locations? For this, we'll get to use Views and the Leaflet Views module that is included in the Leaflet project download. We'll also address a common problem of transforming postal addresses into geocoded data that a map can use. For this, we'll look at a solution that integrates Geocoder and Address Field modules. As a bonus, I'll walk you through the process of configuring a Feeds Importer to work with the esoteric and possibly confusing Address Field targets and I'll demonstrate how to import .CSV text file of postal addresses into Address Field, which is then geocoded and displayed on a Leaflet map.

Drupal 8's out-of-the-box mobile friendliness creates quite the buzz. "Mobile friendly," "responsive," "squishy" — all words to describe the behavior a site invokes on different devices or different screen sizes. Mobile friendly can also mean content first.

In this week's episode, 42: Content Delivery Systems (CDNs), Addi is joined by two bots, Joe Shindelar and Ben Chavet, along with Will Hetherington, who is a network consultant for Drupalize

In this week's release, we kick-off a new video learning series, Using Drupal Chapter 5: Product Reviews.

DrupalCon Austin is rapidly approaching and the big question on my mind is: What Drupal 8 sessions do I need to put on my radar? To figure that out, I've mined the schedule for Drupal 8 related talks and events and organized them a bit to help me – and hopefully you – find the Drupal 8 sessions not to be missed.

This week, we've got five shiny new videos in Addison Berry's series, Using Drupal Chapter 5: Product Reviews. If you've been following along, in this series we're building a website containing product reviews using Drupal 7. So far, we've reviewed the case study and site requirements and added the Amazon module so we can integrate data from amazon.com into our Drupal site. Now it's time to add ratings using the Voting API and Fivestar modules and add simple yet useful style to our product reviews using the CSS Injector module, a CSS styling tool for site builders. If you're new to building sites in Drupal 7, this, along with rest of the Using Drupal video collection are a great way to jumpstart your way to becoming a Drupal site building rockstar.

In this week's episode, 43: Web Services, Addison Berry along with Lullabots Sally Young and Joe Shindelar discuss the Services module for Drupal.

I thought that for my newest blog post I would try something different, and something I have been asked to do in the past, a video tutorial of a Drupal 8 inspired illustration.