5 Fatal Mistakes to Avoid in Drupal Website

Using any Content Management System (CMS) software, in first place, there is no silver bullet for creating a site that can fully survive an upgrade with no developer assistance needed. It’s the same for Drupal website as well.

This is why certain things to be taken care of when planning a Drupal website development project that can save maintenance time down the road.
  

Mistake#5: Keeping Extraneous File In The VSC Repository.

Image asset files, holiday pictures, or database dumps are generally pushed to the repository which is very unhealthy practice. Try to keep the VCS as clean and small as
possible

Mistake#4: Missing Out Of Date Development And Staging Environments.

Say for instance, developers conduct testing only in production because the other environments have old data or no connection to an external service. Ensure to maintain testing environments as similar to production as possible. This way you can easily copy from production and execute tests to assure that changes will work when moved to production.

Mistake#3: Out-Of-Date Code For Core And Contributed Modules.
At times, businesses prefer out of date code thinking to save some money. But keeping all modules and core as current as possible saves you in a long run.

Mistake#2: The Thought- Repair Better Than Maintenance

As a matter of fact, Drupal is a well-architected CMS that will continue to perform for a long time. However, keeping things up to date ensures a good experience for your visitors. If unnoticed, chances are there for site to get hacked which is much more costly

Mistake#1: Less Security During Deployment

Any developer can take a snapshot of production to install on their laptop which means anybody can misuse it. Allow developers to take snapshots and have other access to development and staging environments without giving access to the production environment only for the most trusted users.

Summing up, Keep your code under version control and review all logs periodically, including Apache, Drupal, and MySQL.

The Federal Government to Migrate Its Public-Facing Websites to Drupal

In a move where about one third of the government’s 1,200 odd-sites planning to migrate off commercial and other alternatives onto the open source platform- The Federal Government has revealed long-range plans to migrate its public-facing websites to Drupal on a software as a service (cloud computing) basis.

What’s This Drupal CMS?

Written in PHP, Drupal is an open source content management framework that is distributed under the GNU General Public Licence. Similar to WordPress and Joomla, it is essentially a front end with a user-friendly administration graphical user interface. Astonishingly, 24% of all .gov websites are using it for their websites. 

Here are some of the significant cabinet, commerce, and congressional agency websites built on Drupal:

White House:

·         the inaugural Drupal site in the .gov movement (2009)

·         Code was released for the grassroots citizen engagement 'We the People'(2012)

·         Developers boast a full list of government contributions to the open-source community

Similarly,

U.S. Department of Education: ED.gov runs the gamut for all things academic-related, from preschool to PhD preparation. Currently running on Unix, Apache, mod_ssl and OpenSSL.

·         leverages Drupal's flexibility and Web 2.0 capabilities

·         On an average gets 30 million hits per month

·         Mini websites within ED.gov power blogs, forums, galleries, RSS feeds by taxonomy, and other custom content types

Besides, The United States are affiliate websites NASA, the Department of Defence, and the U.S. Military.

Drupal and The Use Of Public Cloud.

When questioned on the choice of Drupal as the most preferred web CMS platform, US govt comes with two major prerequisites fulfilled by this solid framework: An Open Source Solution and the Use of the Public Cloud.  In other words, it is an excellent idea to leverage public-facing websites onto cloud computing infrastructure from website development companies. If you want to get a cloud web hosting platform migration done this same approach applies here and other IT verticals within the Federal Government.

Why Should you Choose Drupal CMS for Enterprise Web Development

Content Management Systems (CMS) serves as the foundation of many digital customer experience strategy. However, many enterprises struggle with legacy proprietary products that can’t keep pace with the speed of digital marketing.

If you are planning to go for Drupal Website Development, well done! Briefly, this is written in the PHP programming language and uses the Apache HTTP Server to deliver content to customers. The HTTP server uses an add-on PHP processor to turn the PHP scripts into dynamic action while most of its configuration, product content, and reports are stored in a database.

Why Prefer CMS for an Enterprise

A CMS (Content Management System) is a tool used for distributing information to aid people collaboration. Whether it is for a non-technical employee to do his work or for a team manager who deals with workflow, access control, and other popular features- CMS works for all website developers who can extend to add new modules, integrate it with enterprise services, and tweak the interface, and so on.

Why choose Drupal?

