Drupal (core)

Building Strong Roots of Digital Customer Experience with Drupal Vasundhra Tue, 11/20/2018 - 11:45 As a part of the audience, we unanimously measure the quality of experience by one simple factor - how long does it take to get what ... [More] we want. Right? In today’s customer experience economy, organizations are no longer compared on the basis of their direct competition, but they are compared on the basis of the services they provide to their end users. And according to the National Retail Federation, the e-commerce growth for the US grew from 3.7% to 4.2% in 2017, which included tech giants like Amazon, E-bay etc. These techies were successful in reaching the customer funnel ecosystem.  'How' you may ask? Well, they acknowledged that the key of constructing successful and best in class digital experience was through website users and their experience.  Why Digital Customer Experience is Important? Satisfied Customer usually returns and buy more, they tell other people about their experience. Thus, it is important for organizations to understand that end-to-end experience is essential for future growth as well as customer loyalty of a company.  A customer satisfaction survey conducted by B2B International conveys the importance of the customer's expectations. The study reveals that it is crucial for businesses to improve their ability to deliver great digital customer experiences.  Thereby, reaching the customers or the audience through digital channels is something which every organization must do to survive and grow in this digital era.  Enhanced digital customer experience not only becomes a salient strategy for the organizations but helps them evolve beyond conventional web development. Depending on the audience’s situations, aim, and expectations a poor customer experience can make or break a business emblem. Obstacles Faced by Organizations in Digital Customer Experience  Forbes states that only 16% of the organizations were successful in the journey of digital transformation, which of course is a very low percentage.  84% of companies fail at Digital Transformation Digital transformation, here, implies the integration of digital technologies into the areas of business, fundamentally changing the way they operate and deliver values to the customers. But why do companies fail to walk along digital transformation? Because adapting to changes is tough!  Echoing the same sentiment, a survey by Mckinsey reads that some 70% of change programs fail to achieve their goals mostly due to employees’ resistance or lack of management support.  Digital transformation includes a significant change and the type of work the organization does. Making changes is kind of difficult. It becomes important for the organizations to have someone on board who is aware of the people’s mind and how they adapt to business models. Major barriers faced by organizations in digital customer experience include: Limited Budget  Lack of (overall) digital strategy  Organizational structure Employee pushback/ resistance How to Offer the Best Digital Customer Experience? Here are the ways by which an organization can eliminate the obstacles and cuddle a digital native process of working out that allows them to deliver a class intuitive customer experience. Know your Customers There is no point in designing and constructing a digital platform if you are not aware of your audience. If you really want to understand customers needs and wants, then you have to connect and empathize with customers situations.   You can begin with customer-facing teams and CRM software followed by social media monitoring to gain deeper and diverse understanding. This would provide a foundation to construct data-driven and customer-centric decisions.  “The best way to connect with the customer is to empathize with their situation and needs.”  The happier the customer is with you, the longer they stay connected. If the customers are being treated poorly and the feedbacks are being ignored, then there are chances that they would be less sustainable and engaging to the products you sell. This is the reason why organizations that deliver a superior customer service outperforms the ones which do not.   Being Data Driven  A report by Aberdeen states that there are organizations which have implemented data-driven culture, and they have witnessed a seven percent annual increase in terms of revenues which they make in a year.  “By implementing a data-driven culture, organizations can witness a 7% annual increase in revenue.” The increase in the revenue has been conquered through the increase in the efficiency of the operational activities.    83% of the organizations and businesses that have made the shift in data-driven culture have experienced an improvement in the time taken for one operational cycle to complete.  “83% of businesses which switched to data-driven culture have experienced shorter operational cycles.” Moreover, the shift in the time taken per cycle was coupled with the fact that organizations have implemented the data-driven model witnessed a reduction of 12% in the organizational costs.   Thus, by harnessing the power of data analysis, the organization can create a detailed plan for customer-focused marketing messages. Using data to make customer communication more personalized can lead to a mass-marketing campaign.  “By implementing data driven culture, organizations have witnessed a 12% decrease in operational cost” Dynamically tailoring the experience and needs of the customer or the audience can result in an increase in the online relating. Delivering a delightful personalized experience is now what every retailer must aim for.  Integrating the data stack  Doesn’t it sound exciting when I say that disparate data sources can be rolled up into one single tool? Simply put it there are tools that marketers can use to efficiently execute initiatives, across a number of channels at the same time.  The list includes: Social Media scheduling tools like Buffer and Hootsuite Analytical tools like Kissmetrics and Google Analytics  CRM software like Salesforce and HubSpot Integrating these tools isn’t just pleasant when it comes to offering leading digital experiences, but it also constructs a consistency across the marketing stack.  In the age of assistance, where the customers want brands to give them exactly what they desire for, leading marketers use integrated data and technologies to understand their audience.  According to a recent study by the Association of National Advertisers, companies that spend the most on marketing technologies yield an average of 10 percent new revenue.  Integrating marketing and advertising stack provides the organizations with a better understanding of the customer.  Intent signals for the shoppers that might be weak on their own become powerful when they are integrated. Things like search intent, videos viewed, and the content that is read across the web help the marketers engage and assist customers just at the moment they need. Optimizing your digital assets  Website is one of the most important assets in digital experience This is the mantra which should be followed by every organization. Your website is literally a virtual storefront for the brand, and it has only a few seconds to mark a solid impression. The digital marketing industry is rich with acronyms like SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing), SERPs  (search engine result page). Search engine marketing would have numerous changes. Those changes would include search engine algorithms, change in customer behavior, and evolvement of search channels. With these changes come opportunities which are customer, market, and search driven. Optimization of digital assets would refer to the practice of taking inventory of the company’s marketable and digital assets and implementing a process of keywords for promoting relevant channels.  The search done by end users tends to be more conversational in nature. Content creators and marketers are challenged to meet those demands through more robust asset optimization efforts without losing the essence of the organization. Each website has digital assets including web pages, images, videos, blog post etc. A digital asset optimization strategy identifies content in all these forms and formats and applies them to qualify what we call as “promotion”.  Dedicating the time to design and understand the needs of the customer is the most effective way to win the race in digital transformation.  Intuitive Graphical User Interface and the Web Property Once you have identified your customer, it is important to recognize the barriers they face while engaging with your website or product.     Users are becoming more experienced with the use of digital display and expect a splendid experience on the platform they choose. Providing the user with immediate visual feedback about each action, and allowing multiple programs to display simultaneously is the key for a better user experience.    One of the major advantages of using minimalistic and easy graphics and icons is that it makes the system operation more intuitive, and easier to learn.    Allowing the users to tweak elements on the screen using a mouse, stylus or even fingers, GUI lets them process words and web design program as an option for a better customer experience.   Simpler GUI can make the process more intuitive and user-friendly How does Drupal Help in Constructing Strong Digital Customer Experience? Since the release of Drupal 8 (in 2015), the CMS has opened a large variation of digital experience possibilities for millions of websites and applications.  