Friday, Jun 12, 2015
We’ve recently been trying some new modules and techniques for giving our clients’ content editors, some of whom like to describe themselves as “non-techies”, more control over the layout of their content. Previously, we’d usually give them a WYSIWYG editor with limited options, which worked relatively well until they wanted more functionality, for example, embedding images alongside text, or multiple columnss.
If they could find somebody to write HTML for them through the source code editor then this wasn’t a problem, but really we wanted a content entry solution using the node form which could do the formatting for them, whilst still allowing them significant flexibility.
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Friday, May 29, 2015
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been genning up on their already pretty solid Google Analytics knowledge in order to take the Analytics certification exam on the Google partners site.
I think it was a useful thing for us to do. It’s further evidence that we do actually know what we’re doing and can help people get the best from their digital marketing. It’s certainly not too easy (unless you cheat and Google Google’s answers, which you would have plenty of time to do), though most of the difficulties are caused by what are pretty much trick questions rather than by the difficulty of the material.
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Friday, May 15, 2015
This week at Will Hall Online we’ve been building a system on one of our sites which periodically tweets a link to an existing piece of content, along with some custom text, a description and hashtags.
Possible solutions included:
Writing a custom module Try to use the contributed twitter_queue module Construct something using the standard Twitter contrib module, views and rules. We went for the third option in the end, firstly because the working of the twitter_queue module were somewhat mysterious, and secondly because writing a custom module seemed like unnecessary extra effort when we could just use the enormously powerful views and rules modules to come up with something robust and flexible.
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Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Our latest Ansible adventure has been the creation of a task structure which we can use to easily manage multiple Drupal websites on multiple servers.
It’s easy enough to use the Ansible command module to run drush commands on a bunch of Drupal sites, using the following code (where sites is just a list of Drupal root locations):
name: Run drush cc all on each site listed command: "drush cc all chdir=/var/www/{{ item }}" with_items: - sites This is fine if you are only trying to manage sites on a single server, and you could just run this role repeatedly for different servers and change the variable in the playbook to point to a different list of sites.
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Friday, May 1, 2015
This Monday I had the privilege of giving my first talk at the Drupal Cambrdige meetup (@drupalcambs). It was on the subject of using Ansible to provision servers and manage Drupal installations and the slides are embedded below. I had a lot of fun giving the presentation and hopefully it will be the first of many. I just hope the audience had as much of a good time!
Just a few accompanying notes for the slides (I didn’t want to overdo it with onscreen text for the presentation, so a lot of it is mainly headlines):
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Tuesday, Apr 28, 2015
We recently attended the Huntingdon Business Fair and were really pleased to see both the variety and strength of the business community inside Huntingdonshire and the surrounding area. Whilst we were there we were offering a free website performance audit to anyone who left us a business card which was well received. Some interesting results occurred from this. Generally speaking, connections to the internet are getting quicker, however, this doesn’t seem to have resulted in faster website/web services, just more and more being sent to users. However, there are things that developers (and clients) can relatively easily do to drastically improve their website performance, which we have been mentioning in our blog recently.
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Wednesday, Apr 22, 2015
As of the 21st April 2015, Google’s page ranking algorithm will penalise websites which aren’t mobile friendly. With mobile traffic now making up between a third and a half of all web traffic, depending on which estimates you go on, this is a move that comes as little surprise.
At Will Hall Online, we make use of Responsive Web Design principles to deliver an experience for mobile users which is of an identical quality to that offered on a desktop. Key components of responsive design include:
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Friday, Apr 17, 2015
Performance is one of our key goals in any web project. It’s also something we think we’re pretty good at, and we use it as a selling point for our services. However, it can be something that’s tricky to measure objectively, despite the fact that it’s almost universally acknowledged that page load speed is one of the most significant drivers of user satisfaction (see this nice infographic by Kissmetrics).
Page load speed, of course, can vary enormously even for a single page depending on factors such as the device and browser used, the location of the user and server, caching performance and the amount of traffic on the server, to name a few.
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Friday, Apr 10, 2015
More Ansible goodness this week. We’ve been working on a basic playbook to set up the innovatively-named Monit monitoring tool to keep an eye on our webservers and give them a kick up the backside if they’re misbehaving.
It’s based on a very useful Ansible Galaxy role, pgolm’s Monit, which installs and configures the tool. However, the role’s documentation doesn’t necessarily make it obvious how to get the best from Monit, so here’s an example playbook for monitoring PHP, MySQL and Nginx to get things started:
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Tuesday, Mar 24, 2015
Three months ago, we were introduced to the wonders of Ansible at Drupal Camp Brighton. Since then, whenever we’ve had the chance we’ve been working on various Ansible playbooks to automate many of our development and maintenance processes.
For a small team like us, Ansible is invaluable. It is reducing the time we need to spend administering our servers and sites exponentially, freeing up extra time for development.
Development and testing happen more quickly as well, and we can be more confident about deployment to live running smoothly because of better consistency between our environments.
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