After over a decade of our team traveling to other cities, the annual DrupalCon North America is coming to our hometown! I've been attending DrupalCons each year, starting with DrupalCon Chicago in 2011. While I've had an incredible time visiting all these other great cities across the US, there's something special about being the host city. And I'm confident you'll love it too. The Electric Citizen team will be there. Here's some quick details about where we'll be, and some ideas on what you can do while visiting. Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2PywnX0
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WordPress vs Drupal is like Word vs Excel John Locke Thu, 02/27/2020 - 15:26
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. WordPress is first and foremost a blogging tool, and it has become widely adopted by designers who are trying to make pretty-looking sites. There's no shortage of beautiful WordPress sites, and if what you need is a relatively simple marketing site with rich content, it's a great tool. Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2wgZyXS InternetDevels: Scheduled content publishing on your Drupal 8 site with the Scheduler module2/28/2020 High-quality content is a huge business booster. However, its creation takes time and effort. You will need to publish content regularly in order to keep your website fresh, maintain your SEO rankings, and keep your audience engaged. Read moreOriginally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2I0xNpc Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/39eGFDS
Our latest interview features Amitai Burstein, co-owner and CTO of Israeli Drupal agency Gizra. Give it a read and get an insight into how the nature of Drupal contributions has evolved and how great it is to meet members of the community in person. READ MOREOriginally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2PutOWg
Drupal 9: Status, Resources, and Ways to Contribute Lindsey Gemmill Fri, 02/28/2020 - 07:17
Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/2Tao1aF
You’re having trouble keeping up with demand and need a more powerful and robust website platform. As business problems go, that’s a great one to have. Especially for enterprise-grade organizations and government entities. The question is: Which website platform is best? To help you make informed decisions about your platform choice, we’re sharing a look at what Acquia has to offer. In this post, you’ll learn what Acquia is and how it works, who should consider using the platform and who should not. Then you’ll read our thoughts on what should be top of mind when selecting a platform. Full disclosure: Mobomo is an Acquia partner organization, meaning we help clients make the most of their Acquia technology and services. Far from being a hard sell, however, this post aims solely to provide expert analysis and an honest assessment of the company and its products. What Acquia Is and How It WorksAcquia is considered a digital experience platform (DXP), which is a collection or suite of products that work in concert to manage and optimize the user’s digital experience. These products can include a CRM, analytics, commerce applications, content management and more. In its industry report on DXPs, Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, Gartner defines a digital experience platform as “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences…Leaders have ample ability to support a variety of DXP use cases and consistently meet customers’ needs over substantial periods. Leaders have delivered significant product innovation in pursuit of DXP requirements and have been successful in selling to new customers across industries.” Organizations use DXPs to build, deploy and improve websites, portals, mobile and other digital experiences. They combine and coordinate applications, including content management, search and navigation, personalization, integration and aggregation, collaboration, workflow, analytics, mobile and multichannel support. Acquia is one of the major players in this space, and the only one designed solely for Drupal. Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert was in graduate school in 2000 when he created the first Drupal content management framework. Buytaert and Jay Batson then established Acquia in 2007 to provide infrastructure, support and services to enterprise organizations that use Drupal. Features and Benefits of AcquiaAcquia initially offered managed cloud hosting and fine-tuned services for Drupal. It has since expanded on its Drupal foundation to offer a complete DXP, including but not limited to:
Additionally, Acquia provides comprehensive logging, performance metrics, security and Drupal application insights, and uptime alerts organizations need to monitor and optimize applications. The Acquia platform also shines in its security capabilities, supporting strict compliance programs such as FedRAMP, HIPAA, and PCI, among others. Acquia customers can also internally manage teams at scale with advanced teams and permissions capabilities. And they’re running with the big dogs. Other DXP companies assessed in the Gartner Magic Quadrants report include Adobe, IBM, Salesforce, Liferay, SAP, Adobe, Microsoft and Oracle. In that report, Gartner cited Acquia’s key strengths as follows:
Who Should Consider AcquiaIn a nutshell, Acquia is a good fit for enterprise-grade clients and government entities needing a comprehensive and powerful platform that optimizes the entire user experience while integrating data from multiple sources to support decision-making. Organizations that deploy and manage multiple websites will find Acquia particularly helpful. One glance at Acquia’s customer page crystalizes the scope and scale of organizations they serve. Brands using Acquia include Wendy’s, ConAgra Brands, University of Virginia, City of Rancho Cucamonga in California and Australia’s Department of the Environment and Energy. According to Website Planet, what sets Acquia apart is their foundation in the open-source Drupal content management framework. Unlike many of their competitors, Acquia allows customers to buy resources and features individually rather than purchasing entire pre-made packages. This can be particularly appealing to organizations who already have a couple of strong individual solutions in place that they want to integrate into their DXP, such as this reviewer in the manufacturing industry:
Who Should Not Consider AcquiaAcquia is best suited for organizations with both the need for such a powerful suite of tools and the development expertise to easily implement and manage it. Beginners and small businesses lacking the requisite knowledge of programming and Drupal are likely better off with a different provider. For those who develop their website through an agency, you’ll want to double-check that they will provide developers experienced with Drupal 8. If you do develop in-house, make sure your developers have strong familiarity with it. Additionally, Acquia’s power comes at a price: Its price point may put it out of reach for small-to-medium businesses. Acquia: Our TakeawayAs with any other significant investment, the best choice for your organization boils down to your wants and needs of you, the consumer. Keep these points in mind assessing how well Acquia matches up with your master list of must-haves.
