Drupal
The rising costs of site ownership
How much do you spend on your website? I'm not asking how much it cost you to create/build -- I mean day to day, what does it cost to own and maintain your site?
And what happens if you stop paying that?
Deploying blocks and content to other site environments
If you have a current Drupal site (built in Drupal 8 or later) you no longer need to entirely rebuild your site -- ever again. That doesn't mean it couldn't use a freshening up now and then.
Progressive Enhancements: Manage data
Websites can do more than "just" present information. Do you have some sort of data management task that involves a lot of manual work?
Progressive Enhancements: Improve data entry and user interactions
Websites can do far more than just present information. Many business applications have moved onto the web, and with a CMS like Drupal in the back end, your website itself can be an integral part of your business.
Expressing complex systems of information
It's great to boil down information into simple bite-sized chunks. But for so many kinds of information, it's just not that simple. Ecological systems. Policy decisions. Your body. Your website.
Progressive Enhancements with VueJS and Drupal
In April I gave a talk about Progressive Enhancements at the national DrupalCon 2022 conference in Portland. Here's a recording of the full session, which was targeted towards Drupal developers.
Insight
What do you need to know about your website? What don't you don't know? Freelock's new Vision Plan covers a different topic each month, doing a deep-dive to highlight a specific topic area related to the fundamentals all websites need to consider: Reach, Engagement, Delivery, Security, Performance, and User Experience.
Technical Debt and CMS maintenance
As we onboard a slew of new clients due to our joining
Drupal
Our core technology expertise is with Drupal. For over 10 years, we've worked with hundreds of Drupal sites doing anything and everything from regular marketing sites to employee directories to association and event management sites, often with e-commerce sprinkled in.
Clients for Drupal
World Vision mEducation Alliance
The product owners of the mEducation Alliance website contacted us in September, 2015 to provide ongoing monthly Drupal security and module updates. The site is a partnership between World Vision, USAID, Peace Corps, and UNICEF – just to name a few. World Vision reached out to us to take over the monthly maintenance and retainer development support on the Drupal 6 site.
World Vision Chinese/Korean Websites
World Vision decided to partner with Freelock in September of 2015 for their Chinese and Korean websites. Headquartered in Federal Way, Washington – this was a perfect fit! We took plenty of time discussing the pain points their product owners were having with the sites, then building out an appropriate retainer plan to provide support services.
National Center for Science Education
In June of 2015, our colleague recommended our Drupal maintenance services to the National Center for Science Education. Our colleague was looking forward to large project and just didn't have the bandwidth to maintain their website. But, since we have our maintenance processes streamlined and love taking on new clients, this was a no brainer!
Snoqualmie Tribe
Snoqualmie Tribe contacted us in December of 2014 in desperate need to secure their website. It turns out, they were susceptible to the Drupalgeddon attack and needed the Drupal 7.34 core security update. We were able to apply that core security update and identify any other areas that were at risk. In addition, we provided other site fixes, as they needed.
Since the partnership began, Snoqualmie Tribe has opted into our Standard Drupal Maintenance plan, with a budget for additional site work.
Northwest Wall & Ceiling Bureau
Freelock built an informational website for the Northwest Wall & Ceiling Bureau (NWCB), an international trade organization for the wall and ceiling industry. We delivered a snappy and dynamic site that provides resources for products, services, standards, and best practices to contractors, architects, suppliers, manufactures and others. The site includes user profiles for individuals and businesses, a photo gallery, and registration for industry events.
Posts related to Drupal
Use Drupal Flake for PHPUnit testing
Drupal Flake is a new way of doing local Drupal development (running a self-contained Drupal site on your desktop or laptop).
Use Group Purl on your Group site!
One big missing part of the Group module is setting up friendly URLs that contain the group in the path for group content. You can't set this up in Pathauto -- the tokens are too limited to handle this correctly.
Easy unit testing with Drupal Flake and AI - Group PURL, a case study
AI does not replace system engineering. Stories abound about AI running amok, deleting production databases, exposing private data, failing to deliver on promises.
Automating all the things - 24 ideas for things you can automate with your website
Last December I wrote up 24 specific things we've automated on Drupal, and published them as an Advent Calender -- one little nugget each day.
Unleashing the power of ECA: No-code coding for ambitious site builders
Last year I gave a presentation at DrupalCon about automating things using the powerful ECA Module. Here's the recording!
Containerless Dev environments for Drupal development with Nix
The recording of my talk from DrupalCon this year is now available!
This is perhaps my most technical talk, meant for developers and tinkerers who would like an easy way to get started with Drupal.
Adding power to your shell - my home manager configuration
At Freelock, we're starting to use Nix to manage different PHP environments, and be able to incrementally update websites.
Ask Freelock: Sortable tables?
Kevin asks,
Is there a Drupal Add On or Widget that would allow users to sort tables as they're displayed on the website?
Hi, Kevin,
Several options here:
Drupal CMS: Making the easy stuff easy
In the past couple days I've gotten two different questions regarding building functionality out in WordPress. This seems a bit...weird with timing, given that Drupal CMS just launched three days ago!
Creating Product Bundles in Drupal Commerce
As we start developing mini-products to offer to our clients, we've found we actually need to group multiple products under one purchase.
Ask Freelock: ECA vs Rules
Yesterday a client asked us to install Rules module (again, repeating an earlier request, when he had missed my answer that we had installed ECA instead).
The rising costs of site ownership
How much do you spend on your website? I'm not asking how much it cost you to create/build -- I mean day to day, what does it cost to own and maintain your site?
And what happens if you stop paying that?
If you need something done with your Drupal site, we can help!
WordPress vs Drupal is like Word vs Excel
Seems like every day this month I've answered the same question: Why should I use Drupal instead of WordPress? And this is the answer I've come up with. They are entirely different applications, about as different as Microsoft Word is from Microsoft Excel.
Layout Builders versus Content Management - are you making this mistake?
Glitzy websites are all the rage these days. Everybody seems to be looking for easy ways to create multimedia-rich pages with ease.
Assessment of May 8 Drupal Security update SA-CORE-2019-007
New versions of Drupal core dropped today, to fix a file handling issue.
After assessing the patches, statements, and risks associated with this update, we have decided this is an important update to apply, but not urgent for most of the sites we manage.