Drupal (core)

A quick overview of some things happening with Drupal’s Layout Initiative from the perspective of component-based theming, a theme development approach that has been gaining popularity in the past few years.

We are more than happy to announce that November brings new long-awaited updates and features to the Sooperthemes products! In this September's Sneak Peek blog post we talked about introducing an interface for site administrators to ... [More] create user profiles that limit elements, buttons and CKEditor toolbar items a user sees in the Glazed Builder interface. This feature is now LIVE and ready-to-use. Moreover, new documentation is available and can be found on our Help Center page. Last but not least - Automatic Product Installation is back in business! Glazed Builder User Profiles Take content authoring one step further with the new User Profiles feature. Site administrators can now limit what users with specific Drupal roles get to see in the Glazed Builder Interface. Profiles give you total control over who has access to specific Glazed Builder elements, Drupal blocks, views display and CKEditor buttons. We made profiles into configuration entities, therefore they are also exportable in both Drupal 8 and Drupal 7 - this could be achieved by using the feature module.  To set up a new Glazed Builder Profile go to Configuration>Content Authoring on your Drupal administration panel and select Glazed Builder.  By clicking "+Add Glazed Builder Profile" button  we are now able to configure a new User Profile based on: Roles, Glazed elements, Drupal blocks, Views, CKEditor buttons (inline & modal editing). Help Center: New Documentation We are continuously working towards making Sooperthemes products easy and convenient to use. On our Documentation page you are going to find 30 new tutorials explaining how every Glazed Builder element works. In the near future, short explanation videos are going to be added to each docs page. Longer video tutorials with the focus on how to build complete Drupal websites with Sooperthemes' products are on their way to our YouTube channel as well!  Automatic Product Installation Our free installation service has been refactored to be compatible with Drupal 8 and is now back online! You can install complete Sooperthemes demo websites on your a2hosting or other SSH/Drush capable web-server. All you have to do is head over to Automatic Hosting Installation Service page, and choose: The Drupal version you want to install (Drupal 8 or Drupal 7) The Glazed Demo of your choice Fill in the form for your automatic webhosting installation Grab a tea or coffee and watch your website come to life in under 5 minutes Bug Fixes and Improvements We listen to our customers and actively seek out advice on how we can improve the experience with Sooperthemes products. Thanks to your input on Sooperthemes Support Forum we were able to fix several issues that some users might have encountered. Also expanded the features for some Glazed Builder elements.Bug fixes: Fixed a bug where mobile automatic playback for full screen videos wouldn't work properly Better Pantheon hosting: fixed an issue where images wouldn't load properly on Pantheon dev environment Fixed an issue where a "Data you have entered may not be saved" error would appear when leaving a Saved page Fixed an issue where a section with a video background disappears on small screens Improvements: Added additional options to the background video player for disabling playback on mobile devices Added additional options to the background video player for showing player controls Added a new option for aligning breadcrumbs Added an option to "not play video on mobile" Added an option for adding styles to Glazed Builder text editor For more details on the latest update check out the CHANGLOGS: Glazed Builder CHANGELOG Glazed Theme CHANGELOG [Less]

Essential Drupal Modules for an E-learning Platform Shankar Fri, 11/16/2018 - 18:47 From the vantage point of a school, some of the features that prove its greatness are a library with a superabundance of books, science laboratory ... [More] with advanced scientific instruments, projection with 3D technology and so on. Today, where almost everything is happening through the internet, the education sector is not left far behind. E-learning platforms have taken the world by storm with its unprecedented provisions of online learning. And E-learning platforms need great features as well to be able to disseminate knowledge across multiple channels efficaciously. A lot of significant features can spring up in your mind that you think should be in an e-learning platform. It can be tons of courses on a plenitude of subjects for the learners. Or it can be digital certifications that can be provided for a successful completion of a course. Drupal comes with some amazing set of modules to essential features of an e-learning platform. Let’s look at some of the important features and see how Drupal has the answer for that. Courses Modern learners are infatuated with the notion of getting a top-quality education and love to choose from an extensive list of courses on an e-learning platform. Some of the Drupal modules that can be helpful in creating courses include: Course module lets you build e-learning courses with any number of tracked requirements for completion. It allows any content type to be used as an e-learning course comprising of graded or ungraded course subjects. It offers course object API for defining learning objects that can be added to a workflow. For assigning and mapping credit types to learner profiles and courses, Course Credit module is useful. On successful completion of an activity, online learners will be able to receive or claim credit for which they are eligible.  