Drupal (core)

Zivtech is happy to be offering a series of public Drupal 8 trainings at our office in downtown Philadelphia in January 2019.  Whether you consider yourself a beginner or expert Drupal ... [More] developer, our training workshops have everything you need to take your Drupal skills to the next level.  Our experience The Zivtech team has many years of combined expertise in training and community involvement. We have traveled all over the world conducting training sessions for a diverse range of clients including, the United States Department of Justice, the Government of Canada, CERN, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard University and more.  We pride ourselves in educating others about open source, and attendees will leave our trainings with the knowledge to build custom Drupal sites, solve technical issues, make design changes, and perform security updates all on their own. We also offer private, onsite trainings that are tailored to your organization's specific needs.  Read more [Less]

Although JSON Web Tokens (JWT) is a younger specification than its more well-established cousin, OAuth 2.0 Bearer Token authentication, JWT has been adopted by quite a few in the Drupal community due to its relative simplicity. In this installment ... [More] , we explore JSON Web Tokens and how this authentication mechanism can benefit your decoupled Drupal architecture. Tags:  acquia drupal planet [Less]

Over the last few months, I've been involved in a UX study to shed some light on what would make a good content editor experience in Drupal. I helped run a survey asking content editors for their feedback about the Drupal admin UI and got some ... [More] interesting results. Then, we started looking around for examples of good content editor UX, which led to a comparative usability test of other CMS's, generating some ideas about patterns to follow and avoid. I have a job where I get to train lots of people how to use Drupal: developers, site builders, and sometimes content editors. So I've gathered a lot of anecdotes of people's first impressions of editing content with Drupal. As you've probably heard, there is work being done on a brand new Admin UI for Drupal, but this might take a while to build. So what are some things about content editor UX that we might be able to improve on before that? Autosave When you ask content editors what we should change about the admin UI, this one always come up. All content authors have anxiety about losing their content. And when we ran our user testing with other CMS’s, autosave clearly reassured and delighted editors. For example, Contentful has a nice autosave message that helps users know that their content is saved. There is an open issue for adding autosave to Drupal. It would be great to get momentum behind implementing this! A Content Editor Role One of the challenges of using Drupal is that there are so many options. For site builders and developers, a UI that provides a lot of options is great because you can see that the platform is flexible. For content editors, seeing a lot of options that don’t relate to content editing is intimidating. From our usability testing, we can see that content editors love using a UI that is more streamlined, less complicated, and clearly designed for them. Creating a content editor role as part of the Standard install profile might be a nice way to encourage the practice of limiting what content editors have access to by providing a set of default permissions to start with. What should the content editor role look like? Of course, content editors need to be able to create and edit content. And they will need access to the content overview page. Should they have access to the Administer Content permission? What about working with files, taxonomy terms, revisions, and menus? Based on our content editor survey, it seems like giving all these permissions would align the role with a content editor’s typical tasks. But I think a more limited set of permissions would work as well, as long as it's clear that the permissions are a starting point that can be expanded on by an administrator. Show Me the Content! On a standard Drupal install, when you log into Drupal you're redirected to your profile page. I think for most content editors, this doesn’t make sense. Your home base is probably the content overview page. Maybe we should redirect content editors to the content overview page when they log in. Move the Save Button Currently, the Save button, along with the preview buttons and the interface to publish and moderate content is at the bottom of the node edit page. From our usability testing, it seems like content editors expect the Save button to be in the top right-hand corner. For long-form content, this would make those links more readily available and I think this would be a usability improvement for new content editors. The key to success with all the save, preview, and content moderation options seems to be to put them all together. In the comparative usability testing, this feedback rang loud and clear. One thing I like about moving the Save button top right-hand corner is that it puts those buttons in proximity to the “Revisions” section of the edit page, which is closely related to the task of saving or changing the status of a node. That being said, I think it could really confuse existing Drupal editors if we just start moving buttons around. And I assume that there could be accessibility implications that we should take into account. So I leave this one as an open question. What do you think? Modernizing the UI One of the big