Category Development

The Wonderful World of Browser Support

When discussing a project with a client, we find it is important to ensure that all parties involved understand what browsers will be supported, and what happens on those which are not. Clients may have a general understanding of what browser support entails, but it can lead to incorrect expectations about what a project's supported browsers are. Even if browser support is well understood there are many variables between platforms, features, fallbacks, and more that should be discussed at the outset of a project.

Automating Bower library integration with Grunt

Grunt and Bower are great command line tools for automating tedious front-end workflow tasks, and quickly adding libraries to a project. With Grunt we can define a series of tasks such as concatenating files, compressing images, running scripts, and so on. Bower is self-described as a “package manager for the web”. It provides an easy way to install a wide variety of libraries into a project, from twitter bootstrap, jQuery, font-awesome, and even your own personal repositories.

Check Your PHP Version

Making sure your Drupal is up to date is a good start but often people forget about keeping PHP up to date. PHP 5.3 has reached end of life and will no longer have any more security updates in July 2014. It is important to make sure your site is running on a supported version. Please note, it is also important to make sure all your server's other software are up to date (i.e. Apache/Nginx, MySQL, OS, etc...).

Test Wrangling

I was recently responsible for building a suite of Behat-based tests for an existing site using the excellent Behat Drupal Extension. After initially wrapping my head around Behat with some simple tests, I moved on to some more complex tests for the site's business logic, involving the creation of nodes and the voting API.

Escape Your Way to More Meaningful Class Names

As part of a recent movement to think critically about our front-end best practices, many of us are reconsidering the merits of presentational class names, previously frowned upon as “unsemantic”. Building on these ideas, I’ll show how character escapes, a little-known feature of CSS, can help make these presentational classes both more versatile and more readable.

How to make your search show spellcheck suggestion

When a user is trying to search something on your website, you want to help them find what they want quickly. We are human, we make mistakes. When users make a typo, we should try to guess what they are looking for so that they don't have to type it again. Especially when more users use their smart phone/tablet to browse the web. It is much harder for them to re-type their searches. Goal: If the user's search didn't return anything due to spelling error, give a suggestion and list the suggestion search result. Solution:

Drupal, Security & Apocalyptic Avoidance

So you've got a shiny new website. It's been built on Drupal, the best Open Source CMS platform on the planet. You can easily manage all the content on your website. It's responsive and works beautifully on all devices. It's so nice not to need your agency, or web shop anymore isn't it - you have the power! But wait! one day you wake up, pour yourself a cup of joe and login to your site to post that press release that needs to go out today... and see this unnerving warning: