So far, 2016 has been a great year for Drupal and Drupalize.Me. We started off as our own company, and we’ve been heads-down on lots of new Drupal 8 tutorials. We have a deep love for Drupal and the community around here—so in addition to working hard at our business, we encourage each other to roll up our sleeves in the wider community as well. Here’s a little rundown of what’s been on our team’s radar recently.

As mentioned in my previous blog post "Catching the Community Train" Lisa, Bojhan and myself will be working on a website to better facilitate the process of designers contributing to Drupal. Following my last blog post we sent out a questionnaire to current and previous contributors in order to gain some valuable insights that will help us move forward. In this blog post I will analyze the answers we received and share what they mean to me and how they will be instrumental in our success of helping designers more easily get involved in Drupal.

Drupal 8 is coming in 2014. There is a lot of work to do and a lot to learn. We've decided to dedicate a minimum of five hours per week towards Drupal 8 for each person on the Drupalize.Me team. We are now a hefty group of eight people, and everyone will be diving in for a total of 40 hours per week dedicated to Drupal 8. (At least until Drupal 8 launches, and hopefully even beyond that.) Everyone is picking their own projects and ways to get involved. We just started dedicating this time in December, and folks have been spending time sorting out where things are and where to jump in. We're excited about what the new year will bring once we really get rollling. So far, we've been testing the waters with the Core Mentoring Office Hours, some Drupal Ladder work, and just installing and learning where Drupal 8 is right now. We're also lining up training initiatives, UX work, and documentation.

In Episode 24 of the Drupalize.Me podcast, Addi is joined by Bill Liao, co-founder of CoderDojo, and Drupalers and CoderDojo volunteers Heather James (heather) and Mike King (emkay).

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