Drupalize.Me: A 2 Year Retrospective

It's been almost 2 years since we launched Drupalize.Me and I'd like to take a moment to appreciate some of the site's recent accomplishments.

Over 600 Videos

A few weeks ago, Drupalize.Me product manager Addison Berry announced the 600th video posted to Drupalize.Me! Members now get access to over 233 hours of content on an immense range of Drupal-oriented topics from simple content creation to site building tricks and database server performance optimization. Drupalize.Me's most popular videos cover coding for and using Views, using the Calendar and Date modules, configuring WYSIWYG editors, Display Suite, Organic Groups, Drupal 7 module development, and more. The Drupalize.Me team has been really amazing – posting new videos every week and paying close attention to member requests for new topics.

Over 2,000 Subscribers

Word about Drupalize.Me has spread and I often see people on Twitter telling one another that for them, Drupalize.Me has become the way to learn and keep up with Drupal techniques. Drupalize.Me has iPhone/iPad, Android, and Roku apps so members can watch the videos on their mobile devices or televisions. Drupalize.Me has also partnered with Acquia to offer discounted memberships to Acquia Network subscribers.

As word has been getting around about Drupalize.Me, subscriber numbers have been growing and recently crossed 2,000 simultaneous subscribers. We're reaching more people on a monthly basis than most large-scale Drupal events. We couldn't be more excited about the response!

Drupalize.Me now has a staff of 3 full-time people creating videos, maintaining the site, adding features and handling customer support. This team is augmented by others at Lullabot who step in to help with expert video training, development, design and support. Drupalize.Me now represents more than 15% of Lullabot's budget and has become a great outlet for the Lullabot team to share the knowledge that we've gained building the high-profile websites that represent the majority of our work.

New Features

The Drupalize.Me team has been listening closely to subscriber feature requests and we've gotten lots of new features over the past 2 years. They've arranged videos into "series" collections and allow users to watch them consecutively. They've also added curated "guides" collecting videos into linear curriculum for different types of members. They've also greatly improved the user dashboard pages allowing users to manage their queue as well as see the listing of recently watched videos and even displaying a line graph so members can see their progress within the videos they've watched. The team also added the ability to store pause points and allow users to resume from exactly where they left off - even if they're resuming on a different device such as their phone or connected television.

And speaking of connected televisions, we've got apps! We've got an iOS app for your iPhone/iTouch/iPad which can AirPlay to your AppleTV. We've also got an Android app and an app for the Roku Streaming Player box. You can pick up a Roku box for as little as $50, hook it up to your television, and watch all of the Drupalize.Me videos from your couch. It's a great way to learn.

Group Memberships

Drupalize.Me also offers group memberships. If you want Drupal training for your entire group, department, company, or institution, we offer that too. Group accounts greatly reduce the price of individual accounts while still allowing each group member to manage their own video queue, resume videos, and see their own history. We offer both managed group plans and IP-range plans to allow access to all devices at a physical location such as a library or campus.

Subtitles, Transcripts & Translations

Perhaps the greatest new features at Drupalize.Me are the ability to offer subtitles, transcripts, and translations for the videos. We have many international subscribers who, while they speak and understand English, sometimes can't keep up with the rapid-fire technical information in the videos. They've been asking for English-language subtitles and transcripts so they can follow along better. We're proud to say that we've added this functionality as well as functionality to provide complete translations with subtitles in other languages! 60 of our recent videos as well as the complete Introduction to Drupal guide already have transcripts and subtitles. And all new videos published on Drupalize.Me in the future will have transcripts and subtitles.

We're currently looking for volunteers to do foreign language translation for Drupalize.Me. If you're a bi-lingual Drupalist and you'd like to help make bring these Drupal training videos to the world, please contact us!

Drupalize.Me & Videola

One of the Drupalize.Me team's biggest accomplishments is building the Drupalize.Me site itself. The team has built a great Drupal-based platform which manages both the permissions and delivery of adaptive bitrate streaming video; recurring subscription billing and administration; video content categorization, listing, and organization; mobile app and IPTV delivery with seamless pause-on-one-device-resume-on-another functionality; and now even multi-language subtitles and transcripts.

As we've been building Drupalize.Me, we've been funneling this work and knowledge into Videola, a platform to provide this functionality to others wanting to build subscription-based or IPTV-oriented video sites. In short, Videola is a framework for building sites like Drupalize.Me... or like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon video-on-demand. Videola can do everything that Drupalize.Me can do and more. If you'd like to build a site like this, please contact us and we can talk to you about getting you set up with a Videola site of your own.

Onward

Addi and the rest of the Drupalize.Me team have been doing a lot of training at DrupalCons, DrupalCamps, and other events. They've been very involved in the Drupal Ladder project and have posted a series of free videos to help new Drupalers get involved with core development.

Drupalize.Me recently started its own podcast (which picks up where the long-running Lullabot Drupal Podcast left off). Every other Friday, the Drupalize.Me team is posting a new podcast with interviews and discussions to help listeners keep up with the ever-changing world of Drupal. The team is also constantly upgrading and improving the site and they've got lots of great feature ideas for the future.

I couldn't be more proud of the work that's been done by Addi Berry, Joe Shindelar, Kyle Hofmeyer, and everyone who's helped with Drupalize.Me over the past 2 years. The site just keeps getting better and better. At this rate, I fully expect that 2 years from now I'll be bragging about their Drupal training neural implants and interstellar 3D streaming. But for now, I'm really happy with where we are – doing great, having fun, and sharing knowledge with people, empowering them to do great things.