Drupal

If you have not read Alex Bronstein's (effulgentsia's) excellent blog post about creating your first Drupal 8 module, go read it: Drupal 8: Hello OOP, Hello world! This post will expand on Alex's discussion and introduce the new configuration API in Drupal 8. Here we will have the modest goal of making the display of the text "Hello, World!" configurable -- more specifically, we will give site administrators the ability to make the text UPPERCASE or Title Case. I can tell you are excited.

DrupalCon Portland is over and many of us left feeling excited about Drupal 8. There will be a lot of changes from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, and if you are wondering about what is new, one of the best ways to learn is to get involved with Drupal 8 development right now. Until recently, I had tried a couple of times to get involved with Drupal core, but became frustrated when I couldn't find an issue appropriate for me or I worked on a patch that got stuck in "needs review." While there are many ways to help out with Drupal core development, I would like to highlight three areas where I think you will have success -- the first is an ongoing effort for new contributors, the second is for frontend developers, and the third is for backend developers.

These days I find myself splitting time between OSX and Linux, but when I'm on a Mac I like my development environment ready to go without having to do much clicking around. While I have tried a few times to get away from using MAMP, I find that it is just more convenient than configuring everything manually. However, I prefer to use the command line and have it run in the background without having to see it there in my dock and making me feel guilty for not configuring everything myself.