June 2014

Mentored Trainings, Keynotes and Kickstarters!

I'm still working hard with editing the next batch of "Drupal 8 Developer Prep" videos. I'm excited to release them, but in the meantime, here's a few things you might look forward to.

Upcoming Mentored Trainings

DrupalCorn Camp 2014 - On July 17th, DrupalCorn will be holding a Mentored Training for the 3rd year in a row. If you're thinking about a camp in August, Iowa is full of incredibly nice people and a great Drupal community. Kicking it off with some mentorship can be a great way to get started.

DrupalCamp Twin Cities 2014 - On August 7th, DrupalCamp Twin Cities will be hosting a full day Mentored Training, also for the 3rd year in a row. If you're around the Minneapolis / St. Paul area, it would be great to see you there!

Your Hometown - Mentored Trainings are a powerful learning experience and anyone can organize them. Just get a spot with wifi, ask a couple folks from the local Drupal community to come mentor, put the word out and go! As always, we offer 8 days of BuildAModule free for all students and mentors.

Kickstarters

Free Drupal High School Curriculum - Shane Thomas of CodeKarate posted a kickstarter to get the community behind building a free high school curriculum around Drupal. Shane is also a partner in STEM Fuse, a company with that sells courses to high schools across the US. They know how to wrap a curriculum to meet educational standards, and they have a solid reputation in thousands of high schools. If anyone has a chance at getting Drupal into high schools, these guys have the right resources to make it happen. BuildAModule has substantially backed this project because we believe it's a great investment, and there's only a week or so to complete the funding and make it happen. Good luck!

Kalabox 2.0 - The good and witty folks over at Kalamuna have a kickstarter going to bring the next generation of feature-complete instant development boxes into reality. If you've used tools like MAMP, or Dev Desktop, Kalabox is an alternative that aims to be neutral to cloud hosting vendors (like Acquia and Pantheon), and that supports all the tools you need as a novice and as a professional developer. We've backed the project because we think it could end up being a great tool to get started, follow best practices and publish their sites with as little hassle as possible.

Keynote!

I'll be doing a keynote at DrupalCamp Twin Cities this year, talking about what whether Drupal is on its way up, or on it's way out. It will be a blast, so if you'll be in the area, come by. The Camp is August 7-10.

Have a great week!

- Chris Shattuck

Update: New Drupal 8 Videos Coming Down the Pikes!

I hope you've been enjoying the videos in the new "Drupal 8 Developer Prep" collection. If you have been following along, you may have some new skills working with object-oriented code and probably have a growing appreciation for Symfony and the various components it gives you to work with. The one thing we really haven't tackled yet - and which many of you are probably the most excited about - is how all these things relate to Drupal 8. I'm excited to share this stuff, too, because it is pretty awesome how it all comes together.

In the second half of "Drupal 8 Developer Prep", which we will start releasing in a couple weeks, we build a module in Drupal 8 from scratch to explore how to leverage the new Symfony components like routing, the dependency injection container and event dispatcher. Then we'll work through the process of upgrading a Drupal 7 module to Drupal 8, touching on numerous new APIs like the State API, the Configuration API, the plugin system and more. It's a lot of fun seeing the how the updates in Drupal 8 makes your code make more sense.

If you haven't yet taken a look at the first half of "Drupal 8 Developer Prep", now's the time to get started so you can be ready for this next set once it starts coming out. And if you're not yet a member, definitely check out the free videos.

Have a great week!

- Chris Shattuck

New Videos on Dependency Injection Containers (so much cooler than they sound)

In Drupal 8, everything comes back to the Dependency Injection Container (or DIC). Throughout the "Drupal 8 Developer Prep" series, we've been building up to the point where we can understand exactly what the DIC is for, and how it works under the hood. This week we wrap up our DIC coverage and briefly take a look at the incredible amount of ground we've covered so far in this series. If you've made it this far, give yourself a big hug. Nice work. :)

Why you should never use a dependency injection container within a class even though it's tempting - 0:54

Now that you have a dependency injection container at your disposal, it seems like a convenient tool to use anytime you need an object. But, to keep our code testable, we still have to use dependency injection to get objects into other objects. In this video we explain why.

Updating our framework code to leverage the dependency injection container - 1:04

We have our dependency injection container up and running, so in this video we update our framework code to use it. Instantly making it testable and more flexible.

How to use dependency injection container properties to store settings - 2:46

Not only can we use our dependency injection container to hold instances of objects, we can also store variables or properties in it, too. In this video we show a couple of practical use cases.

(FREE!) An overview of what we learned in these Symfony videos - 5:56

In the last 70 videos or so, you’ve learned a lot about Symfony and also about object-oriented coding in general. In this video we give a recap of the main things we covered, and encourage you to work through the videos a couple of times to really build your chops.