Drupal (core)

The real cost of creating and maintaining a new website can be hard to estimate even for the best among Drupal professionals. By using the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) methodology, organizations can ensure that both direct and ... [More] indirect expenses of operating a website are considered and calculated rather than just emphasize on the initial spending. In this article we are going to take a look at what are the Drupal costs of owning a website versus using a proprietary software. There are some key considerations to decide on before diving into building a website: Open Source vs. Proprietary License Creating and Managing Web Content Re-designing and Updating Content Future Upgrades and Longevity Long Term Savings Custom Code - a necessity of the past? [Less]

Predictive UX in Drupal: Can We Create Anticipated User Experiences in Drupal 8?   silviu.serdaru Thu, 11/08/2018 - 08:33 What do you get when you put together: Drupal 8 + AI + UX? Drupal8's content management ... [More] features and integration capabilities, AI, for storing and interpreting data and building a predictive model and UX for anticipating user behavior while adding a “human touch” to the equation? You get predictive UX in Drupal! Is it possible? Can we implement predictive UX in Drupal and thus create anticipated user experiences that:   help you deliver meaningful content only     simplify user choice simplify users'... lives?   But how does machine learning actually power these predictive user experiences? What's the whole mechanism behind? [Less]

Determining how content on your site should be cached isn't a simple topic. Last time, I covered cache contexts and tags. Today, I'd like to get into a couple more advanced topics: The use of custom cache tags and of max-age.

It is our pleasure to welcome once again Tess Flynn, TEN7's DevOps Engineer and DrupalCamp ambassador, to discuss the 2018 DrupalCamp Ottawa. Here's what we're discussing in this podcast: 2018 DrupalCamp Ottawa; Minnesota maple syrup; Camp format; ... [More] Ottawa's move to Drupal open source; Award for travelling the farthest to attend; Camp without BOFs; Drupal 101; Keynote: “Building Accessible Experiences”; Accessibility is a core aspect of the entire design experience; Socketwench presents: "Healthcheck your site!"; Building software as a service Privacy laws differences between Canada and the US [Less]

There are many ways to present data to your readers. One example would be a table or a list. Sometimes the best approach is to show data on a chart. It can ease understanding of large quantities of data. There is a way to make charts in Drupal with ... [More] the help of the Charts module and Views. In this tutorial, you will learn the basic usage of the module in combination with the Google Charts library. Let’s start! [Less]

Every big Drupal release opens fantastic opportunities for websites. Three years ago, the eighth Drupal version came to this world — and the world fell in love with top-notch Drupal 8 improvements. Read more

Installing Lando on a Windows machine is easy. Just follow these 30 (or more) simple steps: Review the directions. Figure out which version of Windows you are running. Realize that you need to upgrade to Windows 10 Professional, because apparently ... [More] you have to pay extra to actually do work on a Windows machine. Open the Windows Store. Spend half an hour trying to figure out why the Windows store is only showing blank pages. Take a break, go vote, spend some time with your kids, and seriously consider buying a Mac so that you don't have to deal with this shit. Reboot your computer and finally get Windows store to respond. Pay $100 dollars, while updating your account information because everything is three years out-of-date. Do not pass Go. Reboot your computer twice. Go to the Lando releases page. Spend some time looking for the last stable release (note: there is no spoon stable release). Download and run the latest .exe. The installer will complain that you don't have Hyper V, which you just paid for. Find the obscure command you need to enable Hyper V. Find Powershell in the Start menu. Discover that you can paste into PowerShell just by right-clicking your mouse. This seems convenient, but it's a trap! Run the command. It doesn't work. Learn how to run PowerShell as an administrator. Run the command, again. Reboot your computer, again. Run the .exe, again. The installer wants to install Docker. Let it. The Docker installer wants you to log you out. Let it Log back in. Open Babun and try the lando command. It isn't found. Open Powershell and try the lando command. It isn't found. Open the Command Prompt and try the lando command. It isn't found. Re-run the Lando installer, for the third time. It turns out that it never finished because Docker logged you out. Open Powershell and try the lando command. It works! Congratulations, you are done!* * Just kidding... Open PowerShell. Go to the directory where you have your Drupal site. Run lando init. Choose the drupal 7 recipe. Why is it asking for a Pantheon machine token? This isn't a Pantheon site! Hit Ctrl-C. Log into Pantheon, create a machine token for your Windows machine. note: Terminus and Lando are notorious for asking for this machine token over and over, so make sure to paste this machine token into a file somewhere, which kind of defeats the entire point of having a machine token. Run lando init, again. Right clicking to paste doesn't work for the hidden machine token. So, learn a different way to paste the machine token into PowerShell. Congratulations, you are done!** ** Just kidding... Run lando start. Your terminal will proceed to spew error messages for several minutes. Spend an hour searching through the Lando issue queue trying to find the magic sequence that will fix these errors. Go apple.com and start comparing the new MacBook Air to the new Mac Mini. Figure out if you can afford either one so that you don't have to deal with this shit. Your kids are picking up on your frustration, and everyone is melting down because it is bedtime (and your are anxious about the election). Give up for the night, and obsessively refresh the election results at fivethirtyeight.com until the results are clear at 11:00 PM. Get up the next morning and write a satirical article about installing Lando on your Windows machine. I will let you know if I ever actually get it working. Tags: development planet drupal security [Less]