Focussing on the customer experience was the part of the idea. It is a high-quality open source content management system which not only provides strong digital customer experience but understands the website users to move from website to different devices.  How?  Let's read. CRM Integration A CRM software records the customer's information (phone number, email address, social media profile) to create a user persona and give an understanding of user choices to the organization.  Drupal 8 supports the website creators to keep using their favorite marketing tools to stimulate customer interest and actions. With easy third-party integration, merging a CRM with your Drupal website is a seamless process.   Even if Drupal is a content management system at the core, it is evolving into a web experience management system delivering quality content across a range of device and third-party system.  Mobile Responsive  This is a technological constraint era and our world has gone all innovative. The number of mobile web users is increasing with each passing day. According to the new 2018 Global Digital suite of reports from “We Are Social” more than 3 billion people around the world now use social media each month, with 9 out of 10 users accessing their chosen platform as mobile.  It is important to make sure that the website is accessible for mobile users, and set campaigns and content targeted for the mobile users.  Drupal caters to this need as it is mobile responsive and offers out-of-the-box mobile theme, building a strong platform for the organizations to bring a quality audience.  One of the most inevitable advantages of choosing Drupal is that it works well for almost all devices including iPhone, iPad, Android, and even blackberry. With each improved version of Drupal, the focus is centered around a “Mobile first architecture”. So it meets even the future needs of the mobile experience.   Personalization Web personalization indicates that on the basis of attributes like profile, behavior and the location of the internet users, the website creator should construct a dynamic and personalized content to provide the users with the relevant website experience. Website personalization is the key to the effective user experience. It becomes important for the websites to implement personalization, allowing them to customize and display content. Personalization is one of the most conventional features of Drupal 8, letting the website holder determine what a user is interested in, and based on the data collected, Drupal allows the user to create a good user experience and uphold the demands of the audience. Its services initiatives have streamlined the process of sharing meaningful information with external systems. There is no limit as to which marketing tool the user can apply, as Drupal managed content can be turned standardized data sharing formats.  Multilingual  Customer support is the backbone of the business, and offering multilingual support has become increasingly important for the business and the organizations. 52.4% of online customers prefer to buy products in their native language (according to a report by Common Sense Advisory), and the percentage was higher in certain countries like Japan and France.  What Next to Expect in Drupal? DrupalCon Seattle 2019 will also focus on improving and evolving the needs of customers with sessions on Content and Digital Marketing. The track would cover the sessions on overall customer experience and ways to improve it. Discussions around the role of CMS (and Drupal specifically) in the world where personalization, automation and customer experience would be the prime focus. Whether you are using a Drupal-specific tool or integrating third-party marketing platforms, there are many critical things that will be discussed.   To Wind Up Understanding and measuring customer experience is the biggest challenge faced by organizations. Customer’s expectations are higher than ever and word of the mouth travel fast. As the customer becomes even more powerful with digital innovation, the importance of customer experience becomes more vital. It includes the identification of consumer brand interaction and the perception of the audience. At  OpenSense Labs, we aim at improving your customer's journey by nurturing and taking care of the methods that entirely focuses on the experience. Contact us at [email protected] to discuss your customer strategies for higher retention and increased revenues. blog banner blog image Drupal Drupal 8 Customer experience Digital Customer Experience Graphical User Interface Personalization Digital Customer Experience Trends Online Customer Experience Digital Customer Experience Strategy Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On [Less]