pieces of feedback we got from the content editors survey was that the Drupal UI looks dated. Well, the idea of modernizing the UI already has a ton of momentum behind it. I’m super excited about the work Christina Chumillas and others have done to create new, improved designs for the existing Admin UI of Drupal 8. This is not an overhaul of the UX, but a new, modern style guide applied to the existing one. It's a big improvement that I think will bolster first impressions of Drupal. And it's something that is planned to be implemented in the near future. What’s Next? If you’re a UX person who wants to contribute to Drupal, there are ways to get involved! See the #ux and #admin-ui channels on Drupal Slack. If you have ideas for other content editor UX improvements, or know of existing UX issues in the queue that need some attention, I'd love to hear about them here. Or continue the conversation in those channels. + more awesome articles by Evolving Web [Less]

Drupal Lays The Foundation For Every Enterprise Akshita Mon, 12/10/2018 - 19:34 Global leading enterprises, brands, governments, and universities are experiencing the power of Drupal to engage with their audience through their ... [More] websites and beyond. In a quest to lead the digital transformation experience, Drupal helps them manage and deliver a host of content across channels and devices.  Worldwide, the organizations are looking for a solution that will support their active community, growing businesses, and user experience. With technological innovations speeding up, be careful when you are choosing the CMS for your enterprise.  Enterprises’ demands, stakeholders’ demands, future requirements - choosing the right technology is a tough call. However, more and more organizations are leveraging Drupal for enterprise website development.  Fulfilling the business requirements as well as meeting the technical aspects, Drupal is used 7 times the number of top sites as its next two competitors combined (BuiltWith.com) What is the Market Demand Like? In one of its reports, Statista predicts the size of the enterprise content management (ECM) market worldwide to reach $67 billion by 2022. The possible spike in the graph is likely due to digital transformation which has become a key strategy for every organization. In order to make the most of the data and information the focus is moving from managing content to using content to support process productivity with simple intuitive backend technology.  In this scenario, the information control and governance features of Enterprise Content Management move to the background, and content presentation comes to the fore.  Reliable, scalable, secure, flexible, presentation-friendly, future-proof to sustain the content without hampering the performance of your website. Can Drupal manage the unending list of demands?  Drupal is Fostering Billion Dollar Businesses… Drupal can manage, in fact, it is very well doing in that matter. Fostering billion dollar businesses under the aegis of its brand. The list includes names like Tesla Motors, The Economist, Puma, Pfizer, Timex, LO’real, Honda, Johnson and Johnson, and a million others.  Drupal 8 rightly taps into the concentrated innovation from its open source community.  Taking advantage from its open source community, Drupal derives the most value by being flexible while keeping its core robust without compromising on security providing with new capabilities for successful digital experiences. Acknowledging that enterprise solutions often demand complex requirements, Drupal has it sorted for you. 5 Unconventional Reasons to Choose Drupal For Your Enterprise With Drupal, you can build a powerful website that’s optimized for every device, personalized for every visitor, and integrates with all your marketing tools. Here are some of the solid reasons which make Drupal an excellent candidate for the enterprise of any scale or vertical. With the new technological developments, Drupal meets these unconventional market demands just right.  Content Presentation with a Headless Architecture Customer experience is the new standard to measure the success of your online business, so much so that even the commerce is going headless. Supporting a headless architecture, Drupal can integrate frontend technologies like React and Angular to give a new dimension to the digital experience. Today, headless is destined to take user experience to a whole new level where the experience itself can be merchandised.   Balancing the Hardware-Software Relationship With changing demands, enterprises are entering new ways to distribute the content. The dramatic increase in smartphone usage and portable devices have triggered the emergence of stand-alone software apps. This requires an easy integration matrix between hardware devices (say an Apple Watch) and a data management system (software) to present the content in the desired format. This is especially important as a medical device CMS.    Personalization with Machine Learning and Predictive UX Bringing together advanced analytic capabilities, data mining, real-time scoring, and machine learning enterprises are trying to discover patterns in data and forecast events to offer the best digital user experience. In fact, 65% of customers are more likely to shop at a store or online business that sent relevant and personalized promotions. For enterprises, machine learning has the ability to scale across a broad range of businesses.  Acquia Lift Connector, a Drupal module, offers integration with the Acquia Lift service and an improved user experience for web personalisation, testing and targeting directly on the front end of your website. It leverages machine learning to automatically recommend content based on what a user is currently looking at or has looked in the past. It has the feature of real-time adaptive targeting that refines segments while A/B helps in keeping the users engrossed with the content that resonates. Chatbots to Drive the Business Value Providing a conversational UI that communicate with the users and is vital for an organization, you can't afford to miss Chatbots in your website. Understanding what users want to know, pass on the information to the backend, and provide them with quick and better responses. Chatbot API, in Drupal helps integrate chatbots with your website.  Exploring Markets with AR and VR Drupal leads by an example when it comes to innovating with technologies outside of its periphery. By the year 2022, the market size of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality is forecasted to increase by humungous levels as can be seen in the graph below. Source: Statista Several examples of VR applications built on top of Drupal 8 have been presented in the community. One of the famous examples of VR built on Drupal is the 'The Drupal site of Massachusetts State University' (a fictional university). Augmented Reality has a lot to offer to different industries, with transportation, sports, education, and healthcare reaping the most benefits out of it. More recently with Google adding AR to its maps for a street view mode.   The Conventional Reasons to Opt for Drupal  It is Easy To Build With Drupal 8.6 “quick-start” command, launching a Drupal site is easy in one command using only one dependency, PHP. Setting up a demo website no longer requires you to have setup a web server, a database, containers, or anything else. A fully functional Drupal demo application can be downloaded and installed in less than two minutes.  Providing easy-to-set-up solutions with distribution, the development time is cut by half.  Enabling companies to deploy core features and functionality rapidly, it allows easier customization as per their business requirements. It is easier to choose the layout and themes for your Drupal website, as themes and appearances are just a click away. With features simplified to make non-developers comfortable around Drupal, the editorial capabilities have been made fluent and easy. Drupal is Secure Used by hundreds and thousands of websites, Drupal’s core, codes, and passwords are repeatedly encrypted and hashed to strengthen the life of your website. Supported by experts, and a large and continuously growing community, it has a dedicated security team to patch any probable security violation.Frequent Updates In case of any security update, the community ensures that you get notified the day patches are released. Security release windows are released every Wednesday for contributed projects, and the third Wednesday of every month for core, usually, for a fixed period of time. Even though the release window does not necessarily mean that a release will actually be rolled out on that date, it exists for the site administrators to know in advance the days they should look out for a possible security release.Security Modules In addition to the proven security of core, numerous contributed modules can strengthen the security of your website. These modules extend the security by adding password complexity, login, and session controls, increasing cryptographic strength, and improving Drupal' logging and auditing functions. Additional security modules like security kit, captcha, paranoia, Drupal Security Review can be used as a checklist to test and check for many of the easy-to-make mistakes making your site vulnerable.  Security Team and Working Group The security team works closely with the Drupal Security Working Group (SecWG), comprising dozens of experts from around the world to validate and respond to security issues, aim being - to ensure that core and contributed project system provides world-class security and provide security practices to community developers. Its core is designed to prevent any possible security breach. Vulnerabilities in the core are coordinated with branch maintainers and individual project maintainers respectively. Drupal has proven to be a secure solution for enterprise needs and is used by top-tier enterprises. Drupal is Scalable and Flexible Another salient feature that makes it popular among businesses. When concerning web technology, enterprises require the ability to handle considerable traffic throughout - especially if it is a media and entertainment site. Drupal has stood both the test of time and traffic spike. Its ability to make the framework extensible via its modules and distributions is at the heart of much of its success. While it has enabled the core to sustain the bulk of the content, its way to streamline the demands of new industries by allowing them to address their needs in the form of custom modules and distributions has given it more satisfactory customer reviews.  One matter that addresses the worries of enterprises is the cost of maintenance. Many government and non-government organizations have migrated to Drupal to avoid the licensing and maintenance cost of the proprietary systems.   Excels at Faster and Responsive Development According to Google’s official statement, more than 50% of search queries globally now come from mobile devices. People want to be able to find answers as fast as possible and various studies have proved that people really do care about the loading speed. And that is why a recent Google release says that page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches from July 2018. It’s high time that you take the combination of performance and mobile responsiveness as a serious factor for improving visibility and revenue from the web. It is very important to have an AMP friendly website.  Drupal 8 is built for a mobile-first world. Everything in version 8 supports mobile responsive design. Its admin and default designs are responsive for both developers and content authors providing a responsive front-end theming framework. Increasing the loading speed of your web page opens numerous doors for business. And when users can view your Drupal website the same way on a desktop and mobile devices you cannot be having second thoughts. Mobile responsiveness helps you deliver the optimal mobile visitor experience. It supports the best responsive design practices and ensures that your users get a coherent experience anytime and every time.   Supports Multi-site Functionalities Given that your organization is running more than one site, the maintenance and management would require big bucks and time. But with the multi-site feature you can share one single Drupal installation (which includes core code, contributed modules, and themes) among other several sites. Enterprises, this way, can handle complex requirements from a single Drupal installation which implies that less time and resources are required to build your network of websites. One can manage any number of sites across their organization or brand, crossing geographies and campaigns from a single platform that allows swift and uncomplicated site creation and deployment. This is particularly useful for managing the core code since each upgrade only needs to be done once. While each site will have its own database and configuration settings to manage their own content, the sites would be sharing one code base and web document root. The multisite feature can be used for sites with the same features and functionalities. But if you have different functionalities it is better to test each site independently. Drupal For Every Enterprise Realizing the needs of every industry is different, Drupal has something for everyone. Media and entertainment Editing and Scalability Media and entertainment websites worldwide use Drupal for their online platforms for seamless editing and scalability. The list of over one million organizations includes The Economist, ET Online, MTV(UK), The Grammy, The Emmy, The Weather.com, The Beatles, and Warner Bros Music. Scalability is all about quantity - how many requests and amount of information you can handle at any given time without breaking or bending. Supporting some of the world’s most visited sites, Drupal is the other name of scalability. Allowing easy content editing and management, which media and entertainment websites look for, it provides it all with WYSIWYG and CKEditor without another weighty feature. SaaS Community solutions: SaaS enterprises are using Drupal to build the platform for their product as well as a community to engage with the clients and followers. It is easy to develop the platforms and then keep on adding the features in the later phase. Given that community platforms are one of the key needs of SaaS organizations which allow the domain for the prospects and help the product and community to grow alike, distributions like OpenSocial offer great help. Zoho is one of the SaaS products using Drupal for its community platforms. E-commerce E-commerce functionalities Providing easy payment gateway to conduct online transactions, Drupal ensures the customer information passes seamlessly and remains safe. Its core commerce payment module and distributions (Drupal commerce and Commerce KickStart) support the payment API, for a smooth payment collection procedure, through the check out form. Supporting Paypal Express Checkout and Paypal Credit along with Amazon Pay, it lets you reach a wider audience by letting your shoppers complete the payment and shipping information stored on their Amazon accounts. Lush is a Drupal patron.  Tour and travel For a potential traveler, your site shouldn’t look like just-another-information-brochure on the web. The need for an end-to-end solution to integrate all the minute details (from hotel booking to landing back) has never been greater.   Booking Engine: Providing two of the best booking solutions for your website: EasyBooking - Distribution BAT - Module A complete solution for your vacation portal, BAT allows you to build an exclusive booking engine for a better customer relationship management. And EasyBooking gives a set of options to your visitors to make room reservations, contact hotel administration, or just sign-up for the hotel’s newsletter to be aware of the special offers and discounts. FMCG Theming A design which resonates with your brand, interests and engages with your visitors is what you should indulge your resources in developing. It’s the psychological effect which drives the visitor to make a transaction or to explore provided possibilities throughout the interface. Every landing page matters. Regardless of your showcased products, Drupal themes provide sound navigation throughout the categories and sections with in-built hero banners’ section and pop-ups which are definitely customizable. Additional modules can be further used to build an industry-specific theme. In order to cope up with varied demands, it provides more than two thousand easy and free to use themes on the go. WholeFoods is built on Drupal. Government and Non-Government Cost and Security: In 2012 when the Georgian government shifted to Drupal, the first reason to dump its previous CMS (Vignette) was its rising maintenance costs.  