Two weeks ago, the Advomatic team divided up and went to both Drupalcon in Nashville and the Nonprofit Tech Conference in New Orleans – they happened at the same time this year. (A few of us went to both!) The short story is: We had a great time and met a lot of people and …
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Promoting Inclusivity and Empathy at the Nonprofit Technology Conference
Given the divisive social and political climate, the Advomatic team has been thinking a lot about about how to recommit to concrete practices of inclusivity in our day-to-day life and work. These are conversations that come up regularly at our weekly team meetings and monthly social hours. So when it came time to plan our …
Read more »Diversity and Staying Grounded: Recapping Drupalcon 2018
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 …
Read more »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 …
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