DrupalEasy: Introducing DrupalEasy Show & Tell: Our new YouTube video series

For more years that I care to count, I’ve been holding weekly 2-hour, DrupalEasy Office Hours for members of the DrupalEasy Learning Community. Unstructured, DrupalEasy Office Hours are a unique opportunity for students and alumni to ask just about any Drupal-related question they have – regardless if it is something related to our curriculum, or a challenging task they are working on for a client. These weekly co-working sessions are a fun and interesting way for all of us to build knowledge and skills, and have become a foundation for our dynamic DrupalEasy Learning Community.If you’ve been around Drupal for a long time, this idea may seem familiar – back when I started with Drupal, there was a thing called Drupal Dojo (I can’t believe the web site still exists!) that was immensely useful. We hope that DrupalEasy Show & Tell can capture some of the goodness of Drupal Dojo.I’ve got a ton of ideas for future episodes – many of them for contrib modules that we use and teach on a daily basis. If you’re a project maintainer and think that you might have a good idea for a future episode – just let us know! Upcoming episodes include object-oriented hooks with Nic Laflin, Dripyard theme with Mike Herchel and Andy Giles, and Content templates in Drupal Canvas with Ted Bowman.

Launch topics and guests

Each episode is unrehearsed to show real-world usage – not a polished demo. The goal is to accomplish a task from the perspective of someone new to the topic – with the benefit of having the subject matter expert to help as necessary.Sometimes, topics we cover in office hours are related to contrib modules or site-building techniques (in additional code-related tasks.) Often, I’ll wind up demonstrating a module or technique regardless of whether or not I have any experience with it! These demonstrations are sometimes the most fun, and we all get a lot out of them. Attendees always respond favorably – regardless of my level of knowledge on the topic. After a recent demo, I had an idea: What if I could perform these unrehearsed demos with a subject matter expert at the ready?And so was born DrupalEasy Show & Tell, available for everyone now on our YouTube channel, whether you are a member of the learning community or not. The goal is to learn something new and usable in 30-45 minutes in a way that is entertaining and really useful. I’m not looking to always cover the latest and greatest, either. We’re planning on releasing episodes on tried-and-true modules as well, and we’re looking to engage with Drupal users of all skill levels.You can also bookmark the DrupalEasy Show & Tell playlist or watch directly on DrupalEasy.com.The quickest, easiest, and most sure-fire way is to subscribe to the DrupalEasy channel on YouTube. That way, in addition to DrupalEasy Show & Tell, you won’t miss any of our other periodic videos.

Future topics

As of today, I’ve recorded the first 5 episodes and released 2 of them: