Learn from our blog

We are excited to have Adam Bergstein joining our team as Vice President of Engineering! Better yet? He’ll be speaking at the upcoming Midwest Drupal Camp in Chicago about his journey from engineer to technical leader.

MidCamp is March 8th - 11th, 2018 at DePaul University Lincoln Park Campus, Chicago.

Drupal thrives with love and care from the community. We help move the Drupal project forward by mentoring, sharing knowledge, helping with drupal.org (d.o) issues, and more. If you want to help in the d.o issue queues, you are very welcome! While there are many ways to help, one important piece is reviewing and testing code patches.

In January, we were happy to have Ashley Bischoff as our guest speaker. Ashley talked about embracing plain language for better accessibility. Ashley is an accessibility expert and copy editor for The Paciello Group.

Writing reports and documentation is nothing new for many of us — we write them all the time. But even though we may do our best to write clearly, those who receive our reports and documentation might not be as familiar with accessibility as we are.

At the end of the day, no matter how technically correct a document may be, our words won't do much good if those who are reading them can't understand what we're trying to say. But writing isn't a black box — there are straightforward techniques that we can use to help ensure that our writing remains accessible.

It's said that the adoption of Drupal 8 has been slower than any other Drupal version. The Hook 42 team embraces Drupal 8 and are curious about how others in the community feel. In this inaugural edition of Drupal 8 Interviews, we are spotlighting my mentor and former instructor Mike Anello from DrupalEasy.

Mike is a Drupal developer, trainer, and the co-owner of Drupal Career Online. You might recognize him from his Drupal.org profile name, ultimike, or know his voice from the DrupalEasy Podcast. He has been a part of the Drupal community for almost 12 years. He has contributed back in many ways: code contribution, documentation, mentoring, and event planning. He also volunteers for the Drupal Association as part of the Community Working Group.

We’re stretching our legs, shaking off the snow, and heading to our first camp of 2018! AmyJune and Carie are on their way to Florida Drupal Camp to share their knowledge in "The Theme Park Capital of the World". They’re thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate and learn with their peers.

Along with their sessions, they'll be helping with the Sunday Contribution Sprints!

As an early holiday present, for December's meet-up we had a very special accessibility guest, Heydon Pickering who chatted about "Prioritizing Accessibility.” For those of you who are veterans of the world of website accessibility, you probably already know a lot about what Heydon has contributed to our field. But for those of you new to this field, let me take a quick minute to give you some more background on our speaker.

There's no such thing as "just a typo."

In Drupal, clients and prospective users see the user interface and documentation first. When we give them demos or when they evaluate the Drupal project, they aren’t just evaluating the code. Grammar, punctuation, readability, and spelling all matter. They give the project credibility. It is just as important to maintain the same high standards with the front facing side of Drupal as we do with the code.

I have been working with Drupal for about three years, and contributing back to the project for a little less than two.

I have learned quite a bit, but, most importantly, I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as “just” a typo, “just” a grammar issue, or “just” a documentation patch; not all patches have to fix code to be important.

When it comes to Atomic Design systems in Drupal 8, there’s hardly a shortage of solutions to choose from. Pattern Lab and KSS Node are certainly among the most popular and the recently released Mannequin looks incredibly exciting. However, in all these aforementioned solutions, exposing that component data to Drupal has never been particularly straightforward.

This month we did something a little bit different with the meet-up format. Instead of one person presenting a slide deck, we had a panel discussion on all things accessibility with four accessibility experts - Eric Bailey, Helena McCabe, Scott O'Hara, and Scott Vinkle!

There were some questions lined up to keep the conversation going, but we ended up having some amazing on-the-fly questions from the audience, so it was a bit more spontaneous and a lot of fun!

We're super excited to attend New England Drupal Camp this year!

Aimee is honored to have been invited to be the keynote speaker this year. She'll be discussing inclusion and diversity in the community. In addition to Aimee's keynote, we are partnering up with our longtime friends at Lingotek to put together a hands-on multilingual workshop that covers Drupal 8 and an integration to Lingotek's Translation Management System.

Just in case that wasn't enough, we're also presenting a couple of sessions. One comparing the madness of the multilingual modules on Drupal 7 to the new and improved Drupal 8 multilingual approach. We will be presenting another session covering how ANYONE and EVERYONE can help contribute back to the Drupal project even if they aren't the most advance technical person