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Hook 42 has run four Drupal multilingual trainings at BADCamp since 2012, which has been a lot of fun. The first three years were focused on Drupal 7 only, and last year our training was split between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. At all of these trainings, we had the great fortune of having the Lingotek team help us mentor students during the self-paced training as well as give a quick peek at their translation software.

It’s always a good idea to give your website a new coat of proverbial paint every so often. With the release of Drupal 8, we took the opportunity to not only upgrade our technology, but to completely redesign the look and feel along with the Drupal architecture.

It is important that for any given project, each developer uses the same version of Node.js and related Javascript (JS) packages. In this article, we’ll discuss how to use “Node Version Manager” (NVM) to install multiple versions of Node.js, how to use “Automatic Version Switching for Node.js” (AVN) to automatically switch Node.js versions when changing to a project directory, and how to use “Node Package Manager” (NPM) to keep track of JS packages.

While it’s amazing how easy it is for an experienced Drupal 7 site builder to get around using the Drupal 8 UI, the same is not true for writing code for D8. As has been made clear for years now, Drupal 8 is very different inside. Many of the hooks we know and love have gone away, most procedural code has been replaced with interfaces, classes, and methods, and there are scads of YAML (Yet Another Markup Language, .yml file extension) files that wire everything together. How does a developer get her/his footing in this slippery new landscape?

Blocks in Drupal 7 are pretty useful but, in practice, larger sites often have requirements that core blocks can't support like placing the same block in different regions for different content types. I’m happy to see core blocks have been improved in Drupal 8 to be much more practical and powerful.

The fabulous duo of K2 (Kristin Bradham) and Lindsay Gaudinier are off on another trip to get their Drupal. Kicking things off, K2 will present her Conversational Drupal session that was a hit at BADCamp and Stanford Drupal Camp. Grab a coffee and bagel, and enjoy the eye-opener session on Friday morning. Later on Friday, Lindsay and K2 will lead a session on Drupal and SEO.

If you are interested in multilingual Drupal development, DrupalCon New Orleans is the place to be. :)

There are 5 events we've got our eyes on, so you might want to put them on your schedule too. It would be great to see some familiar faces and even better to see some new ones!