Saturday, October 5

A portable approach to Federated Search using Solr Drupal Node Js trio for better scalability

According to IDC, 90% of all the digital information is unstructured locked in multiple repositories and digital businesses have either underinvested in technology or invested in substandard technology in order to access them. Traditional search method leads to failures majorly due to the absence of optimisation practices and lack of unified framework.

Iterative UX: Find It Cambridge Case Study

A handful of visionary people in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts wanted an online resource to help families easily find activities, services, and resources. Find It Cambridge was informed and further inspired by extensive initial research done by Code for Boston and the City of Cambridge.  As this was wrapping up, the city brought Agaric in, so we found ourselves in the incredibly fortunate situation of starting with this in-depth knowledge.

Pivoting in a Project

As a Project Manager, Strategist, Developer, Designer, or Stakeholder, we are all part of the puzzle—and it's crucial to keep sight of the big picture—even when we’re required to pivot from the original plan. Pivots come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They can be a minor change that’s quickly integrated into the scope or a major departure that alters the entire course of the project.

Death Star Security: A Live Look at How A Site is Hacked

Let’s look at your Death Star (or website) from the rebel (or hacker) perspective and how they find the exhaust ports which can ruin everything you’ve built.

Your Code is Terrible!

New Developers have forgotten the importance of semantic HTML code and how they can create better user experiences and make websites more accessible utilizing it. In this presentation, we will explain the importance of semantic code, how to use it, and why it's so important to understand as developers. We’ll explore adding tools to our toolbox that help us create semantic code in Drupal and methods to test code for accessibility compliance.

Integrations Roundup: How to plug existing products and services into your site

Integrating with a third party product or service can be one of the fastest (and cheapest) ways of bringing advanced functionality to your site. Companies like Salsa Labs, Salesforce, and Stripe have put lots of work into services that can help you bring a great campaign, donation, or sales platform to market quickly, and without having to build out that functionality yourself.

Level Up Your Development Experience with Lando

Asking members of your team to spin up local copies of your Drupal application can result in an assorted array of solutions to the same problem: Some may spin up virtual machines while others may cobble together their favorite combination of Docker Containers. Some may struggle with native solutions on their machines while others may be entirely uncertain on where to begin. Adding common services and development tools such as xdebug, mailhog, or Drush may pose additional problems to even the more savvy members of your team.

Decoupling Drupal Install Profiles with Gatsby

There is a lot of talk about how great a decoupled site is, and more to the point, how great it is to use GatsbyJS. So much that Mediacurrent has converted their main website to a GatsbyJS based decoupled site. Then there is a lot of problems that come with a vanilla Drupal installation, or using other install profiles. Mediacurrent has created the Rain install profile, and with it a Gatsby based starter.  This talk will review

Making Drupal Friendly for Editors and Clients

Drupal’s extensibility allow us to create the perfect CMS for our organizations. But too often the same level of design is not considered when building out the editorial interfaces. The default tools are often scary for first-time Drupalers and include confusing words like ‘nodes’, ‘taxonomy’, and ‘blocks’. Making Drupal friendly for clients means checking internal jargon at the door and building interfaces that are intuitive and distraction free. Topics include:

Anonymous Personalization Without Leaving Drupal

Drupal has always been very strong at customizing user experiences for authenticated users, but what about anonymous users? What if you wanted to show a new banner block on your home page for first time visitors? Or gate a resource until users have filled out a contact form? For the most part, anonymous user display is determined by the url path, and per-user customization is dependent on excluding the page from cache, custom javascript or third parties.