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 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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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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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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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 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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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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