Drupal Planet

Results. Return On Investment. Value. How do you measure these things in a website? There's one thing you can easily measure -- cost. Or at least the amount you actually spend to build and maintain a site. The others are far more troublesome to measure.

If there's one thing that's constant in the web world, it's change.

If you've used a web ontology before, or any other large-scale data repository, you're likely familiar with one of the chief concerns facing anyone in such a position: how do you get your data into the system? Moreover, how do you get large amounts of data into the system with (relative) ease? And if you've used a content management system before, you've likely faced a similar, albeit inverted problem: how do you get your data out?

If you can accomplish these preliminary items without a good deal of effort, you're finally left with the task of transforming the data from one, and allowing it to be recognizable by the other.

If, instead, you haven't used either of these, you're likely wondering why on Earth you would want to.

At Freelock we're in the midst of building dashboards for ourselves and for customers, to really dial in our process and let us know where to focus our improvements.

Before doing any changes to your web site, the first thing to figure out are your goals. As a web development shop, we focus on building web sites that create measurable value for our customers, aligned with their goals.
Some common goals:

Yesterday Drupal.org got hacked, and potentially all the password hashes on the site fell into malicious hands.

Hey, that's not what I was thinking!

That's a very common complaint customers have with developers, when they receive the result of weeks or months of hard work. And it indicates a failure of planning.

At Freelock, we've been adopting a pattern for git branch management called Git Flow. If you haven't run across git flow before, go check out this article to get the basic concepts: A successful Git branching model.

Robyn asks:

I'm having a lot of discussions about CRM systems these days. What is CRM? To hear many talk about it, it's some magical program you buy and suddenly you start getting more business.

Drupal is one of the most popular free and open source web application frameworks. Drupal is almost infinitely extensible through not only various theme possibilities but also the vast library of modules or add-ons. However, this great extensibility is also a point of weakness should insecure or vulnerable code be used in either themes or community contributed modules that can result in compromise. The following guide on best practices for Drupal covers main areas of attention in regards to security for any Drupal web administrator.

As part of our recent site upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, we had a bunch of content profiles to clean up.