This is a more obvious question among businesses. There are many other platforms like Umbraco, Joomla and so many which are free, well made, and have made my clients happy. Then, why Drupal?

·         Drupal is an open source product built by a community with no licensing costs

·         Runs on many OSs but say one like Umbraco needs Microsoft

·         Drupal enterprise support is remarkable and is offered by many consultancies such as Four Kitchens, Acquia, and Palantir

·         Drupal's build quality is excellent that has been around for years to meet even the less common needs

·         With thousands of installation plug-ins, it powers over 330,000 web sites and the numbers keep growing

Clairvoyantly, half the enterprise IT will be migrating to the cloud over the next couple of years and therefore Drupal CMS clustered in the cloud rather than internally is the best to be predicted.

Drupal - The Superior Alternative in Website Development

For any online business, your website is the best business card and promotional too. This is why investing in a dynamic website development to create Search Engine Optimization strengthen is vital.  These days many opensource platforms are available but not all of them offers interactive modules that help increase your web traffic, except few like Druapl CMS, Joomla CMS, wordpress.

This article talks about the benefits of Drupal Website Development.

Some of the key benefits of Drupal are:

Drupal is a flexible and powerful tool for designing complete and robust websites to meet individual client requirements.

Compliant: It is possible to organize and manage every distinguished feature of your website using Drupal. Be it for content or revise images or process credit card payments or even make online reservations- this Open Source Shopping Cart is the best.

Consistency: Easy to detect errors and bugs and also to fix them simultaneously

Usability: With the help of its powerful tool set, Drupal CMS system can customize your website according to your business needs.

Interactivity: Just like the ones offering real time updating services, this ecommerce solution is full of in-built features that can furnish mind-blowing interactivity.

Cost effective:  Unlike others, Drupal supports maximum features and even helps you in developing multifaceted and intricate websites in a much lesser amount of time.

SEO friendly: Produces SEO friendly URLs that are user friendly as it makes use of Apache’s mod-rewrite technology.

Responsive: Well, one of the reasons to choose Drupal Website Design is its responsiveness features that adapts automatically to the screen of computers, tablets and smartphones.

Website Maintenance: To manage Drupal based website, word skill is all required to easily modify the website’s content that is crucial to the effective running of your organization.

Interested in Drupal Website Development? You are in the right place. Hire Openwave Computing Services, NYC- we being seasoned professionals- have old hands at developing diverse websites using Drupal – be it small or large websites.

Why Do You Need Drupal Responsive Website

Depending on their ability, web designs can be broadly categorized into standard, adaptive and responsive designs. Generally, designing custom theme requires knowledge of HTML and CSS as Drupal websites is driven by themes. Google in its recent webmasters forum proclaimed that responsive web design as one of the best approaches for multi-device sites.

Having said so, here we shall see how Drupal Content Management System can implement responsive designs.

Why Drupal Responsive Web Design is a Necessity

All that matters in ecommerce website development are attractiveness, informative, and user-engaging in order to put its best foot forward in the online dimension, and enhance online visibility.

There is always a debate to building and maintaining separate desktop and mobile websites. From the online marketing and SEO point of view, it involves twice the efforts, cost and time investment. Plus, the different versions of tablets and smartphones in and around 200 screen sizes urges you to make it optimized for all which is notably not possible.

This is when Responsive Web Design becomes a necessity where one fluid design becomes the very notion of developing and maintaining over 200 websites suiting all present and future screen sizes. Moreover, Google encourages responsively designed sites to imply higher search rankings and provide uniformity to your website, irrespective of the device that it is being viewed from.

So...Identify Breakpoints

A breakpoint in Ecommerce Website Design refers to a point where the display changes based on the screen size. So, firstly you’ll need to identify your break points and have a design for each  breakpoint. Recommend having at least three different breakpoints to cater for notebook/desktop, tablets, and mobile phones. This goes a long way in creating a strong and consistent brand image in the minds of your customers.

 

To Sum up, the “fit to all” design sometimes becomes a constraint for ecommerce businesses but definitely it is a force to be reckoned with today.

How Much Will It Cost To Build a Drupal Website?

Drupal is an open-source content management system with its greatest strengths- extensibility. Looking back, its API and module-driven architecture enable PHP developers to implement new functionality.

