This Friday's podcast, The Mysterious Drupal Entity has Kyle, Joe, and Blake joined by Greg Dunlap to talk about Drupal entities. What are they? Why do we have them? What do they look like in Drupal 8? We look at it from both the developer and site builder sides to try and get a grip on a topic that leaves a lot of people scratching their heads.
On the eve of DrupalCon Portland, we're happy to be able to get another free community video out, Installing and Using Dreditor. What's more exciting though, is that this video is part of our Community Tools workshop, and in an effort to spread Drupal community involvement further than where we can show up to run this free workshop, we're putting all of our materials and notes online for everyone to use freely, with the Community Tools curriculum.
A Workshop is Born
Help Us Plan for 2013
Blog postAs 2012 winds down to a close, the Drupalize.Me team has been looking forward to our big plans for 2013. We are still in the thick of working on our site upgrade to Drupal 7, which should come along in early the in the new year. After that, we have a lot of big sky ideas we want to tackle. We'd love to get some feedback from you to help us refine those goals, by taking a quick survey.
As we work our way through December, we are also working our way through the Coding for Drush series. This week we have three new videos, which cover a bunch of extras to add to our drush command. We'll be looking at how to add additional help information, and prompt the user for more information. Then we'll take a dive into some more advanced things with specifying version numbers, and even the Drupal bootstrap level required.
Release Day: Drush Make and Policy Files
Blog postThis week, we are wrapping up 2012, and our Coding for Drush series. The last videos in this Drush series will take a look at some really neat things you can do with your new-found Drush skills. The first thing we want to look at is creating policy files for your Drush command. This allows you to essentially provide access control for your commands. You can check who is trying to run the command and stop it from proceeding. After we get that in place, we wrap up with two videos about Drush make.
Happy New Year! We're kicking off 2013 with some FREE videos to get people up and running with our Drupal community tools. There are a lot of aspects of the Drupal community that many people take for granted. Even something as "simple" as figuring our what community websites are out there, and how to use them, is often overlooked when talking to people new to Drupal. So, if you want to really dive into this Drupal thing in 2013, here is a gentle orientation to help get you started.
Give yourself the gift of learning this holiday season -- and get an extra bonus! The first 10 people who sign up for an annual Drupalize.Me subscription before December 31, 2011 will receive a free Roku HD streaming player*. As soon as the first 10 qualifying orders are confirmed, we'll send the Rokus out to the addresses listed on those accounts. That's all there is to it!
This week we are finally finishing up our Coding for Views series with the last two lessons, which lagged a bit for us. We're happy to round things out by providing another example of writing a Views handler which creates a Views area handler, and with a look at theming Views. In addition to wrapping up that series, we also have a free video that looks at working with secondary menus. While this lesson is using Drupal 6, the concepts and processes used are exactly the same in Drupal 7, and is still applicable there.
Naming Things Is Hard
Blog postThere is a famous quote which says:
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."
Drupal is no different. The secret sauce behind Drupal's powerful hook system is a simple naming convention and it all starts with naming your module. Choosing the right name for your module is important, as is understanding a couple of potential pitfalls you may encounter down the road. Some of which are obvious and some of which can sneak up on you.
Recently Drupalize.Me announced that I had joined the Drupalize.Me team. (So exciting!) I'm bringing with me my catalog of training curriculum, including my flagship course, PSD to Theme. The next opportunity for you to take this course is at DrupalCon Portland. This is a full-day course that has sold out every time it's been offered.
This week we are kicking off a brand new series, Working with Entities in Drupal 7. Entities were introduced in Drupal 7, and are an extremely useful tool, though they have been somewhat confusing for people to work with. In this series we will start out by explaining what entities are, in addition to things like bundles, fields, and entity types. We then spend time understanding how you can use the Entity API to work with existing Drupal entities in you own custom module work.
Release Day: Creating a Custom Entity
Blog postThis week we move on in our Working with Entities in Drupal 7 series to beginning to create our own custom entity. We start by sketching out the use case we will be tackling in this series, which will be to create a video entity, and look at why we want this to be a custom entity instead of a using Drupal's existing node entity. Then we dive into setting up the basics of our entity, and getting an introduction to the entity classes we will be using.
The Drupalize.Me Team Has Grown
Blog postWe are delighted to announce our two newest staff members: Emma Jane and Andrew. These two fine folks are no strangers to the Drupal community and we're really excited to have them on board.
We're looking for a friendly and effective sales representative for the Lullabot Education department, which includes Drupalize.Me. We've been growing by leaps and bounds over the last year, and we'd like to bring someone in to help manage that growth in sales, as well as push us even further along by finding people and organizations who need Drupal training, and matching their needs with our team and knowledge.
Want to get started with Drupal? Join us on the first day of DrupalCamp London for an Introduction to Drupal course. Led by the accomplished Drupalize.Me team, this full-day training will cover Drupal history, terminology, simple site building and how to navigate the Drupal community.
Kickstart Your Drupal Education
- Discover Drupal history and get an overview of what’s next
- Learn basic Drupal terminology
This week I am continuing the trend of mini-series with some lessons on deploying your code, in the FREE Deploying Your Code Without a Terminal series. The reason behind this quick set of videos is that not everyone is command line savvy, and not everyone has to be. What is important though, is getting your code into version control, and there are plenty of tools that let you do that using a graphical interface.
This week's release we have three super handy modules to check out when building your site. The Module Filter module is designed to make your site administration life easier but helping you navigate the module administration page. Environment Indicator helps you sort out which site you are currently looking at and working on. This can get confusing if you are following best practices, and have several versions of the site for different stages of work (like development, staging, and live).
This week we keep rolling out handy modules that everyone should know about, with a look at two very popular modules for extending the Views module. The first, Entity Views Attachment (EVA), lets you attach any of your views to various entities on your site, like nodes or users. This is handy when you want to display a view as part of another entity on your site, instead of displaying it on its own URL.
We're excited to share and invite you to our upcoming workshop: Git With It, an introduction to Git at MinneWebCon on April 16th. MinneWebCon is a 2-day, grassroots, knowledge-sharing conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that unites web lovers from every industry.
Lullabot Module Monday in Videos!
Blog postFor the last two years Lullabot has been writing up a post about a new contributed module every week, in a series called Module Monday. We have almost 100 modules introduced in simple, concise articles. Here at Drupalize.Me we are going to start creating video versions of these Lullabot Module Monday articles so you can have a visual walkthrough of using these modules, in addition to the written overview that the articles provide.