I give you 600-plus Drupal talks. You’re Welcome! bds-admin Mon, 11/19/2018 - 13:38

We extend a hearty congratulations to our 10 scholarship and 12 grant recipients. A global team of community members were given the green light to award more funds than ever before, aiming to have a cross-section of contributors in attendance at ... [More] DrupalCon Seattle 2019. As a result, we’re awarding aid to people from nearly every continent: six attendees from Europe, nine attendees from the Americas, two attendees from Africa, four attendees from South Asia, and one attendee from Australia.   [Less]

Acquia Engage Wrap-Up & Your Digital Strategy Roadmap for 2019 What an amazing week! Our team was in Austin for Acquia Engage, the digital transformation conference that brings together digital leaders and innovators to discuss ... [More] the whys, whats and hows of delivering best-in-class customer experiences. This 3-day conference kicked off with a warm welcome reception, which provid... [Less]

GitLab CI for Drupal 8 websites. We use a simple approach that applies any committed changes to your Drupal 8 website automatically

Drupal + JAMstack: A Paradigm Shift Shankar Mon, 11/19/2018 - 12:18 Delicious. Sweet. Yummy. You may taste the jam and say these words or just the thought of jars containing jam stacked together may propel you to blurt out these ... [More] words. Talking about the stack, in the technological space, we no longer talk about operating systems, specific web servers, backend programming languages or databases. In the web development arena, we think of different sorts of development stacks like the LAMP stack, the MEAN stack etc. And there is a new kid in the block called JAMstack which is not about specific technologies but a new way of building websites and apps. What is the concept behind JAMstack? To build a web development project with the JAMstack, three integral criteria should be met namely: JavaScript: It governs the dynamic programming during the request/response cycle running completely on the client (e.g. Vue.js, React.js etc.) APIs: Abstraction of all the server-side processes or database actions into reusable APIs is done which are accessed over HTTPS with JS (e.g. Twilio, Stripe) Markup: By leveraging a site generator for content sites or a build tool for web apps, templated markup must be prebuilt at deploy time (e.g. Gatsby.js, Webpack). Benefits of JAMstack High performance: When it comes to reducing the time to first byte, pre-built files served over Content Delivery Network (CDN) enhances web performance. You do not have to wait for the pages to build on the fly as JAMstack allows you to generate them at deploy time. A high TTFB penalizes the Speed Index of a page Source: DareBoost Blog Robust Security: Abstraction of server-side processes into microservice APIs minimises the security threats. Also, the domain expertise of specialist third-party services can be utilised. Better Scalability: CDNs are a great way of ensuring scalability when your deployment amounts to a stack of files that can be served anywhere. Great developer experience: More targeted development and debugging can be done by the developers with loose coupling and separation of controls. Moreover, the need to administer a separate stack for content and marketing goes away with the expanding selection of CMS options for site generators. Best practices The entire site must be served on CDN. Rather than living on a single server, JAMstack projects can be distributed as they do not rely on server-side code. Atomic deploys should be employed. This ensures that no alterations go live until all the changed files have been uploaded. Governance of instant cache purges by CDN ensures that when a deploy goes live it really goes live. Everything should dwell in Git. This minimises contributor friction and streamlines staging and testing workflows. Utilise modern build tools like Babel, PostCSS, Webpack etc. Automate markup builds. This is because JAMstack markup is prebuilt and content alterations won’t go live unless and until you run another build. How is JAMstack different from other development stacks? Source: Memory Leak’s blog | MediumJamstack is an alternative to the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and MEAN (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular and Node.js) stacks. LAMP is used to build dynamic websites and web apps. In this, pages are reconstructed from a database on request instead of being held as flat documents ready for delivery. It is easy to add content and modify them. However, JAMstack delivers content at a much faster speed. MEAN and LAMP are more similar to each other and are very different from JAMstack. MEAN is also designed for building dynamic websites and apps. All the MEAN components are written in JavaScripts. The key difference is that MEAN still assembles pages from databases on request like LAMP. MEAN and LAMP are more similar to each other and are very different from JAMstack. Source: Memory Leak’s blog | MediumImplementing JAMstack and Drupal together Web development projects that rely on a tight coupling between client and server is not built with the JAMstack. This comprises of a site built with a server-side CMS like Drupal, a monolithic server-run web app relying on backend language and a single page app that is using isomorphic rendering for creating views on the server at runtime. So, how can Drupal and JAMstack work together? In a session held at Bay Area Drupal Camp 2018, a demonstration showed a method of integration of Gatsby with Drupal. Gatsby is one of the leading JAMstack based static page generators. The demo showed that Gatsby is not a replacement for Drupal and Drupal would still control the content, site structure and how content is created. Whereas Gatsby would be governing little things like the public facing site. Gatsby is not a replacement for Drupal and Drupal would still control the content It talked about ‘Gatsby Drupal Kit’ which is under development stages that can help jumpstart Gatsby-Drupal integrations. It is designed to work with a minimal Drupal install as a jumping off point and provide a structure that can be elongated to a larger and complex site. The demonstration focused on a base Drupal 8 site connected with Gatsby and the best practices for making Gatsby work for real sites in production. The emphasis was also on the sane patterns for translating Drupal’s structure into Gatsby components, templates, and pages. Conclusion Once you have fully understood the specific risks and put in place appropriate workflows, the JAMstack exhibits its share of opportunities. Creating a static site takes time and needs an architecture involving orchestration of several solutions. Today, it may seem intricate but so was your first dynamic site involving choosing a host, master FTP, juggling the web server logs and so on. With experience, JAMstack users would be more and more adept in leveraging its full potential. OpenSense Labs has been making the digital transformation dreams come true for its partners with a suite of services. Contact us at [email protected] to leverage JAMstack for Drupal sites. blog banner blog image Drupal 8 Drupal JAMstack Gatsby JavaScript API Markup Web Performance Content Delivery Network CDN Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On [Less]

