Expanding Your Toolbox with Drupal 8

Let’s start this blog post about Drupal training in an unconventional way: by talking about how much I like WordPress. 

This week, I had the pleasure of working on one of my most complex WordPress sites while volunteering for The Girl Who Wore Freedom. I was reminded of how easy and intuitive WordPress can be. Case in point: we wanted to sell merchandise, and after only a few hours of work, we had our first sale, thanks to WooCommerce. 

But how do I create custom types of content with custom fields and dynamic pages that automatically update when new content is added to the site? I have a much longer history with Drupal, so I naturally start by thinking about how functionality is built there and translate it into WordPress. I eventually dug into custom post types (with help from Custom Post Type UI), Advanced Custom Fields, Content Views, and even got into the WordPress API and wrote some custom code.

The surprising thing was that it could have been done out of the box with Drupal 8—no extra modules or custom code necessary. WordPress is known for being intuitive, but the fundamental building blocks that make Drupal so popular also aren’t difficult once you see how they work. 

Want to see this in action? Good news! Pantheon is offering Getting Started with Drupal 8: an online, half-day introduction on September 13th, 2019 10:00 am PST / 1:00 pm EST. 

This workshop will be hands on and catered to people who have never used Drupal before. We’re going to run through the basics of what makes Drupal special, touch on some case studies, and discover how to use structured content, dynamic lists, and the layout builder to level up our WebOps capabilities.

The workshop is free; so, tell your friends, family, and colleagues who want to build their first Drupal site. Everyone will receive a workbook that they can use to run through the material again or share with anyone who couldn’t make it.

We’ve partnered with Drupalize.me, OSTraining, and DrupalEasy to provide even more training after the workshop is over by sharing exclusive discounts and giveaways for all attendees.

Prefer to attend a class in person? Sign up for this workshop at the Bay Area Drupal Camp on October 2nd or 3rd, or check out the other workshops happening around the world for Drupal Global Training Days.

Have a scheduling conflict? Register anyway, and we’ll be happy to send you a recording, even if you can’t attend.