What Does Decoupled Drupal Mean for Businesses?
Wirtten on 01/17/2018, by Anonymous | Comments
Decoupled Drupal is a topic that's been in larger community conversation for years, and has recently taken center stage with the release and growth of Drupal 8 and its API-first architecture. But what does it all really mean? What is decoupled Drupal, and how could your business and its specific challenges benefit from decoupled Drupal powering your applications? When a fresh copy of Drupal is...
How the Adoption of React in Core is a Big Win for Drupal
Wirtten on 12/14/2017, by Anonymous | Comments
The Drupal community has historically been a bit less than bullish when it comes to the relatively recent growth spurt of the Javascript ecosystem. Most of the Javascript libraries that have made it into Drupal Core have been rather conservative choices that were widely adopted and extremely mature – think jQuery, and, more recently, Underscore.js and Backbone.js. Since Dries started Drupal,...
How Adding Twig to Drupal Core Helps You Craft Better Solutions
Wirtten on 12/07/2017, by Anonymous | Comments
If you've been a web developer for a bit, you're probably familiar with the concept of templating. We pass data to a reusable chunk of HTML (the template), the data are interpolated into the template, and we get a finished product that's ready to present on the front end. Pages on a Drupal site are, and almost always have been, the result of multiple templates being nested within one another to...
A Challenging Move from Drupal to WordPress
Wirtten on 10/26/2017, by Anonymous | Comments
At a Drupal meetup earlier this year, I was talking with a Drupal veteran who worked with me on a client project. I told him the client had decided to move their websites from Drupal to WordPress. He was surprised and told me about his another client who had made a move away from Drupal. One of the client’s Senior VP had challenged the team in a meeting: "Why not use WordPress, it is so easy to...
Drupal Real-Time Dashboard with Node.js
Wirtten on 07/13/2017, by Steve Williams | Comments
Building real-time features into Drupal is now easier than ever with the integration of the Node.js module. The Node.js module provides an API for socket based polling and pushing of updates to open connected clients. Writing custom modules to create dashboards for real-time monitoring is one way to demonstrate this capability. With the ability to monitor real-time clients can respond quicker to...
Decisions, Decisions: When should we upgrade from Drupal 6?
Wirtten on 06/27/2017, by Chad Hester | Comments
Drupal 6 was initially released in 2008. For reference, Drupal 7 was released in 2011 and the Drupal 8 estimated release is sometime in late-September (subject to change). Because of the effort required to support 3 versions of Drupal at a time, once Drupal 8 is released, Drupal 6 support will end 3 months later. The original plan to spin down Drupal 6 support on Drupal 8's release was...
Drupal 8 or should you wait?
Wirtten on 06/10/2017, by Chad Hester | Comments
With the release of Drupal 8 knocking on the door, many organizations and individuals are considering it for their project. A current estimate suggests a release candidate sometime in late September (subject to change). The question is: Should we use Drupal 8 for our project? As one might expect, the answer is "it depends". There are several factors that be evaluated, which will...
Stress-testing your server's MaxClients directive
Wirtten on 09/22/2015, by Chad Hester | Comments
2bits has a great article explaining the theory behind tuning your Apache server's MaxClients directive. It explains how to optimize this setting for your server's available memory based on this simple equation: (Total Memory - Operating System Memory - MySQL memory) / Size Per Apache process. The key here is to avoid thrashing (memory swapping to disk, which is extremely slow and sometimes...
Freelancing vs. Full time W2 employee
Wirtten on 08/21/2015, by John Florez | Comments
When you decide that you want to work as a software developer, there are generally two options for how you want to do it: freelancer or employee. Deciding which direction is best suited for you depends on numerous factors. Freelancing brings with it independence; you’re your own boss, you set your own schedule, and work when you want. However, this also means that you and you alone are...
20 Reasons Drupal 7 is Better than Drupal 6
Wirtten on 08/17/2015, by Anonymous | Comments
Last week I sent an email around to our top Drupal developers, Tim Loudon, Mike Crittenden, our CTO Jonathon Whitener, Chris Jones, Jonas Flint to ask them why is D7 Really is Better then D6? This is what the team came back with! 1) All the UX improvements for admin interface 2) Not needing Pressflow to do reverse proxy caching 3) Entity API (not core) 4) PDO Database abstraction layer 5) The...