To expose Course module as a Course object, Course relationships module is effective which allows parent courses to include sub-courses. It can grant access to sub-courses by enrolling into or purchasing a parent course. Quiz Through online tests and quizzes, an instructor can track the progress of students and analyse the effectiveness of the curriculum. Simultaneously, it paves the way for the students to track their own progress and improve their skills accordingly. Quiz module allows you to build graded analytics in Drupal where a quiz is given as a series of question and the answers are, then, stored in the database. During or after the quiz, the scores and results are displayed. Administrators can also provide automatic or manual feedback. This module can be leveraged as an object in a larger Learning Management System (LMS) or a supplemental classroom activity. Certification Skills and certification tracking is one of the important features of an e-learning platform. Certificate module helps in creating and awarding PDF certificates with the help of tokenised HTML templates. It provides the interface for governing custom certificate templates and mappings and allows integration with Wysiwig for rich certificates. Open badges, which are digital images are used to recognise an individual’s skills and achievements, can be created with Drupal. Open digital badging module helps in providing a Mozilla OBI compliant badge empowered by the learning system. To create badges earned by students on their successful completion of a course or a class, Opigno Mozilla Open Badges App module lets you integrate Opigno LMS with Mozilla Open Badges. In this, badges will be exhibited in the user profile and can be automatically synchronised with Mozilla Backpack. Social learning/ Message boards E-learning platforms should allow students to learn from one another Modules like Opigno Messaging and Opigno Forum, which are related to Opigno LMS distribution, govern the private messaging feature to let users share messages between them. It allows you to select a list of recipients and start a discussion thread with the selected users. It is worth noting that these modules are not covered by Drupal’s security advisory policy. Social Login and Social Share modules eliminate the need of creating a username and password by allowing you to log in using the social network sites and helps in sharing the content with your network. Consistent instructor presence The role of the instructor is significant in e-learning as he or she is instrumental in encouraging and inspiring the students. Opigno instructor-led training module helps in implementing instructor-led training (ILT) entity. It can be added to learning paths in combination with online modules and virtual classrooms. ILT sessions let you register attendance of users and provide them with a grade. These sessions can be made mandatory in the learning path and are automatically added to the user’s calendar. Also, note that this module is not covered by Drupal’s security advisory policy. A well-designed LMS A streamlined and a well-designed LMS means that it should be easy to navigate, well-organised, and must contain high-quality content. The LTI Tool Provider module allows a Drupal site to act as a Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) Tool in any LMS that supports the LTI standard. LTI compliant LMSs include Angel, Blackboard Learn, Moodle, and Sakai. Please note that this module is not covered by Drupal’s security advisory policy. Kaltura module helps in integrating the Kaltura video platform capabilities into Drupal thereby allowing you to instantly enrich your Drupal site with video, audio, and images. Chamilo integration module allows integration of Drupal with Chamilo LMS by offering ways to see Chamilo resources into Drupal blocks. Would love to have a starter kit for building the LMS? Open LMS distribution, which is developed and actively maintained by OpenSense Labs, is a learning management system based on Drupal 8 that comes with robust features. Open LMS offers numerous kinds of content type like textual study material, video lectures, documents that can be utilised as a course material for students. Also, it lets you add H5P, HTML5 based interactive video content type, to the course. Moreover, it provides a quiz and subjective test functionality, assignment functionality powered by Webforms, and calendar functionality to schedule courses. Please note that Open LMS is not covered by Drupal’s security advisory policy. Conclusion E-learning platforms have changed the landscape of education. And Drupal as an open source software and a robust content store helps in innovatively build an efficient e-learning platform. Some of the significant features have been discussed in this blog post that is fulfilled by Drupal’s incredible set of modules. OpenSense Labs has been powering digital experience dreams of its partners with its expertise in Drupal development. Contact us at [email protected] to build a great e-learning platform with Drupal.   blog banner blog image Drupal E-learning module Drupal e-learning E-learning Drupal module Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On [Less]

