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.

In this week's episode, DrupalCon Bogotá Recap, Addi is joined by Lullabots Joe Shindelar, Chris Albrecht, Mike Herchel and Daniel Dalgo to talk about their awesome trip to Bogotá, Colombia for the first DrupalCon Latin America. We talk Drupal, highlights from the 'con, and some of the great things about Bogotá.

One thing people like to do with online learning is work and watch at the same time. Members have let us know that they want to be able to watch our videos on their TVs while using their computers to work along with the trainer. Luckily Drupalize.Me has several options to make this happen.

Vagrant Drupal Development (VDD) is a ready-to-use development environment using a virtual machine. Why use it? It provides a standard hosting setup, contained in a virtual machine, for developing with Drupal. This allows you to get up and running really, really quickly, without knowing anything about server administration.

In anticipation of the release of Drupal 8, one of the things we think is important is to provide foundational training material in areas related to the changes in Drupal 8. One major change is the shift to an object-oriented PHP (OO PHP) architecture, which you can learn more about here, in my presentation, What's New in Drupal 8: Object-oriented PHP. To provide a hands-on coding introduction to OO PHP, we worked with our partners at KnpUniversity to create a new series. Today we are delighted to release the first four video tutorials in the new KnpUniversity series, Introduction to Object-Oriented PHP.

This week, we continue our Introduction to Object-oriented PHP series, in partnership with KnpUniversity (now SymfonyCasts), with tutorials that mostly focus on working with objects in PHP. You'll also learn how to add a specially formatted comment to your code that will enable code autocomplete functionality in your IDE.

This week, we're wrapping up our series, Introduction to Object-oriented PHP, in partnership with KnpUniversity, with tutorials on access control for properties, type hinting, and constructors in PHP.

As Drupal 8 approaches, our team has been growing and really pushing ourselves. Over the past few weeks, we released some impressive tutorials and site updates. Here's an overview.

A new podcast, Drupalize.Me 2015 Spring Update, is ready for a listen. The Drupalize.Me team typically gets together each quarter to go over the past goals and create new ones.

Drupalize.Me and Lullabot together have made a donation of $5,000 to the Drupal 8 Accelerate Fund, becoming an anchor donor of this critical funding initiative. We heartily believe in funding core development and are so excited to be a part of providing a much needed final push to a Drupal 8 stable release. Learn more about how you can be a part of accelerating the release of Drupal 8.

The Drupal 8 development cycle has definitely been a long one. There are several exciting features on the way, but the improvements to the authoring experience in Drupal 8 have definitely drawn a lot of attention. (I know Amber is clamoring for in-place editing for this blog.) The Spark project is the home to much of this work. Several new core modules that contribute to these improvements (Contextual, Quickedit, Toolbar, CKEditor and to a lesser extent, Tour) leverage a pair of popular javascript libraries Backbone.js and Underscore.js.

Both Backbone.js, and its dependency Underscore.js were committed to Drupal 8 two years ago! Let's take a quick look at both Backbone.js and Underscore.js, how they're used in core, and how you might be able to use them to simplify some javascript for your site.

This week we start our new series on improving Drupal's search with Apache Solr.

This week we continue learning how to integrate Drupal with Apache Solr by looking at how to install Apache Solr on both development and production servers, and how to connect Solr to Drupal with the Search API module.

This week we continue exploring the Search API module and use it to display search results from Solr in Drupal. As well as looking at additional configuration options for our Search API index.