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On January 5th the US Access Board announced that the OMB (Office of Management and Budget) had cleared the Final Rule for ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Standards and Guidelines, a.k.a. the “Section 508 Refresh”. The new standards and guidelines were published in the U.S. Federal Register on January 18th and will become effective and enforceable starting January 18th, 2018. You may be thinking: “What does this mean for our site?” 1. Not all content/code will have to be updated right away, because there is a safe-harbor provision, specifically: “legacy ICT that complies with the existing 508 Standards and has not been

Lately, you may have noticed some sites getting labelled as “Not secure” in Google Chrome: Or in Firefox:   As of January 2017, Chrome and Mozilla (the makers of Firefox) have implemented this policy to inform people that they should be careful when filling in forms containing sensitive data such as passwords or credit card details.In the coming years, the Chrome Security team plans on marking all HTTP (non-SSL) pages (not just login pages or credit card forms) with a red icon indicating the connection is not secure. You should strongly consider adding SSL to your entire site, and enforcing

One of the things that makes Drupal a great CMS is the quality and robustness of its modules. Today I wanted to shine a spotlight on the Pathauto module. From Pathauto’s project page; “The Pathauto module automatically generates URL/path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, taxonomy terms, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to have URL aliases like /category/my-node-title instead of /node/123. The aliases are based upon a “pattern” system that uses tokens which the administrator can change.” Tokens require the Token module, which you’ll likely need anyway, because it’s required by many modules. You also should really

Drupal 8.3.0-rc1 (release candidate 1) is now available for testing. The final bug fixes for 8.2 have been released, and new features and functionality are making their way into the 8.3 branch. Some of those features are things that were in Drupal 7, like Views exposed filter autosubmit, but which were not yet ported to Drupal 8. This is just one example. Drupal 8 is becoming ever-more feature-rich and robust. Here at Plethora Design we use it for almost all new sites we build,

Drupal 8.2 beta is out, and it is a harbinger of some pretty neat improvements in content editing. The main improvement is that adding blocks to regions on the page will no longer require you to go to /admin/structure/block, forcing you to navigate away from the page you were focused on. With Drupal 8.2 beta, you can add a block right on the page: It also improves the UI for configuring already existing blocks and menus. Now you can configure blocks and menus without having to navigate away:   Previous Next Drupal 8 already allows Quick Edit for editing fields inline.

Developing any kind of enterprise site typically involves multiple environments, for example Development, Staging, and Production. A very common scenario developers run into is that a site is developed locally (on the developer’s own machine) and then the code changes get pushed to a repository (version control using Git, Subversion, Mercurial, etc). But what about database changes? Those aren’t code … but they can be. What is considered configuration? Module configuration (set via Drupal’s UI), content types, fields, Site Information settings, basically any kind of settings that you can control from Drupal’s UI. Content (nodes, terms, users or any sort of

Engaged learning microsite selected among nearly 13,000 entries A Rider University microsite has been selected as an Official Honoree for the 20th Annual Webby Awards. The distinction puts Rider in the top 20 percent of nearly 13,000 entries from 66 countries around the world. The microsite focuses on engaged learning at Rider, showcasing the multiple ways in which the University creates opportunities for profound learning experiences. The site highlights the opportunities and results of students participating in internships, study abroad, service learning, student/faculty collaboration, the arts and leadership development. “The engaged learning microsite takes users through a series of high-impact visuals, which include

That’s right, Drupal 6 is at ‘end of life’ (EOL). Drupal 8 and 7 have both had security patches. Drupal 6 got a final security patch as well. If your Drupal installation has not been updated in a while, make sure to get it taken care of soon, or drop us a line.

Our design for EIT Avionics was recently featured on Drupal.org’s Featured Showcase. It is currently displayed on the drupal.org home page and as the first item on https://www.drupal.org/case-studies . In our case study we go into detail about the process of building a Drupal 8 site before the full release was out, which certainly posed some challenges. View case study »

Drupal just celebrated a major milestone – its fifteenth birthday! The Drupal project has grown tremendously over the years and with Drupal 8 it is now ‘off the island’. Since its early days, Drupal has held on to its own internal ways of coding and using PHP, but with Drupal 8 this change changed dramatically. Now Drupal uses Composer, OOP, Twig, YAML, and Services to name a few. This new policy of openness will help Drupal grow and improve. It will allow themers to do their thing and coders to do theirs – better than before. Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s

It’s official: Drupal 6 will be going the way of the dinosaurs on February 24th, 2016. Have a look at the official announcement. Sites still running Drupal 6 could continue to do so, but without Drupal community support. This means you’d be on your own when it comes to security issues, patches, and the like. If you’re running a dedicated or virtual dedicated server, you can of course continue running PHP 5 but eventually that too will become untenable, because if you have PCI scans the scanner may force you to upgrade PHP, for example. Updating Drupal 6 to 7 (or

Coming right on the heels of DrupalCon Barcelona, Drupal 8 release candidate 1 is here! Drupal 8 comes with many improvements and features, including: Object-oriented backend leveraging Symfony components Built-in configuration management (the Features module) The Views module is now part of Drupal core Theming is much improved now with Twig and MVC separation of logic from design. Multilingual support was given much more attention in this release. We are already running Drupal 8 on several small client sites and are excited to start adopting it more widely in the near future. Full details here