Although Drupal has reputation for being a developers' platform, lots of user rely on Drupal's admin area for key tasks. For typography in Drupal sites, the best way to change your site's fonts via the admin is a module called @font-your-face The ... [More] @font-your-face module allows you to work with webfonts like Google Fonts or Font Squirrel. It also provides the ability to work with paid font services like Typekit or fonts.com. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to configure and use this module in Drupal 8. [Less]

Drupal-Healthcare: Things to Look for in Your Vendor Vasundhra Fri, 11/16/2018 - 14:31 When the whole world works on the simple facet of fellowship how can the healthcare industry not constitute to the same concept?  Development and ... [More] marketing collaborations between the healthcare organizations and web development agencies can be mutually beneficial. Whether your healthcare organization is built on Drupal or if you are looking for redesign and new prospects with Drupal, there are a number of things that have to be kept in mind, and if the main agenda is to collaborate, a series of questions have to be answered. What is it about Drupal that makes leading healthcare organizations chose this platform? How has Drupal evolved to help healthcare organizations serve better to their patients?  Reasons Why the Healthcare Industry Should Choose Drupal  Web Accessibility  Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 commands that all the websites should be accessible to everyone regardless of their age, ability, or a combination of technology and ability. With the release of Drupal 7, the Drupal community is committed to providing universal accessibility not just for the end users but for the developers too.  Web accessibility is the comprehensive practice of guaranteeing interaction with, or access to the web, for all the people irrespective of their abilities. Flexible and fully customizable theming, and features make it possible for Drupal sites to meet WCAG accessibility and section 508 requirement. Some of the web accessibility features may include: The provision of HTML5, which provides new and better semantic components that tell the browser and assistive technologies about the type of content coming forward, and how the complementary information provided (HTML) is related to the content.   The provision of “Drupal.announce()”, a method which helps the pages update in a non-visual manner.    Without breaking the tab order in local navigation flow, Drupal directs non-visual and non-mouse users to access prime element on the page in a logical order. With its tabbing manager, Drupal defines tab orders explicitly for keyboard users.    Other Drupal web accessibility modules such as text resize, style switcher, alt text, CKEditor abbreviation, high contrast, it makes it easy to make a universal user-friendly website.    Drupal also uses fieldsets which give a visual diagram around the field gathering. It breaks the form into subsections, making it easier to understand for visually impaired people. The Drupal accessibility handbook and theming guidelines ensure that the Drupal themers are well aware of the best practices while they are building their website. themes Third-Party Integration The ability of Drupal to integrate with third-party applications is the primary building block of generating a robust functional system. Making the task easy for developers, seamless third-party integration allows a bonus for marketing strategic stand too.  Integrating Drupal with an EHR system  The Electronic Health Record (EHR) system is steadily gaining its ground in the healthcare industry. Used for electronically storing up data of the patients in the digital format it offers a completely new level of playing field for both the patients and providers.  Bestowing the physicians with faster access to the medical records, EHR avoids errors and minimizes the cost which is associated with paperwork.  Drupal, when integrated with an EHR keeps the data protected at all times and prevents duplicacy of the content, while still permitting the user to interact with the view and input the information which is necessary for the role. It securely shares the information with patients and other clinicians assisting providers more efficiently diagnose patients, reduce medical errors, and provide safer care Some of the most adopted EHR systems in use that can be integrated with Drupal are NueMD e-MD, PHI etc.     Mobile first design  Around 61.2% of the worldwide population is indulged in the use of a smartphone, and in such an innovative environment the manipulation of mobile compatible websites is hard to ignore upon.  Incorporated with mobile friendly themes which is suitable for any screen size, Drupal works well for almost all devices which include iPhone, iPad, Android, and even blackberry. There is no doubt that having a medical based mobile website armed with all relevant information to target a diverse group of people and partners is a profitable mechanism for every medical organization.  Drupal makes it easy for users to have a better mobile experience on healthcare websites. The mobile first designs let them set up online profiles, helps them in maintaining records, and other medical practices.  Security  According to HIPAA Journal, there have been about 2,181 healthcare data breaches (2009-2017) involving more than 500 records.  Healthcare industry is massively reliant on technology these days, not just the hardware to cure illnesses, but also when it narrows down to send, retrieve, and store data.  Drupal’s lockdown security and publishing of detailed security reports have been a major shield to the organizations. With the evolution in the Drupal system, the platform has conquered a huge reputation for its security and robust performance. Hospital websites store an ample number of data, records, reports, digital assets in their database.  The modules and extensions are provided with a layer of extra security to the website, marking Drupal a highly secure CMS.   Not only this, but Drupal also contributes to resolving security issues that are supported by the security advisor. It also offers help for contributing module maintainers in fixing security issues.  Multilingual feature  With medical tourism getting popular and healthcare technology advancing sparingly forcing people to look for better medical assistance across various parts of the globe. It is not uncommon to encounter patients who speak a language other than English. To expand the access to people across the globe in healthcare,  Drupal grants 4 easy modules to translate the website into more than 94 languages providing healthcare websites a better scope of communication with the patients. It is also easy to build a custom language not available in Drupal.  Better user experience and engagement  Medical healthcare websites are often used by people in distress. And if operations, like finding the right health care provider, or finding medical records, and paying bills, should be tough and unintuitive, it would leave people more frustrated.  In fact, Google tells us that website speed has a great impact on how people perceive it. Therefore engagement through media features and at the same time uninterrupted communication online with faster loading is important.  With an excellent array of modules, Drupal 8 has to be the right choice for creating an engaging user-friendly website in the healthcare sector. Over the past few years, Drupal has evolved to be more flexible and better for technical as well as non-technical users, presenting a customizable administration dashboard and responsive web designs.  Drupal lets the user personalize the website in a way they desire. Acquia Lift Connector, Drupal module, offers integration with the Acquia Lift service with an improved user experience for personalisation.  Important Factors to Look for in a Drupal Partner  Now that organizations have started using Drupal as their CMS to revamp or build their organization’s website, the next step would involve choosing up of Drupal vendors.  Every Drupal vendor is different and posses a unique set of skills, thus choosing the right partner makes it important. This can be done by checking some vital factors which can include: Important factors Points to remember Skillset The organization has enough experience and capabilities to manage projects of healthcare Experience with diverse business verticals to prove its worth. Reputation Look out for reference and portfolios Verify the ranking on Drupal.org Marketplace Monitoring and Processing Ask for case studies for its previous clients. Look out for the credentials of the technical team. Verifying about the site performance Enquire about the development plan and ways to improve it Check their knowledge on best practices.  Maintenance and technical support Robust customer support service for regular updates and maintenance services.    Things to Remember Before Choosing a Drupal Partner  Do they have the right amount of healthcare experience? Every healthcare marketing agency has creative resources available in their vanity, but only an experienced partner adds up to the plans, solutions and original thinking.  Thus, no matter if the firm has beaten up with high-quality challenges or low-key struggles, every potential partner should have capabilities of providing solutions, and it can only be done when that potential partner has knowledge and experience of solving the health-related travails. Patients expect a very specific functionality in the health website, from providing directories to patients reports, it becomes really important to find a partner that is able to build modules and timely update them.  Not only this but healthcare organization are apprehended to follow HIPAA compliance guidelines which protect individuals' medical records and other personal health information. The healthcare industries can’t afford to take risks when it comes to HIPAA and PCI compliance.  One wrong or missed encryption and the company's reputation is put under the radar. Which is not only bad for the branding but also violates the rules. Therefore, demanding experience to be an important factor.    Do they have an adequate content strategy? Content strategy is important to all the healthcare websites. It is important to team up with the partner that would help you to organize your site in a way that clearly reflects the main objectives of the visitors.  There is a need of a  partner with an agency that will help to organize the site content in a manner that is clearly reflected on the visitor’s objectives, and build out the information architecture in Drupal.  Drupal’s content model can be complicated if the user is not familiar with the platform. If you operate with an experienced strategist that would help you to see the long-term vision before you start adding content into Drupal, it will help in the long run.    Do the goals and services match? A true healthcare organization partners should deliver greater cerebral and inventive values. Which includes the delivery and projection of the agendas. How to conquer it?  