Three Factors Determining the Cost of Your Drupal Website

All the core features of Drupal providing the bulk of your site’s functionality, the next question is how much will it cost to build the Drupal site of my dreams? Well, the reply is “it depends” on three factors

Depended on Complexity

Using a standard Drupal distribution requires no custom development where the readily available “contrib” modules can often-times address everything that the site needs to do. However, before picking out modules and heading toward site development ensure that the chosen modules can all be used concurrently.

Depended on Design Elements

Once the basic feature set in any ecommerce website development is to build wireframes and other mock-ups, which is logo and a preferred colour scheme. Also, your web designers must be informed prior of whether you want separate desktop and mobile versions of your site, or a single responsive site design for the best display based on the device viewing it.

Depended on Implementation

Drupal implementation is a process of defining templates and system components to support the prescribed information architecture. Many content types and complicated workflows for content creation results in higher costs. This is why defining your project requirements and understanding of the CMS technology is important.

Summing up, a simple custom Drupal development, requires 6-8 weeks of work (or roughly $30,000 to $40,000), while a site of larger complexity may cost upward of $100,000. So, the next time you approach a professional web development company, be quick to check on clearly-defined requirements, design assets, and a firm budget to move forward with your project.

What’s Your Choice for Web Development: Drupal vs. Joomla

Content Management systems has tremendously grown over to assist you in managing different types of your content that includes text, videos, images, and many more. Arising as one-to-one marketing tools to help you in your sales, businesses find it hard to decide between the two popular ones: Drupal Website Development vs. Joomla Website Development.

Drupal vs. Joomla: Which One is Better

Both these Content Management Systems are highly competent and requires a step deeper to analyze their differences.

Technical Expertise: Drupal Content Management System is developer friendly but then requires technical expertise to handle it. On the other hand, the Joomla CMS does not expect a particular standard of technical expertise.

Highlights: While Joomla is a community driven platform best suited for social networking sites Drupal has a special set of taxonomy and tagging features along with organizing and categorizing the content.

Best-Suited Cases: Wanna run a complex website? Drupal is best suited choice, especially for ecommerce shopping cart. But Joomla is best suited for social networking and e-commerce with a comparatively less flexibility with regards to content and structure.

Caching: Drupal has a free downloadable plug-in called “Pressflow” that performs caching and enhances the performance. Whereas the latter one comes along with a system cache plugin by default that improves the speed of page loading.

Versions: Drupal has got 7 versions and the eighth one is awaited for release while Joomla has come up with 6 different versions.

Security: Compared to any systems in the aspect of security, Drupal Content Management System is the best. Nail It!

Support: Both Drupal and Joomla are equally competing but when compared on the lines of unofficial support; Joomla is considered to have a better support when compared to that of Drupal.

Summing up, both of these ecommerce solutions are equally competing with the availability of the vast number of additional extensions and modules. However, the decision clearly depends on the needs and budget. “More the budget, more the value and features”

Building Ecommerce Websites On Drupal? Tools That Come in Handy

Among the reputed content management systems, Drupal- being an open source CMS stands apart from the crowd with its numerous features and functionalities, and excellent collection of modules that comes in handy for ecommerce website development.

Ecommerce on Drupal is no exception. However, the tool you use depends on your business needs and timeline.

Drupal Ecommerce Tools That Come in Rescue

Ubercart: This fully fledged ecommerce system is designed to work perfectly. It offers the standard shopping cart features, several payment portal integration and shipping quote services that would automate your order workflow without having to write any code.

Plus, the dozens of related contributed modules and with over 18,000 live sites and hundreds of users and contributors - shopping cart development is a breeze.

Ecommerce API: Recently released version of ecommerce, this API defines the components required to build the ecommerce functionality. Compared to Ubercart, the pool of contributors and users are relatively small so you should feel comfortable doing some heavy lifting on your own and possible Drupal module development if you go this route.

Secure Pages Module: Secure Pages is a simple module that lets you protect all website paths using simple pattern matching. After SSL certificate installation, you can browse to the module's administration form to configure which pages ought to be secured on your site and add e-commerce functionality to your site.

The upcoming Drupal 7users should keep an eye on the Drupal Commerce project. With its great features, spearheaded by the former project lead of Ubercart  has attracted the attention of some of the top contributors to Drupal 7 with expertise in core API development, usability, and security. Consult a professional web development company, nyc for more information if you aren't sure what to secure.