As you start down the road of learning Drupal 8 module development, one of the first new Drupalisms that you're likely to encounter are plugins. After writing a blog post about creating blocks, which uses the new plugin architecture, I thought it might be interesting to take a step back and talk a little bit more about plugins at a higher level. This blog post contains an introduction to the what and why of plugins to help Drupal 7 developers make the transition to Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 is moving along at a steady pace, but not as quickly as we all had hoped. One great advantage this has is it gives developers time to backport lots of the features Drupal 8 has in core as modules for Drupal 7. My obvious inspiration for this post came from the presentation fellow Lullabot Dave Reid did at Drupalcon Austin about how to Future-Proof Your Drupal 7 Site. Dave’s presentation was more about what you can do to make your Drupal 7 “ready” where this article is more about showing off Drupal 8 “hotness” that we can use in production today.

Robust content modeling is made possible in Drupal 7 through fields. Attaching the right field types to entities makes it possible to bend your Drupal site to your will and scale it according to your needs. There are a lot of field types and field formatters provided in Contrib that you can download and install as modules to extend your Drupal 7 site. But what if you want to collect, store and format data in a particular way not provided by core or contributed modules? By providing custom fields and formatters through a module, you can control how your data is stored as well as provide one or more ways for the data to be output—through field formatters.

Last week, we got started with the Field API. And this week, we'll continue with code-walkthrough videos for Drupal module developers who want to add field widgets, settings, and field formatters to custom fields.

If you've watched any videos this week you will have noticed that the video player looks very different. We've been working on this update to our entire video delivery system since the beginning of the year, and we hope you're as excited about it as we are.

Are you finding yourself searching for some new icons to use on your latest project? Drupalize.Me loves helping out the Drupal community, and people in general, so for this post I thought it would be fitting to provide you with a carefully designed free icon set.

Today we're excited to roll out a new installment in our series on Building Websites in Drupal 7 with Panels. In the continuation of this series, I will be walking you through modules and functionality provided by Panels, CTools, Page Manager, Views and more.

We're welcoming a new member to the Drupalize.Me team this week! Say hello to Betty Tran.

This week's podcast, Episode 45: Keeping Up with Drupal News, gets into the why and how of the flow of Drupal community information.

Today, we've got another batch of video tutorials to wrap up our series on Building Websites in Drupal with Panels. This week's lessons focus on other modules related to Panels such as Mini Panels, Panel Nodes, and Panelizer modules.

When I first started learning Drupal, I remember the process of enabling and disabling modules on the Modules page took for-ev-er. My laptop was in serious danger of getting hurled across the room, due to my frustration. Then I discovered drush, and downloading and enabling modules was now performed with ease instead of pain and suffering. Of course there's a lot more you can do with drush than just download and enable modules, this is just one example.

New Video Tutorials

For this week's episode on the podcast, 46: Updating the Drupalize.Me Video Experience, Addi is joined by Joe Shindelar, Justin Harrell, and Amber Matz to discuss the why, what, and h

We're always striving to provide great support to our current and prospective members. To that end, we're always looking for better ways to listen and keep track of our what our customers are saying — whether they're new, long-time members, or moving on.

We're excited to announce a new partnership with KNP Labs to provide our members with expert PHP and Symfony2 lessons.

This week we are finishing up PHP for Beginners, Part 1 by wrapping up the project we started in last week's tutorials.

In this week's podcast, episode 47: Drupal as a Services Platform, we discuss as all things web services, REST, and headless Drupal.