Spokane Day-time Learn/Co-Work Group September 8

I will not be able to lead/attend a Drupal Group meeting at our regular time on the 2nd or 3rd Thursday in October. If you want to have a meeting without me, great! But someone else will need to figure out a date, be the meeting leader (bring laptop!), and bring a projector. Lately, attendance has been a bit low, but people are not always around during the summer and usually it would pick up in Sept/Oct, so probably having a meeting is a good idea, and there is definitely plenty of expertise in the group to cover most questions. Or, you can have fun researching answers together.

Anyway, if you figure this out before our next meeting, I can make the room reservation and meeting announcement here on groups.drupal.org (I already have the paperwork and web account set up with Spokane County Libraries).

Also, I can loan my projector to someone if they can commit to being at the September meeting (when I can give it to them), the October meeting (to use it when I'm not there), and November meeting (to bring it back). I think Jon also has a projector... maybe others do too?

Here is what we discussed today:

• Keeping track of what is going on in the Drupal universe: Subscribe to Drupal Planet (RSS feed aggregating posts about Drupal from 601 sources) -- see https://www.drupal.org/planet -- RSS feed is at https://www.drupal.org/planet/rss.xml and you might also want to subscribe to https://www.drupal.org/blog
• In particular, it includes a news feed from the Drupal Association (DA): https://assoc.drupal.org/news . The DA is a non-profit that keeps drupal.org running, puts on DrupalCon, etc. They have recently cut staff... alas!
• How/where to learn Drupal and get help:
  - https://buildamodule.com/ and https://drupalize.me/ and https://www.lynda.com (videos by subscription, note that Lynda is available for anyone with a Spokane County or City library card)
  - Drupal marketplace (has training): https://www.drupal.org/drupal-services
  - Drupal books listing: https://www.drupal.org/books
  - Learning Drupal from O'Reilly was excellent for Drupal 7, and is in "early release" for Drupal 8: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033912.do
  - The User Guide for Drupal 8 -- should be on drupal.org soon -- for now go to https://www.drupal.org/project/user_guide to find links to where to view it.
  - YouTube and Google search
  - http://drupal.stackexchange.com/ -- you can search for previously-asked questions, or ask your own
  - https://www.drupal.org/irc -- Drupal has chat channels where you can ask questions
  - Free training at a Drupal event: https://groups.drupal.org/node/513185 shows some that are coming up

  You might want to consider learning Drupal 7 for now... there are many more materials, blog posts, videos, books, documentation, etc. about Drupal 7. There is not much for Drupal 8 yet. Also the contributed add-on modules are not really there yet for Drupal 8... lots of the major ones are not done yet.

• Scott explained about REST, which is a way to request information from a site, or put information into a site. In Drupal 7, this module: https://www.drupal.org/project/restws . It's in Core in Drupal 8.
• We looked at using right-click in a browser, then choosing "Inspect" or "Inspect Element", to look at the HTML and CSS affecting a certain part of a web page. Both Firefox and Chrome/Chromium have this feature.
• What to do if you don't like your theme?
  - If you are using Bartik or another "colorizable" theme, you can use the Color module in Core to change the colors.
  - Search for a new theme on drupal.org, download it, install it, and set up your blocks. These themes are all free.
  - Use the Bootstrap theme and customize it in the administrative interface if you want to. https://www.drupal.org/project/bootstrap
  - Search for a theme that you pay for (using a web search). Install it and set up your blocks.
  - Make your own theme.
  - Hire someone else to make a custom theme for you.
• Switching themes: you will need to make sure that all the blocks that were placed in regions in your old theme are also placed in regions in your new theme. If you don't disable the old theme after installing a new one, you can see both of the themes in tabs on the Blocks admin page (admin/structure/block). Then you can make sure that all the blocks that were in your old theme get put into your new one.
• What is an entity reference?

  First... What is an entity? It's a content item (node), taxonomy term, user account, file, or other similar things. Entities have properties and fields.

  An entity reference is a field that stores a relationship between one entity and another one. Such as a taxonomy field on a content type, or a content reference field on one content type linking it to another one.

Also, in reference to our discussions on Thursday about learning materials...

We now have a published User Guide for Drupal 8! This is a great way for anyone to learn the basics of Drupal 8, and is most likely far better than any of the existing published books out there right now. It has 101 topics and covers how to make content types and views, multilingual sites, and basic site administration.

It is currently available in PDF, ePub, and Mobi e-book formats, and will soon be on drupal.org in HTML format as well. See https://groups.drupal.org/node/513741
for more information and links.