Episode Number:  219 The Drupal 8 Configuration Read-only module allows you to lock down some of your environments to prevent users from making configuration changes. This lets you use the Drupal 8 configuration management system to push up all ... [More] your changes, while preventing you from changing any settings, content types, views, or any other configuration on your production website. Tags:  DevOps Drupal Contrib Drupal 8 Drupal Planet Deployment [Less]

The third major version of simple_sitemap has been seven months in the making. The module has been rewritten from the ground up and now features a more reliable generation process, a significantly more versatile API and many new functionalities. ... [More] Major new features Ability to create any type of sitemap via plugins The 8.x-3.x release allows not only to customize the URL generation through URL generator plugins as 2.x did, but also creating custom sitemap types that mix and match a sitemap generator along with several URL generators to create any type of sitemap. This 3-plugin system coupled with the new concept of sitemap variants makes it possible to run several types of sitemaps on a single Drupal instance. Now e.g a Google news sitemap can coexist with your hreflang sitemap. A sitemap variant can but does not need to be coupled to entity types/bundles. When creating a sitemap generator, one can define where the content source is located and what to do with it upon sitemap generation/deletion. Ability to create sitemap variants of various sitemap types via UI In 3.x links form a specific entity bundle can be indexed in a specific sitemap variant with its own URL. This means, that apart from /sitemap.xml, there can be e.g /products/sitemap.xml, /files/sitemap.xml or /news/sitemap.xml. All of these can be completely different sitemap types linking to Drupal entities, external resources. or both. They could also be indexing other sitemaps. The name, label and weight of each variant can also be set in the UI. [Less]

This blog post contains a written transcript of my NEDCamp 2018 keynote, Real World DevOps, edited to match the style of this blog. Accompanying resources: presentation slides, video (coming soon). I'm Jeff Geerling; you probably know that ... [More] because my name appears in huge letters at the top of every page on this site, including the post you're reading right now. I currently work at Acquia as a Senior Technical Architect, building hosting infrastructure projects using some buzzword-worthy tech like Kubernetes, AWS, and Cloud. [Less]

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Drud Technology's DDEV-Local web development tool. I selected it as my local development tool of choice for both my clients and my Drupal Career Online students after an exhaustive search. I've been teaching monthly ... [More] 2-hour online workshops getting folks up-and-running with DDEV, and I've taught numerous full day "Getting started with DDEV" workshops at various Drupal events around the United States. Since I've been writing, testing, and refining curriculum related to DDEV for well over a year now, it made sense to take everything I've learned and put it in a format that makes it available to even more folks looking to easily adopt a professional local development environment. I'm super-happy to announce that the book is now available for purchase on amazon.com at a price designed to get it into as many hands as possible - just $5.99 for a digital copy and $9.99 for the dead tree edition. This first book, Local Web Development with DDEV Explained, is the result of a partnership wtih Steve Burge and the rest of the fine folks at OSTraining, which is the publisher. They've allowed me to retain full control of the book while at the same time tapping into OSTraining's extensive experience in publishing and marketing books related to open source content management systems.  The book covers the full range of topics related to local web development and DDEV. Topics covered include: Why a professional local development environment is important. What a professional local development workflow looks like. Installing DDEV on Mac OS X, Windows 10, and Ubuntu. Step-by-step example of starting a new Drupal 8 project with Composer and DDEV. Step-by-step example of getting an existing Drupal project up-and-running with DDEV. Adding a Solr container. Common workflows using DDEV. Extending DDEV with hooks. Using Xdebug with DDEV and PhpStorm. The bulk of the book's content is straight from my training curriculum, so you can be sure that it is tried-and-true, and, as always, reflects only best practices. My goal is always to teach the right way to accomplish a task - no hacks or shortcuts. My goal is to update the book several times per year, with a list of topics for the first revision already growing. I'll be starting on it in the next few days! By purchasing a digital copy, you'll automatically get updates to the book as they're released.  [Less]