Running a total of 65 state websites on two different versions of this proprietary system proved to be costly in the long run Another decisive factor for government websites, uncompromised security is why government organizations are opting for Drupal. Around 150 governments are already powered by it. Just like the Georgian government, costs have been a significant factor affecting the choice of government and non-government agencies.   Higher Education Distributions: To quickly build your higher education website, distributions provide an easy opportunity to build the website halving the development time and providing quick features. Opigno and OpenEDU are two of the distributions used widely by the higher-ed websites. Drupal is most widely used CMS in the education sector no wonder why top international universities like the Harvard, Brown, Yale, Pennsylvania, and Columbia rely on it. Harvard and Oxford are built on Drupal.  HealthCare and Life Sciences Content and User access control: It can conform to any workflow that can be programmed with just a few configurations available. You can identify different types of content such as text, images, comments, file attachments, and any other information on your website for easy content integration and management. Pfizer, a leading pharma organization is built on Drupal.  Drupal As an Enterprise Management System The need for an intranet system cannot be emphasized enough. For your business to grow by leaps and bounds, it is necessary to establish clear communication within your organization. As your business expands, the need for an intranet system which can help in storage and sharing of data increases. ECMS is different from the web content management system in the way that the former is specifically designed for enterprise websites and is more dynamic. Drupal allows building ECMS in two ways, either by using its modules and features or with the third party configuration. Its integration capabilities help the website to serve as a central content management system integrated with other necessary advancements. Drupal Is Easier To Manage Drupal isn’t hard to use, but it can be hard to learn how to use. Even though it requires more technical experience it is capable of producing exceptionally advanced sites. There is a WYSIWYG editor and drag-and-drop functionality to ease out the process and help you start straight away. The release of version 8 has made the platform easier to use even for non-developers(and it includes content authors). Managing your website is easy as the community platform provides you with necessary documentation and answers in case you get stuck. Summary Being one of the leading technologies in the market, Drupal gives your enterprise the features and flexibility to innovate as per your visitor behavior and preferences. We’d love to hear your thoughts. To get in touch, drop a mail at [email protected] and let us know how we can enhance your statistics with Drupal. blog banner blog image Drupal and enterprise Drupal Drupal 8 Drupal module Drupal for Enterprise Digital Marketing Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On [Less]

How to Scale a Web Application in Drupal: Latest Techniques to Easily Scale Your Web App with Drupal 8 radu.simileanu Mon, 12/10/2018 - 11:47 It's a fact: “the next generation” of web apps aren't just extremely ... [More] fast, they're highly scalable, as well. Which brings us to the next question: “How do you scale a web application in Drupal?” What tools, best practices, and latest techniques do you use for leveraging Drupal 8's scalability capabilities? For ensuring that your custom web app will keep on scaling to:   handle sudden spikes in traffic avoid downtime  withstand “surprise” content overloads   Well, here they come:   1. But Is Drupal Scalable? How Scalable?  Let's just say that: Drupal's built with scalability in mind and that Drupal 8 is... extremely scalable. [Less]

If you've adopted a Composer-based Drupal 8 workflow (hopefully using the Drupal Composer/Drupal Project template) where you're keeping dependencies in your project's repository, then you've no-doubt experienced the annoyance of a rouge .git ... [More] directory ending up in one of your project's dependencies. This will always happen when you're using the -dev version of a Drupal module.  For example, as of the authoring of this Quicktip, the Field Redirection module does not yet have a stable release for Drupal 8. When added to a project using Composer, the results look like this: Michaels-MacBook-Pro:dcoweek5 michael$ ddev composer require drupal/field_redirection Executing [composer require drupal/field_redirection] at the project root (/var/www/html in the container, /Users/michael/sites/dcoweek5 on the host) Using version 2.x-dev for drupal/field_redirection ./composer.json has been updated > DrupalProject\composer\ScriptHandler::checkComposerVersion Loading composer repositories with package information Updating dependencies (including require-dev) Package operations: 1 install, 0 updates, 0 removals   - Installing drupal/field_redirection (dev-2.x e1c30f2): Cloning e1c30f24f9 from cache Writing lock file Notice on the "Installing drupal/field_redirection..." line, it indicates that the project is cloned, not downloaded. This means that a .git directory has been created in the Field Redirection directory. Note that I'm calling Composer as "ddev composer ..." - this is because I use DDEV as my local development