Friday, Aug 28, 2015
Yesterday saw us launch a new Wordpress plugin which enables site builders to easily install the Shoprocket ecommerce system (http://shoprocket.co) on their sites. The plugin is hosted on wordpress.org at https://wordpress.org/plugins/integration-with-shoprocket-ecommerce, or is available from the ‘Add plugins’ section inside the Wordpress admin area.
Shoprocket is a slick new ecommerce service which we’re really excited to be working with. They’ve made it possible to set an ecommerce site up in a matter of minutes, and it provides a fantastic user experience which makes the purchasing process as painless as possible. It also uses the highly secure stripe payment platform. There’s no setup fees, just a flat 2% commission rate on all transactions.
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Friday, Aug 21, 2015
Mailchimp is a fantastic service that makes creating and sending HTML emails fast and easy. Mandrill, Mailchimp’s transactional email API, can be used to send lovely HTML emails straight from Drupal, but it needs a bit of configuring. So I thought a blog post was in order.
Install the Mail System, Mailchimp and Mandrill Drupal projects
https://www.drupal.org/project/mailsystem https://www.drupal.org/project/mailchimp https://www.drupal.org/project/mandrill Enable the Mail System, Mailchimp, Mailchimp Lists, Mailchimp Campaigns, and Mandrill modules.
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Friday, Aug 14, 2015
When building a new website, SEO can sometimes be a bit of an afterthought, coming in after design, user experience, functionality, and a host of other considerations. This is a bit strange really, given that if you’re not getting eyeballs to your site, all the rest of it counts for nothing!
Fortunately, Drupal has a bunch of contributed modules available that can help whip your site into Google-friendly shape. A good place to start is with the SEO checklist module, which provides a huge list of ways to improve your SEO. In fact, it probably lists too many items – if you installed all of the modules it suggests on your site, chances are any SEO benefits would be outweighed by performance penalties and the difficulty of maintaining all the extra code.
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Friday, Aug 7, 2015
We’re excited to announce that our Shoprocket Drupal project has been accepted by the community. The module allows the easy integration of the Shoprocket ecommerce system with Drupal, making it a matter of minutes to get your online shop up and running. The Drupal project page is at https://www.drupal.org/project/shoprocket.
Shoprocket (https://shoprocket.co) is an exciting new venture which uses a lightweight javascript library to easily create a flexible, simple ecommerce system. It takes literally minutes to set up, depending on the size of your product range, but it’s also flexible and robust. We can’t wait to use it in upcoming projects, and we think it really expands our offering. It looks beautiful without a great deal of extra styling, though it’s easy to change the look if required, and it provides a fast and minimalist checkout process for a great user experience.
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Friday, Jul 31, 2015
We’ve been using the Sass preprocessor for a little while now and it’s undoubtedly a brilliant tool for expanding the power of CSS while also making it more maintainable.
One of the great beauties of Sass is that it enables you to split your theming files up pretty much however you see fit. This obviously helps you to keep your style rules nicely organised rather than having large files of CSS.
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Monday, Jul 27, 2015
We’ve moved… Hallneg Limited are now located at Bellingham House in the heart of St Neots on the corner of Huntingdon Street and Cambridge Street. Only moments from all local conveniences and walking distance from St Neots mainline station.
The newly refurbished office is a vibrant and modern facility housed within a characterful Grade II Listed Building. We have meeting facilities, high speed internet, a hot-desking hub and open plan campus all in house.
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Friday, Jul 24, 2015
Making a custom block in Drupal, something other than a block with a title and body which is already core functionality, is something that we often end up doing when integrating services from other locations to control the display of some data. Although it may not be as elegant as integrating with a custom entity, it is far less time consuming overall and where we attempt to deliver value before perfection it fits with most customer requirements. So here we go.
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Tuesday, Jul 21, 2015
We’re starting some exciting new Drupal projects for customers over the next few weeks, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to share with everybody what contributed modules we’re downloading for all our new sites, and why. The Will Hall Online Drupal starter kit, if you like.
Without further ado, then:
Dependencies and Basic Functionality Ctools – can’t get much done without ctools Devel – a key project for any Drupal developer Entity API – same reasons as Ctools jQuery Update – updates Drupal’s default jQuery version, which is frequently useful Libraries – we try not to add libraries where not necessary for performance reasons, but one or two we just can’t do without Token – quite a few other modules depend on Token Admin NavBar - We’re big fans of the responsive NavBar project which has been backported from Drupal 8. There’s a patch for it which enables the dropdowns to behave like the old Admin Menu too, see https://www.drupal.org/node/2481207 Module Filter – vastly improves the modules UI Site Building Views – the question is, what don’t you need views for? Flexnav – integrates the lightweight and flexible responsive menu library, flexnav, into Drupal. Our preferred responsive menu solution at the moment. Webform – we haven’t made a site without a contact us page for a while. It’s just good manners. Fences – helps to tackle Drupal 7’s endemic divitis a bit. Drupal 8 should clear this up once and for all with any luck. Paragraphs – a great way of giving the client’s content editors control over the layout and appearance of their content, without the dangerous step of providing them an empty WYSIWYG field with all of the bells and whistles attached. UI CKEditor – clients like them, and we make sure we only provide the bare minimum of text editing options. Linkit – a helpful interface for creating links to other content SEO Google Analytics – almost all of our clients are using Google Analytics to track their website performance to some extent. Don’t turn it on in the Dev environment though! XML Sitemap – Google will be upset with you if you don’t have one. Metatag – enables metadata customization, which we sometimes help our clients out with. URLs Pathauto – automatically geenrate clean URLs for your content Redirect – always turn this on for production sites so that when content is updated the URL changes to match With these twenty contributed modules, a theme and the power of Drupal Core, you could actually put together a pretty advanced site with a great backend and strong SEO. If you think there’s any we’ve missed, or better options available, please leave a comment! We’re all ears…
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Thursday, Jul 9, 2015
At Will Hall Online, we love Sass for making our CSS more powerful and streamlined. And we love CSS3 Flexbox for enabling us to create responsive layouts quickly and easily.
But until recently, we’d found using the two of them together relatively difficult, because Flexbox requires numerous prefixes to work on as many browsers as possible, and there are a lot of Flexbox related properties, so to write mixins for all of them would take ages.
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Thursday, Jul 2, 2015
This week we’ve found a new technique for creating semi-transparent css only buttons from list items, which become opaque when hovered over. This is easy enough to do when writing custom markup as you can put anything you like inside an anchor tag, but using some of Drupal’s theme output it isn’t always so simple.
In our case, we were finding that the list item area was turning opaque without the anchor being hovered over, giving the impression that it was clickable even though it wasn’t (bad UX alert!). The code below is a neat workaround for this problem and uses background opacity and the rarely used CSS3 attribute pointer-events.
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