Drupal Talk

This references my post – Production Change Request – Modules for SEO.

I am now installing and enabling choice modules for SEO. Some of the big issues that I have read about concern path redirection, aliasing and multilingual capability. So I am going to avoid pathauto and global redirect and others that are similar. There also is a warning about using the Title Module and Meta Tags together as they do some of the same things. Buyer beware.

SEO is important of course, but since I’m aiming at a niche market so to speak, it isn’t so critical that I “beat” the competition in page rankings as it would be in other industries. Do your research and check out all the great SEO sites available out there to customize a plan for yourself. Will add to this post in a bit.

Well, I didn’t get as much done today as I would have liked. Seems to be that way a lot. Aim high I suppose.

Tomorrow I will be finishing up the SEO stuff. Installing the modules on Prod, configing. And adding the info from Google and Bing. Those are some of the real keys. But…

The number one key is content. Make sure that you have something to say, that it is relevant and informative. I never expected this blog to be anything more than a sounding board for my ideas on what to do with Drupal. And while it has succeeded there, it has also attracted some attention. Which, I would like to thank those folk for. That in itself has helped me hone out some of my ideas.

This podcast episode is a great listen if you want to learn about contributing to Drupal (contrib and core). Make sure to check it out: http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupalizeme-podcast-10-becoming-drupal-...

m.gifford posted a photo:

m.gifford posted a photo:

m.gifford posted a photo:

m.gifford posted a photo:

Multi-site Drupal Core at Hermit Studio

There hasn’t been a lot of general studio news to report lately that hasn’t been touched on in the various other project division blogs we have. Since Mr Rabbit’s Big Adventure came to Hermit Studio we have also been working on moving our Web Hosting from a Shared Server to a Virtual Private Server or VPS.

We now own over 50 domains and plan to upgrade our sites to using a Multi-site Drupal Core instead of bespoke PHP script or WordPress blogs. As and when we rework each site, we shall move them over to the new VPS. This will let the websites run faster and take more traffic. Of course any client websites will also benefit from the upgrade too.

We have fallen in love with Drupal and we now want to specialise in CMS Web Development, whilst using our PHP skills to customise things when we need it. This is a big step for Hermit Studio toward expanding our web-presence over the coming year.

Today I am working on getting my Prod site to a point where I can leave it up and running in a relatively functional state while I work on the real theming dev work in my sandbox. I’ll also begin working on some SEO stuff today for the prod site.

I guess that it is worth mentioning that while my Prod site does exist, I haven’t mentioned the URL  Nor the nature of the site. It isn’t really ready for prime time yet. It is close but not quite. and when I say that, I mean in a relatively workable state. The prod site itself will still take months before I am completely through with it. But soon it will be at a point where I’ll feel more comfortable with its availability.

I do plan on working on some SEO stuff today. If you want to learn about SEO, analytics and all that, just google the term. I have learned a lot from this (and the other two blogs I keep) blog and its very helpful info for Google and Bing. If you want to learn this stuff, start a WordPress blog. They are free and the experience has been a lot of fun.

So, I have a base Adaptive Theme subtheme enabled for the site. It is very bare, almost like the Stark theme, but fine for what I need right now. Now that I have that in place and I am comfortable with what those who might stumble on it may see, I’ll be working on the real theming in the sandbox.

And all that begs a question; how much do you really keep sand and quality in line? if you do it all manually, you might get a benefit from the repeated process of implementation. But it also means a lot of work. My ideas are based around refreshing quality from sand via a file copy of the VM files. I think i might script a copy. i’ll work out the details and post later.

Drupal aims to be “the best mobile CMS on the planet”. Although, mobile-friendly sites can already be created in Drupal 7, Drupal 8 will increase performance and introduce “new features” that will turn Drupal totally mobilicious. Drupal 8 will also radically improve content creation and sitebuilder tools and a UX strategy  has been developed for that purpose.

At DrupalCon Chicago, Dries announced that Drupal 8 will feature a  number of major “core initiatives”. Drupal most important improvements will be:

Mobile-friendly administration tools – Users will be able to create content or administer a Drupal site while on a mobile device.

Responsive themes – All core templates will be converted to HTML5 so that a single HTML source will use CSS3 media queries to respond to different device capabilities;

Front-end performance improvements – According to Steve Souders, the web performance optimization guru, 80% of web performance happens in the front end. This is, in fact, the biggest concern for Drupal developers, since it actually permits large speed gains in a site.

Web services for native app integration - Drupal 8 can be used as the backend for mobile application development. Native apps can be a front end that talks to Drupal using the Services module. Services are a standard solution of integrating external applications with Drupal.

Drupal working groups are working hard on the next version of Drupal, setting up Drupal 8 on a modern web development framework. Being Drupal an open source software maintained and developed by a community of 630,000+ users and developers, nothing will  can’t do any of it without the help of all these passionate volunteers. If you want to be part of it, join in on discussions on groups.drupal.org. And help out the drupal.org.