environment and am utilizing its built-in Composer command. If this goes unnoticed, and you attempt to do a normal "git add/commit" workflow for the new module, you'll end up with a somewhat-friendly Git message indicating that you now have a Git submodule. Unfortunately, Git submodules aren't normally necessary nor wanted when you are committing dependencies to the project repository. So, the typical solution is to delete the .git directory of the dependency prior to performing the "git add/commit". Luckily, there's an easier way! Travis Neilans recently pointed me in the direction of the Composer Cleanup VCS Directories project. By adding this as a dependency of your project, any .git directories that result from adding project dependencies will be automatically removed! First, install the Composer Cleanup VCS Directories project using: composer require topfloor/composer-cleanup-vcs-dirs Then, anytime you use "composer require" to install a project dependency, if there's a .git directory, you'll see a message indicating that it has been automatically removed. Deleting .git directory from /var/www/html/web/modules/contrib/field_redirection/.git [Less]

Headless Drupal Commerce: The Future of Commerce Shankar Sun, 12/09/2018 - 20:35 Customer experience was elevated to a new high when storefronts and shopping carts first burst onto the scene. Then, e-commerce created a different ... [More] dimension in the world of shopping. In this age of shoppable everything, brands and retailers need to seize the moment of truth as consumers look for shiny objects of inspiration. Today, headless commerce is destined to take shopping experiences to a whole new level where the experience itself can be merchandised. Headless commerce is here to get the consumer’s attention and get the deal done. Drupal Commerce allows you to implement headless commerce and helps in monetising the moment of heightened emotion as most of the time, the inspiration, which is potent at the moment, diminishes to a fleeting whim. Headless Commerce: Explained When the frontend of your shopping experience is decoupled from the backend, that is, the presentation is segregated from the commerce stack, it is referred to as headless commerce architecture. In headless commerce, the frontend of your shopping experience is decoupled from the backend. Such an architecture supports an e-commerce platform without ‘head’ - front-end presentation layer - permitting additional flexibility, customisation, enhanced shopping experiences and creative freedom. In a headless commerce, you do not have to worry about interfering with the back-end commerce setup. Marketers and merchants can experiment and make alterations to the front-end with agility. Source: SnipcartHeadless commerce vs Traditional commerce Following are the two key differences: Presentation layer In a traditional commerce, design constraints are observed as alterations would require you to invest an awful lot of time in editing the database, code, and the frontend platform. In contrast, frontend developers do not have to be concerned about modifying databases in the backend and can create a unique user experience that adheres to their business requirements with just a simple API call. With no presentation layer, everything from product pages to the landing pages has to be built from the scratch in headless commerce. More room for customisation In traditional commerce, developers have to edit several layers of coding even for a single customisation starting from front-end to the database layer that is dwelling in the back-end. Headless commerce offers more room for customisation and personalisation. Headless commerce offers more room for customisation and personalisation. It gives you complete authority over the look and feel of your digital commerce platform. Benefits of headless commerce Following are some of the major benefits from different perspectives: Magnificent shopping experience It gives a magnificent shopping experience to developers, merchants, and consumers. For instance, adding a new field to a customer account, implementing a custom checkout flow, adding ratings and reviews to the shopping experience and many others can be performed without redeploying the digital commerce platform. With less duplication of functionality, it offers a better experience to the merchants while administering the shop. At the same time, end-users or consumers get content-rich experiences. Leveraging portable backends There is no dependency on large, restricting infrastructures which lets you stay competitive with your front-end without getting bogged down by coupled solutions. Choosing best front-end tools Whether it is a web application, mobile application or Internet of Things, headless commerce lets you select the best front-end tools for every platform or device. Utilising JAMstack Headless commerce allows you to build using JAMstack which faster, safer and cost-effective thereby providing a creative and strategic development experience Headless commerce with Drupal Drupal Community, with its commitment towards making Drupal more better, is continuously working on decoupling Drupal Commerce and the result is incredible. Drupal Camp Ashville 2018 A session held at Drupal Camp Ashville 2018 delineated the development of the Commerce Demo project. It talked about the out-of-the-box capabilities of the demo store and an ecosystem update constituting the roadmap for decoupled Drupal Commerce. The demo store is available online.  The Commerce Demo project was built to create a product catalogue that can be easily removed without hampering the configuration of the site. The design involved modern shopping cart interaction paradigms. It required simple Views and Form API based solutions. As a result, the design resulted in building a standalone Commerce Cart API module. This can be leveraged by anyone to develop a custom shopping cart widget and Commerce Cart Flyout which is the reference implementation for demonstrating how decoupling Drupal Commerce would look like.  The design resulted in the development of a standalone Commerce Cart API module that anyone can use to develop a custom shopping cart widget and Commerce Cart Flyout. It showed a reference implementation that demonstrates what decoupling Drupal Commerce can look like. Drupal Europe 2018 Another session held at Drupal Europe 2018 showed a Cart API for progressively decoupled cart experiences. It talked about how to decouple Drupal Commerce to enhance scalability and flexibility for the organisations. It demonstrated the works that were done for developing a standard Cart API to support progressively decoupled shopping carts in Drupal Commerce for Drupal 8. It was not without hurdles as the core RESTful Web Services were reviewed and involved contributions in JSON API projects. The new Commerce Cart API project and the reference implementation in Commerce Cart Flyout demonstrated the end result showing a potential of creating a unique user experience. With this, Drupal Commerce can offer great shopping experiences that are on par with leading e-commerce software platforms. This would, in turn, make it simpler for Drupal agencies to sell Drupal Commerce to the customers. Conclusion Enterprises encounter increasing pressure to offer innovative customer experiences, An API-based headless architecture provides increased flexibility with its decoupled user interface (UI) approach. Technical professionals responsible for digital commerce can utilise Drupal Commerce for delivering fantastic shopping experiences. We have been committed to providing a great digital experience with our expertise in Drupal Development. Contact us at [email protected] to implement headless commerce for your enterprise. blog banner blog image headless commerce headless drupal commerce Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On [Less]

Picturing yourself winning: How Drupal Powers Sports Brand? Shankar Sun, 12/09/2018 - 20:29 As Leicester City fans continued to rejoice at their team’s unlikely triumph in the 2016 edition of English Premier League to become the ... [More] champions for the very first time, some people were contemplating how the underdogs managed to beat such high odds. The way a team envisages itself performing is just as important as the physical strength of the players. And in this age of digitisation, imagining themselves performing well in the digital space is immensely significant. This is where Drupal comes in. Be it a football club, a tennis open or a cricket world cup, any popular sports team and the tournament would want to be an instant hit among the sports lovers around the globe and build on it to create a unique brand identity. As one of the leading content management systems, Drupal can help a sports brand establish themselves as an important entity in the digital arena with a unique and powerful website. Benefits of Drupal Drupal powers websites of biggest of the sports brands like National Basketball Association, PGA Tour, Major League Soccer, Sevilla Fútbol Club, Kentucky Derby, New England Patriots among others. Drupal powers websites of biggest of the sports brands Why do such great names choose Drupal? You have the reasons stated below: Phenomenal Features Drupal offers a large number of open source modules, themes and distributions to help build a sports-centric website with robust features. For instance, Sports League module helps govern content that is typically used for a sports club. It can help manage multi-competition editions and their standings. It can handle rosters, automatic statistics on players and teams and the match moments. If you need a lightweight Drupal theme for a sports-related website, Drupal 8 Premier League Theme is a great fit. It has features like slider functionality, colour switcher functionality, social media integration among others. For a complete starter pack, there is a Drupal distribution Sportsleague comes with superb features to help build a sports-related website with its robust features for managing content, user accounts, image uploading, and search. Security Among the leading open source CMSs, Drupal has made great inroads for being one of the most secure frameworks and has reported least vulnerabilities among the leading players in the industry. Drupal Security Team actively validates and responds to security issues to it the best security-focussed CMS. Scalability Drupal can scale with your needs and help you handle busiest of the days by effectively coping with an enormous amount of traffic. Drupal can scale with your needs Multilingual Drupal 8 has in-built support for language handling in the form of core modules and lets you deliver localised digital experiences. Mobile-responsive In this age of mobile devices, Drupal enables the development of responsive sites and web applications that would let you interact with your consumers on-the-go. Speed Drupal’s flexible platform ensure the continuous delivery of the web development project and run an agile team. Moreover, Drupal is awesome for implementing performance optimisation techniques and build a high performing website. Third-party integration To get the best out of the tools that are outside the periphery of Drupal, you can integrate a variety of marketing technologies and business applications. Content Workflow Drupal has terrific tools for making it a loveable CMS for the content authors while creating and publishing content on the site. Its preview feature delineates how your content will look across various devices. Also, the authentication and permissions bring in improvement in the editorial workflow.   