Drupal

Your Drupal Site API

Posted by Hani Atalla on Monday, September 8, 2014 - 12:48 Development, Drupal Drupal, API, RESTful, services module

As IT citizens, we are often pictured while glued to our monitors doing whatever we need to do to keep software humming on servers or porting applications from legacy technologies to more up-to-date software stack or trying to figure out why things work one way on environment Y while when the exact same code deployed in environment X the app just decides to stall. Well, I think you know what I mean: we spend countless hours hunched in front of our monitors neglecting that we need to also hum that vital organ in our chests to maintain our own health and a decent fitness level. In an effort...

Add Awesome Elements to Drupal with jQuery

Posted by Jon Reid on Monday, March 17, 2014 - 13:29 Development, Web Experience Management Drupal, Javascript, jQuery

Drupal 7 comes packed with functionality but what do you do when you want to implement some of those incredible visual elements that you see across the web? Cover flow like image galleries, fade animations, sliding page elements, smooth scrolling and other dynamic presentation effects can help push your site design to a whole other level.

Fortunately, Drupal 7 comes loaded with an answer in jQuery. jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library which contains many common DOM, event, effects, and Ajax functions. While Drupal 7...

Drupal: The Case for NoSQL

Posted by Hani Atalla on Thursday, January 23, 2014 - 11:35 Web Experience Management Drupal, MongoDB, NoSQL

It isn't an Edward Snowden NSA leak that the overwhelming Drupal population is running on the thirty-year- old and time honored conventional relational database management system (namely MySQL); or, to a lesser extent, on the more progressive object-relational database management system (namely PostgreSQL). MySQL seems to be the embraced database because the contributed modules populous on d.org were designed with MySQL as the target database. Therefore, just work better with Drupal and cause less heartache for Drupal site builders and admins. ...

Drupal Coming Soon to a Phone Near You!

Posted by Avani Cheriathundam on Thursday, January 9, 2014 - 17:00 Cool Tools, Development, Drupal Drupal, Drupal8

Happy new year everyone! With the start of 2014 comes the much anticipated release of Drupal 8. While the official release date hasn’t been determined yet, it is being marketed as the most customizable and adaptable release of Drupal. The following features has been included that are particularly aimed to help End users/clients: Authoring – using the Spark project to review what was currently available in the market for out of the box functionality, Drupal 8 will allow in line editing which can be used for...

The New and Improved Drupal Commons

Posted by Avani Cheriathundam on Monday, August 26, 2013 - 15:12 Web Experience Management Acquia, Collaboration, Commons, Drupal

On February 26, 2013 Acquia announced the release of Drupal Commons 3.0 to the public for Drupal 7. This third generation release by Acquia included several new features to help enhance and accelerate the creation of communities and social applications within Drupal. This distribution is bundled with other modules that are pre-configured to work with Drupal Core. While Drupal core was designed to be flexible, without much attention to the look and feel, Commons was designed as more of a complete package out of the box. And Commons is also free to all users.

The first release of...

Is Drupal Right for You?

Posted by Isheeta Gandhi on Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - 13:35 Web Experience Management Drupal

Lately, Drupal seems to be a hot topic in the technology community. As of mid-July, there were over 900,000 sites using Drupal. Many companies, organizations, and agencies are migrating their websites to Drupal. Some notable sites currently running on Drupal are The Economist, Fedex, NASA, and even the White...

Modal Options in Drupal 7

Posted by Jon Reid on Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - 13:26 Drupal Drupal

The modal, the less obtrusive cousin of the popup window, is an effect that overlays a page element over a webpage. In contrast to the popup browser window, a modal also restricts access to the underlying page until the modal receives some interaction from the user. Why use a modal? There are several use cases including the awesome obliteration of the need to ever use a popup again. Perhaps the best reason is that a modal allows you to show and/or receive information from your end user without requiring a page reload. In short, a modal can improve usability by increasing the amount of...

Beware: Watchdog is a Hog

Posted by Hani Atalla on Monday, June 10, 2013 - 13:37 Best Practices, Drupal Drupal, Syslog, Watchdog

A neat monitoring agent that will run inside your Drupal PHP engine is New Relic. With New Relic we can monitor the PHP application performance as well as the overall health of the Drupal site in terms of under-the-hood metrics: database performance, error rate, response time, sluggish modules/APIs (it can locate these down to the line of code causing the site to spin at a zillion CPU cycle a second. So, it is a handy tool to have...

Loading data into Drupal

Posted by Allan Mai on Friday, April 12, 2013 - 13:08 Drupal Drupal, feeds, Migration

Migrating content of any kind into a different system is almost always an inevitable headache. A process of auditing the previous system, normalizing who-knows-how-long's amount of data, and bringing all of that together in a harmonious flow from old to new. In the past we have discussed: the procedures you might take to prepare your data, custom PHP coding that could facilitate a specific import case, and also...

'Varnish' Your Drupal Setup

Posted by Hani Atalla on Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - 13:18 Cool Tools, Drupal Caching, Drupal, Varnish

For every high performance website that gets hammered by a decent traffic volume, some sort of caching mechanism is essential and Drupal is no exception. The Drupal caching approach, to a great extent, depends upon the type of visitors who frequent the website and this suggests different Drupal specific caching techniques depending upon the type of visitors to the website; for instance if the predominant visitors to the website are authenticated users versus unauthenticated. So in this blog, I’d like to discuss Varnish as a caching option for...