Seattle Drupal and Web Development by Freelock Computing blogs

Keeping your site safe online

John Locke — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:37:35 +0000

Why do websites get hacked? Websites get hacked for a bunch of different reasons:

Static Brochure sites are easier?

John Locke — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:50:37 +0000

We've had several clients recently chafing at how confining Drupal sites can be -- it can be a lot more work to make individual pages vary from the template, and if you have build web sites using a tool like Dreamweaver, you can't tweak the layout the same way.

We call these hand-built sites brochure, or static, because they are a collection of files you build once, and then don't change very often. Drupal is a Content Management System (CMS), a program that helps you manage content.

So what's the difference? Why would you want Drupal over a static brochure site?

Drupal CRM -- Why?

John Locke — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:21:11 +0000

We have several customers interested in adding CRM to their Drupal sites, so today I hopped on a conference call with a working group developing CRM tools for Drupal 7. It's a small group, but it sounds like they are making good progress with the Party module, to serve as glue between all the various items that might end up in your database, to de-duplicate and associate them as a single entity.

The question is, what is CRM, and why build another in Drupal?

TEDxRainier: If you could do anything, what would you do?

John Locke — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 20:30:54 +0000

Last weekend I had the good fortune of being able to attend TEDxRainer. The event could best be summed up in one word:

Passion.

Everybody there seemed passionate about being there, sharing ideas, looking for ways to make the world a better place. And after spending a solid 10 hours among such passionate, engaged people, it's hard to come away without being inspired.

Drupal goes mobile

John Locke — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:59:17 +0000

Mobile is hot right now. Most of our current clients are actively thinking about, if not proceeding with, mobile access to their web sites or building a mobile application. Guess what -- it turns out Drupal is a good platform for that, too!

When going mobile with Drupal, we're advocating one or more of three different approaches:

Top 6 reasons Drupal really sucks -- Developer Edition

John Locke — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:12:41 +0000

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on why customers complain about Drupal -- the short version is that they either had incorrect expectations, or "developers" who were in over their heads. Nothing wrong with Drupal there. There are some very legitimate downsides to Drupal from a technical perspective, however. Here are our top 6, and why they're not enough to keep us from recommending and using Drupal for nearly all our work:

The hidden costs of e-commerce sites

John Locke — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 19:32:52 +0000

Mavis asks,

I have already spent thousands of dollars on my [Zen Cart] website. What would be your advice for [a company] who wants to transfer their site to a new host but not redesign it?

Just like a physical store, the costs of running an e-commerce site very quickly exceed the costs of opening it. And any time you're handling money, you automatically become a target for thieves -- you need to take security seriously, or you're bound to get robbed.

5 reasons Drupal projects suck: Hapless customer edition

John Locke — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:44:08 +0000

At Freelock, we're huge fans of Drupal. But we keep running into customers (or potential customers) who are terrified of it. So here's our take on why.

5. I just want a web site! It's too complicated!

Drupal is not just another web site builder. In experienced hands, it's easy for a Drupal developer to spin up a simple web site on Drupal -- I've done it in a matter of a couple hours, complete with initial content. But if you're not experienced with Drupal, the learning curve to get something useful is steep.

Why auto updates are a very bad idea

John Locke — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 20:45:18 +0000

A question came across the Drupal Developer's list today asking whether Drupal could auto-update itself, like WordPress. As someone who thinks about security a lot, the very thought of this horrifies me.

It's a bad idea for several reasons, but the biggest reason:

It could easily lead to the biggest most powerful bot-net on the planet.

This could just as easily happen to WordPress, too. It already has, in fact, to a small extent.

My site needs to be secure. How will you address this?

John Locke — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 21:37:58 +0000

That's the essence of a question I got today. And it's not one that can be answered easily, because there's no such thing as a site being "secure." It's not an either/or question, it's really a "how much" type of question. How hot is it today? Let's take a look at the temperature -- hot for you may well be different than hot for me. I'm from Alaska, after all...