Thoughts that Count
Recent Posts
Second Screen is Key to Great Digital Experience
Cross-posted with permission from Digital Disruption
Brands today are engaging with consumers on a rapidly growing number of platforms and devices. Taking the next step in the multiplatform revolution, many have begun engaging with their audience on two platforms simultaneously, add a second screen in order to add new layers of interactivity and interest.
Chief digital officers, or digital strategists with similar responsibilities, are often those being charged with developing this second-... More
Posted on
Friday, March 28, 2014
by Ryan MacInnis
Friday, March 28, 2014
by Ryan MacInnis
Entrepreneurship is 80% sales and marketing
Background in business is a 'nice to have', not a 'must have' for an aspiring entrepreneur. I had no solid business background when I founded Mollom or Acquia (I launched them roughly at the same time).
Other than the standard things (an idea, passion and the willingness to act), the most important thing that aspiring entrepreneurs need is the understanding that 80% of entrepreneurship is sales and marketing. If as a founder, you're not obsessed with sales and marketing, you're a liability rather than an asset.
You don't have to... More
Posted on
Friday, March 28, 2014
by Dries Buytaert
Friday, March 28, 2014
by Dries Buytaert
Why Drupal is Dominating the Higher Education Sector
Cross-posted with permission from Imagex Media
Drupal web technology is increasingly being adopted across the globe and is currently in use by massive organizations including The White House, McDonald’s, Twitter, IKEA and many more*. We can assume that big guys like these have taken the time to vet it. The reasons to choose Drupal are literally endless: pick n' choose modules, an army of developers contributing worldwide, cost effectiveness, always evolving, etc, etc. There’s no... More
Posted on
Thursday, March 27, 2014
by Brett Burns
Thursday, March 27, 2014
by Brett Burns
San Francisco State University moves to Drupal
What is a website? For colleges and universities everywhere, a website is an opportunity to tell a story.
Thanks to this opportunity, schools depend on websites more than ever to deliver rich, engaging experiences. When looking for a CMS capable of delivering this experience, schools naturally look at Drupal. Today, about 30 percent of colleges and universities in the United States use Drupal to power their main .edu site.
It helps that Drupal has the flexibility to be used for any site a campus needs -- recruiting, admissions, development, general outreach and much more. In fact, at Acquia... More
Posted on
Thursday, March 27, 2014
by John Capin
Thursday, March 27, 2014
by John Capin
Getting the most out of a code sprint - DrupalSouth shows us how
The DrupalSouth code sprint was a huge success and a standout feature of an already excellent conference. I put this down to some ingenuity and some great preparation. I interrupted two of the people who made it all happen, Dan "dman" Morrison and Heike "HeikeT" Theis from Wellington, New Zealand, to get to know them better and talk about how they put together the code sprint at DrupalSouth.
How to prepare a model code sprint
If you've been to... More
Posted on
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
by Jeffrey McGuire
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
by Jeffrey McGuire
Acquia Cloud adds PHP 5.5 (and more)
Acquia Cloud strives to be the best place to build and manage Drupal web sites. One aspect of that is providing the best, most current PHP runtime environment for Drupal. We’ve long supported Drupal 6 and 7, and we are preparing to support Drupal 8 as soon as it is ready. Drupal 8 requires PHP 5.4 or newer, so today we are announcing that Acquia Cloud supports PHP 5.5 for all sites and all subscription levels.
Choosing the PHP version per environment
Acquia Cloud provides multiple environments, such as Dev, Staging, and Prod, for your site development workflow. Converting your site from one... More
Posted on
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
by Barry Jaspan
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
by Barry Jaspan
Do well and do good
This blog post is on purpose, Open Source, profit and pie. This week I had an opportunity to meet Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. I was inspired by the following comment he made (not his exact words):
"Because companies strive to have a positive balance sheet, they take more in, than they give out. However, as individuals, we define success as giving more than you take. Given that many of us are leaders as... More
Posted on
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
by Dries Buytaert
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
by Dries Buytaert
Drupal 8 performance: render caching
In late 2009, Drupal 7 introduced render caching — enabling Drupal modules to easily cache the final HTML corresponding to a subtree in a Drupal render array. Render caching already was a powerful tool in Drupal 7, but unfortunately almost nobody knew about it! This blog post will show how you can leverage it, how it's gotten even better in Drupal 8, and how you will be leveraging it directly in Drupal 8. Hopefully I can get you excited :)
In Drupal 7, few modules use it… even in core! If your contributed module provides a block with the optional... More
Posted on
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
by Wim Leers
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
by Wim Leers
Locking Down the Cloud
Over the last few years, IT departments have gotten increasingly comfortable with cloud technology, by which I mean cloud security. Because as one IT analyst put it recently, “When it comes to the cloud, security is the number one concern. And number two isn’t even close.”
