Forms are an essential part of any web application. They are the primary mechanism for collecting input from our users, and without them Drupal wouldn't be very useful. As such, they're also one of the first things people want to learn when they start learning Drupal. Forms are fundamental to creating Drupal modules, whether you're asking someone to leave a review of your video or giving an administrator the option to turn JavaScript aggregation off.

Back in June, I wrote up a little blog post with some tips for getting a developer environment setup. Recently, I've been working on a new learning series and set up Vagrant for local development. Both experiences left me thinking "Ugh!" It requires so much work just to start working! For a developer, this is time well spent. But not everyone who works with Drupal is a developer. In fact, the list of non-developers whom might want to peek at Drupal is longer than you might originally think. Sound familiar? Read on if you're interested in taking a peek at Drupal 8 without the setup overhead. I've got just the tool you've been looking for.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been meaning to get involved with Drupal 8 for quite some time now. But where to start? What’s left to be done? How do I find tasks that match my skills? Enter Core contribution mentoring.

During DrupalCon Prague I had the pleasure of giving a presentation about teaching Drupal 8 as part of the core conversations track. In the presentation I talked a lot about providing a good learning environment for people starting with Drupal 8, and removing the fear and uncertainty that are so counter to learning. One of the key points that I made during the presentation was that I want to see the leaders in our community step up and promote the things that they are excited about in Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 has come a long way since Drupal 7 to being easier to use out of the box. When I built sites for people using Drupal 7 the biggest complaint was the lack of a WYSIWYG editor. At some point installing WYSIWYG module and adding an editor role just became part of my usual installation of modules. This process wasn't complicated, but it was rather annoying.

First you had to install the module, then download the third party WYSIWYG files from another website. Once you had all the components you needed, you then had to setup text formats to use the editing interface, and also configure the role for your content managers to assign correct permissions. My favorite part of the process was the web page of check boxes of buttons you could add to the toolbar. The page was hideous and not very configurable if you'd added any extra add-ons to your WYSIWYG.