Have a serious talk about money management.   Many firms work on a plan to meet or exceed the possible budget. However, a partner minded organization has a cost-effective way of meeting or exceeding goals. The aim is to construct a strong measure of results, outcomes, and high return-on-investment.    Do they have a plan for performance measurement? Every organization would have projects with a certain goal. Here, it becomes an important factor for you to know how does your potential partner measure the scale of performance towards that goal? Benchmarking is the term which is used to compare the current performance and the overall standard. Every Drupal based agency measures and quantifies the results based on the - manual page. It describes various methods to measure the performance of the web server, allowing you to witness the performance and even improve it for the future. Performance measurement can also be analyzed with the help of Performance Bucket model. This model helps in making the detect-triage-diagnose process more efficient. Applications insights is a service that lets the developers monitor the performance, availability, and usage of the entire applications. It becomes an essential part of the application lifecycle. As mentioned above, a user tends to abandon a website if it doesn’t load after 3 seconds, and when it comes to healthcare websites, loading time becomes an important factor. Having a predefined performance budget would allow you to enforce better results. Your long-term potential partner should be induced by a good design team and development cycles which would help in maintaining the value limits that takes care of the website performance. Performance Budget is one such design and development which would help the user to establish and maintain the culture of an organization, helping them to deliver a smooth.   Long-term partnership It is true that Drupal healthcare websites are quite amazing but on the other hand, they are big and complex. Thus, make sure that you pick an organization that would be there to support you even after the procedure of website-went-live is done. A long-term partner is needed if the custom modules built on the website requires regular updates and security patches.    What methodologies and tools do they use to manage their project? Drupal has several modules several distribution and modules developed to perform several project management functions. A clearer idea on which methodology is right for what project contributes to the desired goals in the end. There are several project management frameworks which should be used by an organization to build a successful project. Agile frameworks like:   JIRA Scrum Kanban Scrumban Case study for PMG Produce Market Guide is a product of a Farm Journal which shares information on fresh fruits and vegetables. The advanced search feature on the website was slow, which resulted in a poor user experience.  To fulfill the needs and the standards of loading time, the site was mapped and decoupled with the Elastic search. The new website now is a lot user-friendly with search application and better loading result. Because of the third party integration like Kibana and Logstash, the admin can now track the user behavior and personalize the user experience. The project was completed within a month which followed the principles of SCRUM and AGILE with team fluidly arranging the needs accordingly.  Future of Healthcare Marketers using Drupal  As an organization, the requirements are bound to change from time to time and using a single vendor or a specific partner can sometimes be the hindrance. This is a common scenario in healthcare industries. Fortunately Drupal makes a lot of things easy for healthcare marketers or organizations. It prevents everyone from getting caught up with a single vendor Drupal exponential growth in the healthcare industry has been rapidly increasing. With the healthcare industry in the third position of top 10 industries using Drupal, it continues to grow mature.  High profile hospitals like C.S Mott Children’s Hospital, Duke medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Northwest medicine etc has further elevated Drupal’s profile. It’s these types of reputed organizations with a progressive digital team which tells us that Drupal has a bright future in the healthcare sector.  Conclusion The Drupal platform is an open source CMS, there are many agencies around the country that have developers familiar with Drupal. Having developers who are familiar with Drupal isn’t the same as having a team that understands the inherent complexity of healthcare websites.    OpenSense Labs believes in providing the best Drupal partnership for you. Contact us at [email protected] for a rich and conducive partnership. blog banner blog image Blog Type Articles Is it a good read ? On [Less]

BLT (Build and Launch Tool) provides an automation layer for testing, building, and launching Drupal 8 applications. It is the default recommended tool used by Acquia Professional Services. We use BLT in Professional Services to sync databases ... [More] , manage configurations, create artifacts for deployments, and tons of other things that -- most of the time -- save us time. If you have not tested it yet I’d recommend you to have a look: https://github.com/acquia/blt DDEV, on the other hand, is a Docker-based, open source tool that helps you to quickly spin up a (local) environment in applications like Wordpress; Drupal 6, 7 and 8; Backdrop, and Typo3. Have a look at https://github.com/drud/ddev Tags:  acquia drupal planet [Less]

