It was great to get back to DrupalCon this year. I really enjoyed the Con, and this was one of my favorite DrupalCons in the eight years I’ve been going. Drupal as a community is getting more serious about diversity. In the past, there’s been an undercurrent of people saying “diversity is good” for a …
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A Week of Firsts at Drupalcon
I went to DrupalCon this year with the goal of doing things a bit differently this time. I’m a bit of an introvert with people at first, but I’ve been told I don’t come off that way. So, I decided to leverage that and just push myself through things that, in years past, I would …
Read more »Refocusing on the Important Things: Drupalcon and the Nonprofit Technology Conference
I attended both Drupalcon and the Nonprofit Tech Conference this year. They were on the same week, so I started the week at Drupalcon then caught the tail end of NTC. I often come into conferences with my head down, working hard on tough problems, so it’s great to have a chance lift my head up …
Read more »Humanizing Accessibility: A Recap of the Nonprofit Tech Conference
I went to my first Nonprofit Tech Conference this year! As a heads-down coder day-to-day, it was refreshing – if somewhat exhausting – to spend time talking to new people working on so many cool projects. I was seriously impressed. My favorite moments were hosting a conversation about digital inclusion at the “Birds of a …
Read more »Design tips for lowering front-end costs, part two: Reducing complexity
Last week, we discussed a few ways design deliverables can be made with the goal of streamlining the front-end development process. This week, we’ll address design complexity and how to simplify things with that same goal. Assemble page designs as a collection of modular pieces that fit together, and provide notes for any edge cases …
Read more »Design tips for lowering front-end costs, part one: Deliverables
Here at Advomatic, we frequently get the chance to partner with really creative, disciplined, and talented design shops. Over the years, we’ve identified a few areas where we can be more helpful to them. We’ll try articulating the best ways to solve design problems which have an impact on the front-end development approach. Along with strategizing …
Read more »Eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content in Drupal sites
One of the things we do on an annual basis for our clients at Advomatic is an annual site audit – a high level kick-the-tires kind of site inspection. For Drupal sites, we check the logs for any glaring errors, check for overrides in Features, run some SEO and accessibility testing, and, of course, take it …
Read more »Using Configuration Split to have dev-only configuration in Drupal 8
The problem If you are using Drupal’s Configuration Management subsystem to deploy configuration out to the production environment, you’ll run into a problem where the configuration .yml files contain your development settings. To avoid this you’ll need to use the Configuration Split module. I couldn’t find any good documentation for this, so I had to …
Read more »DrupalCon Baltimore 2017: Thoughts on the community
I was fortunate enough to get to Baltimore for this year’s DrupalCon. Here’s a few takeaways regarding Drupal’s open-source community. The community is still strong. There has been some major turbulence recently with the dismissal of a community member from his position as DrupalCon track chair. It’s had repercussions about issues of both governance …
Read more »Avoiding the boom/bust website cycle
How to ensure that satisfaction in your websites remains high, while also levelling out your spending A typical website is created in a burst of activity (and spending), then “launched” to the public. There is probably some really great thinking that went into it, but because no one can predict the future, you don’t really …
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