Today I'm happy to say we've added three more tutorial to our theme guide that expand on JavaScript Libraries in Drupal. We now have tutorials that provide some orientation and basic exposure to Modernizr.js, Underscore.js, and Backbone.js and how to use them in a theme or module.
Site Update: Navigation for Tutorials
Blog postWe've been working hard to improve the navigation on our new tutorials. Today we released a new and improved design that makes navigating tutorials much easier. See it in action in our Drupal 8 Theming Guide.
Free PSD to Theme Webinar
Blog postIn 2008 I started on my big Drupal theming adventure by co-authoring Front End Drupal with Konstantin Käfer. Since that time thousands of people have learned Drupal theming through this book, and my presentations and workshops.
Twin Cities DrupalCamp is coming up -- June 7th-10th -- and we'll be attending and presenting our popular Theming Drupal 8 workshop.
We've added the last 13 tutorials for our free Hands-on Exercises: Movie Project, which covers building an entire Drupal 7 site, including site building, theming, and module development. The project is covered in 36 exercises, with the first 16 exercises focused on site building and theming. The remainder of the series has exercises that require module development, along with some performance testing.
We're Teaching at DrupalCon Baltimore
Blog postThe 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!
Template files are responsible for the HTML markup of every page generated by Drupal. Any file ending with the .html.twig extension is a template file. These files are composed of standard HTML markup as well as tokens used by the Twig template engine to represent dynamic content that will be substituted into the HTML markup when the template is used. As a theme developer, you'll work with this a lot.
In this tutorial we’re going to learn about:
- What template files are, and how they fit into the big picture of creating a theme
- How template files are used in order to allow theme developers to modify the HTML markup output by Drupal
- Naming conventions for, and specificity of, template files
This week we're chugging along with our PSD to Drupal Theme series, with a look at getting our CSS system setup and figuring out our Drupal elements for theming.
Today we kick off a new series design to get you started with responsive web design in Drupal. We'll take a fictitious site to use as our case study, The Anytown Farmers Market. This site was built using the Drupal theme, 960 Robots, a theme based on a 960px grid and designed for the desktop. (You might recognize this theme from our series on theming).
We're excited to publish a new set of tutorials on Drupal's Views module. This set of tutorials includes a database starting point and instructions for setting up a local development environment with DDEV so that you can follow along. The database includes an extensive set of baseball stats data so that we could demonstrate the power of Views to filter, sort, display, theme, and build customized lists in blocks, pages, API endpoints, and more.
This week, we've added 8 new tutorials to our Drupal 8 Theming Guide on breakpoints, responsive image styles, and core themes Bartik and Stark. In these lessons you will learn about breakpoints and media queries, and how Drupal uses these concepts outside of CSS files. We'll cover breakpoint configuration files and how to create one for your theme or module. Then, we'll dive into the Responsive Image module. We'll explore responsive image style configuration, popular responsive image use cases that you can solve with responsive image styles, and, step-by-step, how to create a responsive image style for a viewport-sizing use case. Finally, we have a pair of tutorials on Bartik and Stark. We'll take a look at these core themes, their purpose, and what you can learn from them.
Help Us Choose a 2018 Workshop Topic
Blog postA look at how we design our remote workshops for flexibility and on-the-fly adjustments so that we can provide as much value as possible to the people who choose to attend.
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.
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.
We've published 18 tutorials on Search API and Solr in Drupal. Learn about Drupal's built-in search capabilities and how to take your site's search to the next level with Apache Solr in this new series.
More Drupal 8 Insights
Blog postLast month, we posted a survey regarding your plans for learning Drupal 8. This was a follow-up to a similar survey we posted back in May, 2014. The responses we received in both instances were remarkably consistent, which is reassuring as we begin to publish our Drupal 8 tutorials. Here are a few big take-aways from our Drupal 8 surveys and some insight into our plans for Drupal 8 tutorials.
How to Become a Drupal Developer
Blog postLearning Drupal can feel daunting. Its ecosystem is like a rich forest with all kinds of fruit and wildlife, but for those who aren’t experienced in exploring it, the foliage can look thick, dark, and foreboding. The sounds drifting from the trees seem mysterious and enchanting. But also a little dangerous. You know there are paths through the woods, but some aren’t well-marked, and some lead to dead ends. Some take you the long way around and then loop back on themselves. If you want to become a Drupal developer, what path should you take to explore the vast Drupal ecosystem?
In 2015, we released a series called What's New In Drupal 8, which gives an overview of the different things that have changed in the upcoming version of Drupal. We've added a "Notify me" button to these particular lessons so members can get added to a notification list for that topic.