A common problem that I’ve faced, particularly in the last few years, is how to deliver the complex, component driven design that clients want while also giving content authors full flexibility with those components without creating an un-maintainable, or brittle product.
Since 2012, PreviousNext has been developing and maintaining the aGov distribution for Drupal 7. aGov provides a means for Australian Government organisations to meet their accessibility and security obligations with free and open-source software hosted on the platform of their choice.
In the last few weeks we have been working on the Drupal 8 version, and are happy to announce today the first Alpha release!
In this post we share some of our experiences developing a Drupal 8 distribution.
During PreviousNext’s weekly developers meeting I recently gave a lightning talk about how to use kss-node to auto-generate a website style guide. If you’ve even tangentially followed front-end development, you’ll find that this is yet-another blog post describing “project A implementing technology B with hip, new language/framework C.”
But kss-node is really cool and useful, especially if you understand how it fits into the larger picture of the new web development process. Fortunately, my previous post provides that big picture, so if you’d like to understand how Agile is turning web development inside-out and how style-guide-driven development is the new website development workflow, please go read that first. Then head back here for the screencast to get you started with kss-node.
Panelizer is a great module for being able to modify the layout of a page on a per-node basis. However, its greatest strength can sometimes be its greatest weakness. We found this out the hard way when a client asked us to help them add a block on every single page of their site directly beneath the h1 page title. Read on for how we approached this issue.
If you’ve looked at front-end development at any time during the past four years, you know that there has been an explosion of new technologies. We are inundated with new projects like bower and cucumber and behat and KSS. It is a lot to take in. At the past two Drupalcons there have been sessions about this overload, My Brain is Full: The state of Front-end developement. Essentially those sessions are asking “What the hell is going on?”
“Everyone is describing the one little piece they’ve created, but don’t explain (or even reference!) the larger concepts of how all of these elements link together.”— Frank Chimero, July 2014 Designer News AMA
This is my attempt to explain.
Get started with some quick and easy ways to improve the content editor experience, using contributed modules.
Our client had some very specific requirements for their project. They needed to be able to insert links to files and they needed to keep the same URL for those files even if the file changed. Those familiar with Drupal will know that by default, Drupal will suffix the newer version of the filename with _0, _1 etc which obviously breaks the URL. Here's how we worked around the issue...
Pamela Barone presents her DrupalSouth Wellington talk at Jam's (virtual) DrupalCamp.
User Experience is a much misunderstood discipline. For a start, in software and web development, we generally think of it as a design task, for design wonks, or some kind of process prior to real development where we determine some user needs or requirements. In particular, within web development, user experience is treated either as a step in a process, or a specialised skill, but almost never as a holistic development vision.
What are the core skills, tools and practices you will need to be Drupal 8 ready? How do you get them now? This summary is a companion to PreviousNext's DrupalCon presentation "Drupal 8 Ready".