5 Tips to Attend a Conference Like a Pro This week we're wheels up for Acquia Engage, where the foremost leaders in digital will take center stage to share their insights, revelations, and lessons learned in the quest to deliver ... [More] best-in-class customer experiences. We're excited to be sponsoring the event again this year and can't wait to learn, share, meet and discuss with our peer... [Less]

07 Nov Drupal Europe dropsolid8 Drupalcon Drupal conferenties general Drupal ... [More] Drupal Last September Dropsolid sponsored and attended Drupal Europe. Compared to the Northern America’s conferences, getting Europeans to move to another location is challenging. Certainly when there are many conferences of such high quality that compete such as Drupalcamps, Drupal Dev Days, Frontend United, Drupalaton, Drupaljam, Drupal Business Days. I’m happy for the team they succeeded in making Drupal Europe profitable, this is a huge accomplishment and it also sends a strong signal to the market! Knowing these tendencies, it was amazing to see that there is a huge market-fit for the conference that Drupal Europe filled in. Also a great sign for Drupal as a base technology and the growth of Drupal. Hence, for Dropsolid it was a must to attend, help and to sponsor such an event. Not only because it helps us getting the visibility in the developer community but also to connect with the latest technologies surrounding the Drupal ecosystem. The shift to decoupled projects is a noticeable one for Dropsolid and even the Dropsolid platform is a Drupal decoupled project using Angular as our frontend. Next to that, we had a demo at our booth that showed a web VR environment in our Oculus Rift where cotent came from a Drupal 8 application.     On top of that, Drupal Europe was so important to us that our CTO helped the content team by being a volunteer and selection the sessions that were related to Devops & Infrastructure. Nick has been closely involved in this area and we’re glad to donate his time to help curate and select qualitative sessions for Drupal Europe. None of this would have been possible without the support of our own Government who supports companies like Dropsolid to be present at these international conferences. Even though Drupal Europe is a new concept, it was seen and accepted as a niche conference that allows companies like Dropsolid to get brand awareness and knowledge outside of Belgium. We thank them for this support!     From Nick: “One of the most interesting sessions for me was the keynote about the “Future of the open web and open source”. The panel included, next to Dries, Barb Palser from Google, DB Hurley from Mautic and Heather Burns. From what we gathered Matt Mullenberg was also supposed to be there but he wasn’t present. Too bad, as I was hoping to see such a collaboration and discussion. The discussion that got me the most is the “creepifying” of our personal data and how this could be reversed. How can one gain control the access of your own data and how can one revoke such an access. Just imagine, how many companies have your personal name and email and how could technology disrupt such a world where an individual controls what is theirs. I recommend watching the keynote in any case!”     We’ve also seen how Drupal.org could look like with the announced integration with Gitlab. I can’t recall myself being more excited when it comes to personal maintenance pain. In-line editing of code being one of the most amazing ones. More explanation can be found at https://dri.es/state-of-drupal-presentation-september-2018.     From Nick:  “Another session that really caught our eye and is worthy of a completely separate blogpost is the session of Markus Kalkbrenner about Advanced Solr. Perhaps to give you some context, I’ve been working with Solr for more than 9 years. I can prove it with a commit even!  https://cgit.drupalcode.org/apachesolr_ubercart/commit/?id=b950e78. This session was mind blowing. Markus used very advanced concepts from which I hardly knew the existence of, let alone found an application for it.  One of the use cases is a per-user sort based on the favorites of a user. The example Markus used was a recipe site where you can rate recipes. Obviously you could sort on the average rating but what if you want to sort the recipe’s by “your” rating. This might seem trivial but is a very hard problem to solve as you have to normalize a dataset in Solr which is by default a denormalized dataset.  Now, what if you want to use this data to get personalized recommendations. This means we have to learn about the user and use this data on the fly to get these recommendations based on the votes the user applied to recipes. Watch how this work in the recording of Markus and be prepared to have your mind blown.”     There were a lot of other interesting sessions and most of them had recordings and their details can be found and viewed at https://www.drupaleurope.org/program/schedule. If you are interested in the future of the web and how Drupal plays an important role in this we suggest you take a look. If you are more into meeting people in real-time and being an active listener there is Drupalcamp Ghent (http://drupalcamp.be) at the 23rd and the 24th of November. Dropsolid is also a proud sponsor of this event. And an additional tip: Markus’s session will also be presented there ;-) [Less]

BADCamp 2018 wrapup Last week I attended BADCamp and as usual, I can confirm firsthand that BADCamp keeps being a blast. I will mention some of the reasons why. The Summits I had a chance to attend DevOps and Front-end Summits half day each. During ... [More] such summits, participants shared their experiences about the tools and techniques used regularly while working with clients. While at the DevOps Summit, it was great to hear that a lot of developers are interested in Kubernetes. Also, it was interesting to hear conversations about CI/CD workflows and the different tools used when building… [Less]