Thursday, Oct 29, 2015
This Wednesday (28th October 2015) saw DrupalCambs’ Drupal 8 release session, featuring three talks about the new version of the software. The session was very well attended, with people from a range of technical backgrounds and all levels of Drupal experience present.
First up was our very own Will Hall, who gave a talk about Drupal 8 ‘out-of-the-box’, and all the new features that come as standard with the new version. He gave a brief run through of new goodies such as Inline Form Errors, the inclusion of Views and CKEditor in core, Responsive Images and Breakpoints, Fieldable Blocks, Configuration Management and all the rest of it, with a particular focus on the beenfits these items would bring for site builders.
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Friday, Oct 23, 2015
This week has certainly been a busy week at Will Hall Online, with Stephanie and Will out of the office at two different events, The Beds SME Expo and The ARU Computer Science Employers Forum. So we thought a great time to do a bit of feedback from both.
Beds SME Expo The Beds SME Expo is a Small and Medium size exhibition/business fair based in Bedfordshire to allow businesses to network and look for potential customers and clients in the Bedford B2C scene. Firstly, we have been to Beds SME Expos before and had a great time and made some useful contacts so that was great but an additional factor this time was that it was at the new Center Parcs at Woburn Forest, which was great to have a look round and we would highly recommend for future business venues and have reasonable rates for conferences and bookings.
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Friday, Oct 16, 2015
After, five years of development, Drupal 8.0.0-rc1 was released on October 7th 2015. Drupal 8 makes the content management system more powerful, flexible and maintainable than it has ever been before. Here’s some of our favourite new features; let us know what’s got you excited about Drupal 8 in the comments below:
Configuration Management In Drupal 7, configuration settings for the software were stored in the database. User data was also stored in the database. It was really hard to move configuration from development sites to production ones, because moving the development configuration to production would mean overriding the production database with the live data (not an option) or manually adjusting the configuration on the live site.
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Friday, Oct 9, 2015
Over the recent weeks we have been restructuring the business and especially how we can measure employees performance. The measurement of performance is not a new thing and I am sure that most of you have heard of KPI as a way of being able to see how effectively you are working at a role. However, with development we found it difficult to think up any KPI’s or metrics that a developer could be judged upon. Sure as a systems admin, you could look at uptime and resiliance, but how do you measure the creativity or problem solving nature of being a developer; where sometimes the same answer takes either 2 minutes or 2 weeks?
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Friday, Oct 2, 2015
We all know (well people who spend a lot of time on Drupal) that Pantheon have a great service. What Pantheon provides is container-ised Drupal instances, which can very easily be scaled but also maintain a separation for deployment from Dev, Test/Stage and Production. We like Pantheon so much, that we even have quite a few sites running on it. However, as it is not always exactly like running a site from a VPS it can take some extra configuration to get that up and running as you would like.
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Thursday, Oct 1, 2015
I’ve recently started running a course called Computers for the Clueless (name chosen by the local education authority), which is aimed at helping people who’ve not really used computers before to be able to do some basics. For me, basics covers using the keyboard and the mouse effectively, using the operating system (in this case Windows 7), CRUD tasks for files, and a few internet tasks including general navigation and sending and receiving emails.
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Friday, Sep 25, 2015
As many of you will know, this week has seen the 25th Drupal Convention, which was hosted in Barcelona. Over 2,000 people attended from across the globe, participating in activities including knowledge sharing sessions and presentations, coding sprints where people work on Drupal itself, and a variety of social events. Many of those sessions concerned Drupal 8, which we’re hearing rumours could have its first release candidate available on 7th October. Regrettably, we were unable to attend in person, but the Drupal Association has kindly put videos from the sessions up on Youtube for people to watch. We’ve been looking at a few of these, and here are some of our key take-aways from the week.
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Thursday, Sep 17, 2015
As you’ll be able to see if you’ve visited our site on more than one occasion, we’ve recently reorganised much of our content and changed to a new style of menu. In this post, I’m going to explain why we’ve made the changes we have, and how they should benefit our users. Hopefully you’ll be able to see some of the processes we go through when we’re suggesting improvements to client sites.
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Wednesday, Sep 9, 2015
Everybody in the Drupal community is getting very excited about the impending release of Drupal 8, however, this could also mean the end of Drupal 6! For those who aren’t aware, the Drupal community only ever supports two stable version of the software at a time. This means that when Drupal 8 is released as stable, Drupal 6 will no longer be supported.
At the moment there are still four or five blocking issues that need to be resolved before an official release candidate is announced, but within a few weeks these should be sorted out and Drupal 8 will be with us in full. And that means that organizations on Drupal 6, of which there are still significant numbers, need to look at either maintaining it themselves (easier said that done) or moving off of it before significant security flaws or bugs which won’t be fixed are discovered.
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Thursday, Sep 3, 2015
Like any digital business, we’ve got a lot of online acccounts. And all of these online accounts have a password. Sometimes each member of our team has an account. And sometimes we need to share passwords securely between team mambers to share an account. That’s a lot of usernames and passwords. In fact we don’t even know how many we have.
Luckily, we don’t need to. That’s what password managers such as LastPass and OnePassword were invented for. If you aren’t using one, you probably should be, although there is an argument that you’re putting rather a lot of faith in their software. We’re of the opinion, however, that their security is likely to be better than ours, and that using a password manager to create different and secure passwords for all of our accounts is better than using similar passwords to enable us to remember them.
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