By conducting a thorough assessment of your organization’s needs, capabilities, and goals, you can readily determine whether Acquia is the best fit to help you provide an amazing digital experience for your audience. Contact us today and find out how Mobomo can help you make the most of Acquia. The post Is Acquia the Right Platform Choice? appeared first on . Originally from Drupal.org aggregator https://ift.tt/395bSt5 In Part 2 of our series, we provide a framework to help you ask the right questions before embarking on a complex integration project. If you haven't already, be sure to read Part 1 first. Understanding that integrations can balloon the complexity of a project, you may be asking yourself: why do it this way? That’s a valid question! Why Integrate? Why not consolidate?With all the potential complexity surrounding an integration, it may be worth it to ask the question: is there an alternative option? There are three main factors to consider when looking at the value of a potential integration:
Often, the balance of integrating versus bringing an external service “in-house” (or into the platform) comes down to these three factors. Data Ownership / StorageIt may well be that you cannot bring an external system into your platform natively (forcing an integration) because you don’t own the data you want to integrate with. This might be the case with any paid access to a database like a list of service providers or tweets. Someone else owns that data but allows you to expose it (or use it) on your site. You cannot bring that data into your platform natively, requiring you to go and fetch it from them. Sometimes data ownership issues get complicated, too: just because your organization collects the data doesn’t necessarily mean you own it. This is sometimes the case with proprietary systems. Your organization may have fed the data into their system, but part of your license assigns them ownership of your data after you’ve submitted it. It is important to understand who owns the data you’re integrating with and where it ultimately can and cannot be stored. Business LogicIntegrations usually bring with them some meaningful experience: either data to enhance some functionality or some processing of information for an outcome. For some examples, you could think here of a commenting platform that is used widely: having an account with that commenting platform may enable you to comment on many different sites on the Internet rather than needing to create an account on each site. Or, a small ecommerce site may integrate with a credit card processor that you’re already familiar with, so you can trust when you click “Buy now” and are taken to a familiar checkout experience, that the retailer is using solid technology to handle your private financial information. In both of these examples, the meaningful outcome of interacting with this data isn’t owned by the platform itself: it is business logic that is owned by another company. The service you’re getting by integrating with them is that data transformation. The credit card processor takes a credit card number and turns that into a deposit in your bank account. The commenting platform stores all of the comments, their approval status, and who made them, so you don’t have to. Drawing bright lines around this functionality and understanding what the processes are that you’re relying on is key to understanding how hard or easy it may be to bring a particular piece of business logic to your platform, rather than outsourcing it. Data ExposureA system that makes the right data available to the right people at the right time can be difficult to set up and maintain! Even if you own your own data and you can replicate the business logic you need to perform on the data, you still need to evaluate whether or not other systems apart from yours rely on that information to be available in a particular format. If there are other such systems, then you’ll need to make the data available from your platform if you choose to bring that integration “in-house.” This might mean setting up and hosting an API yourself. It might mean moving a database behind your corporate VPN. It might mean needing to comply with data protection regulations that you didn’t have to worry about before (like HIPAA or GDPR). It is certainly possible to do (and sometimes it is very beneficial), but it does require careful examination of the whole system. How to plan an integrationWith all that context, let’s set up a scenario: you’ve been asked to plan an integration. Your company is planning to start selling widget online and would like to use a third-party shopping cart and credit card processing. How do you start planning for this discrete but complex set of integrations? Define the BenefitsLike most plans, it helps to start by defining your desired end state. When this integration is done, what will your users be able to do? Will there be a new button on your website? Ten new buttons? Text entry fields? What is the value or benefit to the customer? Write it down! Put All the Cards on the TableNext, investigate what information will flow through the system. Document it in as much detail as you can. Will there be products? If so, they probably have lots of data with them (prices, quantities, sizes, availability, etc). What about users? What is a user (a username/password combo? An email address? A shipping address and credit card)? Try to be as specific as you can be about both the data and the composition of the data you’re going to be working with. (If you’re integrating with a good third-party system, they may already have documentation about the data and data composition that you can use.) Draw a FlowchartA simplified view of the flow of information through a system. This documents requests that can happen, storage locations, and data transformations to make the system complete. This documents five integrations that are codependent. Once you have a good understanding of both the outcomes you’re aiming for and the pieces you have, you can start to line up the pieces sequentially in the order they’ll be used/consumed by the systems. Block out areas for where there will be business logic or transformations (these typically slot in right before storage, before display, or after initial read). As you go through this process, make sure you write down your questions. If you don’t know what data looks like at some point during the process, note it! That is an area that could drive up complexity (or you might be able to discover the answer to that question and disambiguate the system a little more). Your flowchart will drive your understanding of the complexity of the integration and now it’ll be a whole lot less ambiguous, too! ConclusionIntegrations can be scary! They’re inherently complex: you’re dealing with data transportation, information ownership, data models, business logic, user experience, and display logic. Until you have a good framework for breaking down that complexity into some core component pieces, it can be really hard to wrap your head around how they all fit together. By taking this approach, we at Palantir are able to estimate the complexity of particular integrations quickly during both our sales estimating and project planning phases of our projects. Integration by Christer licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. 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