In the community

We didn’t see this project solely as a chance to rebrand and rebuild for ourselves, it was also an opportunity to try something new and expand our collective knowledge with the potential for using with clients in the future. We had been discussing using Pattern Lab for Front End development for some time and this was the perfect opportunity to try it out. Patten Lab allows the creation of component-driven user interfaces using atomic design...

As with every other Drupal agency on the planet, it was another fun evening of frantic patching of client sites last night due to the release of the highly critical SA-CORE-2018-004 security update for Drupal, released on 25/04/2018. Being so closely related to SA-CORE-2018-002 and knowing proven exploits for that were already affecting thousands of un-patched Drupal sites, time was of the essence for this one as a new exploit was sure to be released...

Now that we had settled on the branding and had established and planned exactly what we needed to create, I could start looking at designing the new website. I wanted a clean, spacious site with a modern look and feel. I always keep a close eye on changing design trends and it was important that for our site I was careful to design something that would age well...

Before I could actually start designing, we needed a clear understanding of exactly what we wanted from the new site. We conducted a full SEO analysis to see which content was popular on our existing site and what was not often read and could be consolidated. We also discussed the current state of our business and the direction we wanted to be heading in. We were taking on more and more big development projects and...

After seeing our logo alongside others in various places it was clear to us that we were starting to look outdated. The work we were doing was getting more and more advanced and our branding did not reflect this. We needed to rebrand.

After 7 years of our brand and website, we felt the outdated look did not reflect the cutting edge work we were doing, so it was time for a change. With the relatively recent release of Drupal 8 there was no better time for a complete overhaul, so I set to work. But before any website design or build could begin it was important to rebrand the company fully so this could be carried through...

Once upon a time, we wrote an article about how to render fields on their own in Drupal 7, which was really handy because Drupal 7 wasn't always intuitive. It's common to want to display a field outside of the context of its main entity page, like showing author information in a sidebar block or in a panel, but you had to just know which functions to use. Drupal 8 came along since then using...

If you don't have access to the file system on the server for a Drupal site, when a security issue like Drupalgeddon2 comes along, you are entitled to panic! Many sites are run by a combination of teams, so sometimes you really don't have control over the server... but that might even mean there is another way to apply fixes. If you've been tasked with updating such a site (I was!), it's worth checking if...

Drupalgeddon2 happened! We got all but two of our projects updated within an hour, with those remaining trickier two fully patched another hour later. The key was planning the right process using the right tools. We actually use these tools for regular deployments every day, but speed was essential for this security update. Here's what we did, since some of you may be interested. 1. Our on-call developers split up the various sites/environments/projects that would...

In light of the recent Drupal security release we at ComputerMinds have taken the decision to rebuild all our client sites in a brand new bespoke CMS custom built in Perl. Our new CMS, codenamed F001, offers significant improvements over the Drupal architecture - mainly by managing to fit the entire codebase into a single line of code. Other significant improvements include : 1. Support for HTML1.0 only. By standardising on this well established HTML...