vertical_align_center Progressive Decoupling: A React App in Drupal It's almost time for NEDCamp, and I can't wait! Redfin will be presenting a session there on our toe-dipping ... [More] foray into the world of "progressively decoupling" Drupal. Recently, I was on an episode of Talking Drupal to explore a little bit more about React and Drupal together--this shoudl whet your appetite for the session at NEDCamp. Give it a listen! Chris November 15, 2018 [Less]

This is Part 2 of a three part series about choices you can make with the news of Drupal 9’s release. Part 1 is an overview. Part 2 is what to do if you choose to stay on Drupal 7. Part 3 is what to do it you choose to upgrade to Drupal 8.  With the ... [More] recent news of the release date of Drupal 9, and that Drupal 7 & 8 will be end of life Nov 1, 2021, our Director of Engineering Kat White wrote Part 1 of a blog post series with an overview of how you should next approach your Drupal site . . . is it best to stay on Drupal 7? Or should I upgrade now to Drupal 8? In that article, Kat outlined the pros and cons of going from D7 to D9, or upgrading now to D8. In Part 2 of this series, let’s assume you’ve decided to stay on Drupal 7 for now. What next? The average lifetime of a website is three years. So if you have had your Drupal 7 site for a three years, hurrah! You’ve done well with your return on that investment. And Drupal 7 is robust and supported enough that there’s still a lot of growth and life in your site. So unless there’s a specific module or item that only D8 can offer, you can feel confident that your D7 site will be solid for a few more years. But this also means you have about two years to maintain that D7 site: in Fall of 2020, you’ll need to start prepping for that Drupal 9 upgrade (or — gasp! — switching to another CMS). This also buys you two years to secure funding, and get all the stakeholders on the same page for the next upgrade. So here are some of the incremental bites we recommend you take over the next two years of maintenance: Review your website strategy: assuming you built your site a few years ago around business goals, how is the site working towards those goals? Have your goals shifted? Does your site still achieve your mission? It’s always good to revisit your strategy to ensure any changes you make are on the right path. Always audit your content: Content has a way of getting out of control quickly if there are multiple editors and the lines of governance get blurred. Archive or delete unnecessary content. Also review it for your authority voice and mobile strategy. Review your SEO: In addition to keywords, make sure your content is mobile-focused, that your URL structures are meaningful, and schemas are used to describe the content of a page. Code Quality: How clean are your code standards? Are the styles that drive the look and feel of the site well-structured and easy to extend? Is there good documentation? Completing a code audit would be smart to make sure your code is as quality as possible and fits your goals.   Optimize your user experience: There are many tweaks that can be made to a site to make sure users are finding things. Can you run a usability test on a red button vs a blue one? How about using heatmap software to see where users are clicking and scrolling, and tweaking accordingly? Between surveys, interviews with users, looking at analytics, and testing, you can constantly improve the user experience of your site.   If you’re a more visual person, I gave a talk at BADCamp just last month about going from D7 to D9 if you prefer video. And if you need extra help with nurturing and growing your existing D7 site, we can help. Kanopi Studios has a dedicated Support Team that currently maintains over 75 Drupal 7 sites, and will be taking on new Drupal 7 support clients at anytime. Additionally, we will be an official long-term Drupal 7 support provider once the application on Drupal.org is available. If you want help or want to talk through anything do with your Drupal 7 site, please call Anne directly at 1-888-606-7339 or contact us online.   The post Drupal 9 is Coming, Part 2: Choosing to Stay on Drupal 7 For Now appeared first on Kanopi Studios. [Less]

For the second year in a row, Acquia was named a leader in the Forrester Wave: Web Content Management Systems. The report highlights Acquia and Drupal's leadership on decoupled and headless architectures, in addition to Acquia Cloud's support for ... [More] Node.js. I'm especially proud of the fact that Acquia received the highest strategy score among all vendors, ahead of Adobe, Sitecore and everyone else. Thank you to everyone who contributed to this result! It's another great milestone for Acquia and Drupal. [Less]

In this blog post, I'm going to show you how embed Drupal entities using the "Entity Browser" module. This tutorial was requested by an OSTraining customer who is building a book review site. The customer wanted to use Entity Browser so that they can ... [More] create this feature: The site has two content types: Books and Book Reviews. When users create a new Book Review, they can use a view to search for and select the book they're reviewing. For example, if they're reviewing "War and Peace", they can search for the exisiting "War and Peace" node. When the book review is published, the selected node will be embedded inside the book review. [Less]