In the community

Does your site have an online store? Are you looking to have sales on during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period? Then read on - here are some quick tips to help you make the most of the sales period by ensuring that everything goes as smoothly as possible to make sure both your marketing and site are up to scratch. Marketing / Promotion You should have a plan in place for marketing your...

Last month I begun my second decade of working with Drupal! How crazy is that? I started at ComputerMinds in 2009. Drupalcon Paris was my first week on the job - I just remember taking so many notes, as if it were a university course! I had a lot to learn then, but now I can look back with a much more experienced head, hopefully wiser, with some sort of perspective.

Over the past few months ComputerMinds has undergone a complete rebrand, most noticeably our website has been migrated to Drupal 8 and had a facelift so that it follows our new branding guidelines. But a new logo, colour scheme and aesthetic is only part of the work, we’ve also change all of our corporate stationery to follow our new look and feel. We tend to be a relatively paperless organisation but one thing we do...

At ComputerMinds we work out of two offices, one in Bristol and another in Coventry so every now and then it’s important for us to get the whole team together to share ideas. When we meet we try to do this away from the office environment for a change of scenery, in the second of our 2019 away days we decided a walk in the Malverns was just the ticket! We all met in the...

Here at ComputerMinds, we think of ourselves as Drupal specialists for the UK, but we don't limit ourselves to that. We offer clients a close working relationship and our general flexibility to get stuck into applying our skills to most problems. One of our clients, Alfresco, has come to trust us with more than just our Drupal wisdom. They wanted a new hub that would bring together documentation for a variety of their open source...

Drupal is lucky to benefit from a very active community of developers meaning that there is a wide and varied range of contributed modules to extend the functionality of Drupal core. In this article we’ll take a quick look at 10 interesting contributed modules; some are well known whilst others are a little bit more obscure. 1. Admin menu (D7) / Admin toolbar (D8) Out of the box the Drupal admin interface can be a...

Websites need to look pretty and be blazing fast. That often means lots of beautiful high-quality images, but they can be pretty enormous to download, making the page slow to load. Images are often one of the 'heaviest' parts of a website, dragging a visitor's experience down instead of brightening it up as intended. If a website feels even a tiny bit unresponsive, that tarnishes your message or brand. Most of us have sat waiting...

Update: Since writing this article the EOL of Drupal 7 has been extended from November 2021 until November 2022. Your current website/platform is built on Drupal 7 and news has hit your ears about 7’s end of life (EOL). Maybe your website is a Drupal 8 website and you want to know what the future has in store for you. Good news is, you don’t have to do anything immediately, but it is definitely a...

Drupal receives security updates several times a year, and we always apply them as soon as possible. Since Drupal security issues can make the headlines, it's important that site owners know that their site is secure and up to date - it provides for peace of mind and for pride in an excellent site. We decided this year to ensure that clients know about security updates to Drupal Core on their site. Via a quick...

Last night saw the popular EU Cookie Compliance module fall from grace, as the Drupal community discovered that numerous inputs in the admin form were not being sanitised. To me, this shows some serious failings in how our community is handling security awareness. Let's do some fixing :) ### 1) We need to make this OBVIOUS, with clear examples One of the most important things when trying to get people to write secure code is...