Content architecture You can create the right content architecture and exhibit appropriate content for each context with the help of stupendous display mode tools, Views and a wide range of media types. Content-as-a-service Drupal’s content as a service approach allows the front-end developers to build engaging customer experiences with Drupal’s presentation neutral content and RESTful API by utilising tools like Angular, Ember, Backbone and so on. Multisite It helps you in governing multisite setup across your enterprise brands, geographies and promotional campaigns on a centralised platform. Drupal helps you build a solution that adheres to your business requirements Business-driven Drupal helps you build a solution that adheres to your business requirements. It does things as your business demands. Perfect tech stack Drupal dwells on a modern LAMP technology stack that constitutes Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. This allows Drupal to fulfill the needs of fast-moving, flexible and agile organisations who are in pursuit of creating ambitious digital experiences and help them build next-generation digital platforms. Large community One of the most beautiful things about Drupal is its huge community presence as thousands of organisations create solutions with Drupal and in the process build Drupal itself. Case studies Travelling along the process of building an actual sports website with Drupal would throw the light on how it powers a sports brand. To do so, let us look at the development of two of the massive names in the sports viz. Major League Soccer and Sevilla FC. Development of Major League Soccer Major League Soccer (MLS) is a professional soccer league that primarily represents top-notch talent from both United States and Canada. It took help from a digital agency to migrate each team’s site to the Drupal platform. Drupal proved a remarkable solution to improve the fan experience which was the top-of-the-line requirement. While the site maintainers of the each of the sites could easily configure their team’s instance, custom, rich multimedia platform allowed viewers to enjoy games in real-time from any device. Moreover, switching to a multisite setup cut their deployed footprint. The Drupal platform integrated with the majority of MLS properties comprising of the league’s videos and stats. Furthermore, the integration of Doubleclick for Publishers Drupal module optimised the placement of ads and attract visitors with vibrant advertising media. Also, Drupal allowed faster editorial capabilities and strong customisations. Thus, Drupal helped build a stable infrastructure for MLS and reduced severity of alerts. Development of Sevilla FC Sevilla FC was established in 1890 and is one of the oldest football teams in the history of Spain’s football history. A digital agency used Drupal 8 to help them improve their online brand spectacularly. Drupal 8 helped in incorporating multisite architecture to build the main website and several satellite sites. The Club was also able to edit and publish most of the app content from a sole entry point. Most importantly, the multilingual capability was enabled easily with Drupal 8. Drupal’s open source security was also an important reason for considering Drupal for the redressal of the website. Drupal has also resulted in a better website performance, enriching user experience, lower maintenance costs, and improved hardware consumption. Hence, Drupal helped in increasing monthly user acquisition and the global audience in addition to stability and high availability of the website. Conclusion The mantra of Go Play And Get Fit is something we hear from our peers all our life. And we also hear that mental strength and physical strength go hand-in-hand. That is absolutely true. It also applies to a sports-based website albeit in a different manner so that it can be ‘fit’ enough to provide great digital experiences and grow as a brand. Drupal powers innovation and can be a marvellous CMS for building a sports-related website. We can assist you in growing as a sports brand with our suite of services. Contact us at [email protected] to power your sports brand with Drupal. blog banner blog image Drupal 8 Sports website Drupal and sports Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On [Less]

Webmentions for Drupal in pretty good shape Jürgen Haas Sun, 12/09/2018 - 12:13 Thanks to a tutorial from @swentel my attention got back to webmentions again and I gave the first release candidate for Drupal another try. What's still ... [More] confusing to me that I have to enter a link-class and a publishing target manually. The former might be a task for a link widget and the latter may be some lack of understanding the API so far. [Less]

    In case you missed the news from September, Dries Buytaert announced the end of life dates for both Drupal 7 & 8. The date for both Drupal 7 & 8 is slated for November of 2021, and that may seem strange, but it really ... [More] makes sense given the differences in 7 & 8 and the widespread usage of 7. Drupal 8 is ending alongside Symfony 3 which powers a lot of the underlying framework of Drupal 8, so that makes perfect sense. [Less]