But 2014 could be the year when thought and analysis take a back seat to action. Companies that haven’t already embraced cloud technology are ready to make the move. One reason: the rise of automation, which is making it easier -- nearly irresistible, in fact -- for IT departments to start transitioning significant parts... More
Posted on
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
by Jess Iandiorio
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
by Jess Iandiorio
Drupal 8: Forms, OOP style
Back in August 2013, I wrote the original version of this article on my Drupal Gardens blog. Drupal 8 has continued to be refined since then, so I updated the code to work against the current state of Drupal 8, and am cross posting it here.
Thank you to everyone who provided feedback and encouragement on my first blog post about OOP in Drupal 8. This is the next installment. In the first post, we examined a very simple controller: one that just outputs "Hello.". In the real... More
Posted on
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
by Alex Bronstein
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
by Alex Bronstein
Ready for certification
Right after we launched our first certification last week, two questions stood out. First, why is Acquia doing the certification? And why did it take them so long? I saw these as two sides of the same coin. I wanted to reflect a bit on the history of this project.
Click here for full details of Acquia’s Drupal certification.
Ready for certification
In 2012, my colleague, Hernani Borges de Freitas, gave a presentation and wrote blog posts on “Things we found in your website.”... More
Posted on
Monday, March 24, 2014
by Heather James
Monday, March 24, 2014
by Heather James
10 Tips to Streamline Migration Review
To a project manager for large migrations into Drupal, the time scheduled for stakeholder review of migrated content never seems to be enough. In this post, I'll talk about 10 ways Acquia Professional Services Engagement Managers have streamlined this review so it works for stakeholders without derailing the project schedule.
In a typical project schedule, the opportunity for project stakeholders to review and bless the content migration is sandwiched somewhere between the development team's first automated migration and the launch date. This... More
Posted on
Monday, March 24, 2014
by Joshua Smith
Monday, March 24, 2014
by Joshua Smith
Keeping Pace with DigitalDisruption.com
Here are some of the past week's highlights from DigitalDisruption.com, Acquia's portal for examining the impact of digital disruption.
Google Glass' Health Care Challenge
Last evening I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel at an event hosted by Health Innovators discussing the future of medicine and specifically Google Glass. The event title was "Google Glass the new frontier in Healthcare Innovation?" and although I'm not sure how many converts were made, I did come away with knowledge of an incredible organization pushing... More
Posted on
Friday, March 21, 2014
by Ryan MacInnis
Friday, March 21, 2014
by Ryan MacInnis
Acquia certification for Drupal
Topic: DrupalAcquiaI'm proud to share that Acquia announced its certification program today. You can now get "Acquia certified in Drupal", something I'm pretty excited about.
This is something I've been hoping to see in the community. While there have been other experiments around certification, we as a... More
Posted on
Thursday, March 20, 2014
by Dries Buytaert
Thursday, March 20, 2014
by Dries Buytaert
The Importance of Content Governance in Higher Education Websites
Cross-posted with permission from Blue Coda
Many higher education institutions struggle to keep up with the demands, expectations and innovations, in both the service provision and use, of web content management. Most senior members or staff don't have the time to implement changes or plan strategies, and those who do have responsibility for things like websites, blogs and student forums often find themselves without a coherent game plan. Simply having a... More
Posted on
Thursday, March 20, 2014
by Lindsey Kempton
Thursday, March 20, 2014
by Lindsey Kempton
11 Drupal Implementation Mistakes
Cross-posted with permission from OHO Interactive
If you're not careful when it comes to implementing your Drupal site, a lot can go wrong. Working with a partner who has Drupal expertise and plenty of experience can help you avoid costly mistakes that can derail your digital strategy. Here's our list of 11 common mistakes that are entirely avoidable, along with the reaction you can expect if you make them.
1. Picking the wrong host. If you picked a host who can’t handle spikes in your site traffic, you’re... More
Posted on
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
by Rachel Sherman
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
by Rachel Sherman
Your First RESTful View in Drupal 8
Cross-posted with permission from Drupalize.Me
In a continuation from my first post, An Introduction to RESTful Web Services in Drupal 8, I want to explore how Views interacts with REST in Drupal 8.
As many of you already know, the Views module was added to Drupal 8 Core. With RESTful Web Services also in Core, we now have all the tools we need to create highly customizable solutions out of the... More
Posted on
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
by Joe Fender
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
by Joe Fender
10 Tips for Success as a Remote Employee
There are passionate advocates for working remotely who will tell you about the many benefits of having been or being remote employees: less time and energy wasted commuting, more productivity, better breakfasts, better work/life balance, and so on. There are jobs and companies that are incompatible with working remotely, too. Many kinds of business need people in the same space together on a daily basis. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer famously banned working from home in 2013 as part of her effort to reboot that company and its culture. Let's take those... More
Posted on
Monday, March 17, 2014
by Jeffrey McGuire
Monday, March 17, 2014
by Jeffrey McGuire
Keeping Pace with DigitalDisruption.com
Here are some of the past week's highlights from DigitalDisruption.com, Acquia's portal for examining the impact of digital disruption.
