Something I've enjoyed since starting work on the Smart Date module has been seeing it grow and evolve in ways I wouldn't have expected, in response to the community. I had three specific goals in the beginning: a more "app-like" and intuitive widget, natural language, deduplicated date range output, and more efficient storage of dates and times. Soon after its release, requests started to come in for additional features: calendar integration, repeating events, support for timezones, and more.

[This content was originally published in the Digital Echidna Blog on Nov 20, 2019]

A slow site has negative impacts on search engine optimization, can increase bounce rate, and reduce site conversions. Taking a surgical approach and understanding the cause of the problems can help you effectively ‘treat’ the site and alleviate the symptoms. 

[This content was originally published in the Digital Echidna Blog on October 31, 2019]

A slow site has negative impacts on search engine optimization, can increase bounce rate, and lower site conversions. Taking a surgical approach and understanding the cause of the problems can help you effectively ‘treat’ the site and alleviate the symptoms.

*This blog is part three in Martin Anderson-Clutz's ongoing series devoted to site speed performance issues. 

[This content was originally published in the Digital Echidna Blog on August 6, 2019]

In the previous installment, I talked conceptually about how to approach testing and what we are trying to learn. This time we’re going to get our hands dirty and start collecting data.

[This content was originally published in the Digital Echidna Blog on July 8, 2019]

Just as with medicine, when you’re trying to fix site speed issues, you want to ensure that you’re curing the cause -- not just dealing with a symptom. An issue may present itself in one way, but the root cause can be something different, and a key component of taking a surgical approach to site speed issues is to make sure we take a moment to understand the challenge that’s before us.

[This content was originally published in the Digital Echidna Blog on May 15, 2020]

There is a lot of excitement in the Drupal community about the release of Drupal 9. In particular, one of the most appealing elements is how the transition to Drupal 9 promises to be the easiest major upgrade in more than a decade.

In reminiscing with other community members about some painful upgrades from long ago, it got me thinking about how the nature of the majority of Drupal modules has changed.

One of the strengths of Drupal has long been its ability to easily model complex content architectures. The ability to quickly configure and manage a variety of content types with distinct collections of fields and other configurations makes Drupal an excellent choice for structured and robust handling of a multitude of different kinds of data.

When I think about the admin experience of Drupal, I often think about context. 

As a longtime Drupal user, it's easy enough for me to know that wherever I am in a Drupal site, there's a predictable spot in the admin menu where I can select a content type and start creating content. For people new to Drupal, or even new to the concept of managing website content, this is nowhere near as obvious. Training will help, but we can also employ the principle of multimodal interaction to provide additional options in ways that will be more obvious.

The JAMstack seems to be what's getting a lot of press lately, but there's actually a lot to be excited about in the Drupal technology stack of late.