What to do with Big Data? CDOs May Have the Answer
One of the biggest challenges digital executives face today is figuring out what to do with it all the data. There is so much data collected today about shopping habits, travel patterns or even activities logged, that being able to effectively track and leverage this data to improve an aspect of the consumer experience or predict a certain market... More
Posted on
Friday, March 14, 2014
by Ryan MacInnis
Friday, March 14, 2014
by Ryan MacInnis
Drupal vs. Sharepoint: Choosing the right platform for your site
As Drupal continues to gain significant enterprise adoption, it is competing more and more against incumbent technology in the form of commercial and proprietary software. One of the more surprising competitors in the marketplace belongs to a software application that was created for document management, not content management.
That technology is Microsoft SharePoint, and it powers a surprising amount of enterprise websites. Then again, perhaps this is not as shocking as it seems given the ubiquity of Microsoft applications and the fact Microsoft will include a license for an external website... More
Posted on
Friday, March 14, 2014
by Jason Schaffer
Friday, March 14, 2014
by Jason Schaffer
Using the AWS Ruby SDK to Put a Drupal Site's Assets Behind a CDN
As a demo for my local Drupal meetup, I offered to show how to use an origin pull CDN to serve the static assets of a Drupal 7 site installed on Acquia Cloud. If you are not familiar with basic CDN concepts and terminology, start by reading this article on key properties of a CDN by Wim Leers. The value of using a CDN for a site's static assets is primarily a faster total page load for the end-user since once the main page HTML is loaded, the requests for images, CSS, JS, and other assets needed to fully render the page happen... More
Posted on
Thursday, March 13, 2014
by Peter Wolanin
Thursday, March 13, 2014
by Peter Wolanin
Lukas Smith on how Drupal and Symfony mutually benefit from cooperating
Part 2 of 2 - I had the great pleasure of speaking with Lukas Smith at SymfonyCon Warsaw in December, 2013. Lukas is a major contributor to open source and is involved in a range of projects, including the Symfony framework, Drupal, and many more. He is one of the 50 most active contributors on GitHub. Thank you, Lukas!
In part one, we talked about how Lukas manages to contribute so much to so many open source projects, social competence in open source (I love this... More
Posted on
Thursday, March 13, 2014
by Jeffrey McGuire
Thursday, March 13, 2014
by Jeffrey McGuire
In the Era of the Small Screen, Localization is More Important Than Ever
If you plan on competing in the global marketplace—and chances are, you eventually will—you have to make sure that every customer in every country has the opportunity to engage with your brand. After you mark off the logistical action items for globalizing your website, such as accommodating different time zones and currencies, you’re faced with a bigger question: How will we get users in this country to engage?
How you answer that question depends on which country you’re talking about. The colors, wording and calls to action that make Chinese users engage aren’t the same ones that Brazilians... More
Posted on
Thursday, March 13, 2014
by Calvin Scharffs
Thursday, March 13, 2014
by Calvin Scharffs
This Week-ish in Drupal Core: March 12, 2014
What's new with Drupal 8?
Two big news items this week for our intrepid testbots! First, RTBC core patches are now automatically retested every 24 hours to ensure they don't go stale and to avoid regressions and commit conflicts. Hooray!! Additionally, the 8.x testbots have been upgraded to PHP 5.4, which means Drupal 8 now officially requires PHP 5.4.2 or above to install. Woot! In addition to this allowing us to remove... More
Posted on
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
by Angie Byron
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
by Angie Byron
We Came, We Saw, We SXSW’d
As the last day of SXSW Interactive comes to a close, there was no shortage of places to go for disruptive innovation, technology and everything social. Heck, there was even a 3D printer that made oreos with personalized hashtags.
Here’s a look at some of the sessions and events I went to during the past few days in Austin.
One on One with Mark Cuban
As Shark Tank fanboy, I couldn’t miss a fireside chat with Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and tech investor. In packed hall of the Austin Convention Center, Guy Kawasaki and Mark Cuban talked sports, new tech investments, and advice for... More
Posted on
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
by Ryan MacInnis
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
by Ryan MacInnis
Pages
Blog Series
Posted on Friday, April 11, 2014
by Nick Veenhof
by Nick Veenhof
Posted on Wednesday, March 26, 2014
by Wim Leers
by Wim Leers
Posted on Tuesday, March 25, 2014
by Alex Bronstein
by Alex Bronstein
Posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2014
by Joe Fender
by Joe Fender
Posted on Thursday, February 27, 2014
by Moshe Weitzman
by Moshe Weitzman