Drupal

Choosing the right framework for your website when you have a small or midsize business (SMB) can set you up for success as your business grows. Making the right choice can ease growing pains and lower the future cost of your website.

Coming back to The Worx Company and reminding myself of why we do what we do, I was encouraged to come across this latest article Drupal Surpasses 1 Million Websites, mainly because we are a Drupal-centric shop. The Worx Company has been using Drupal back in 2005, and I remember wondering then what the big deal was, and fast forward to today, they are still going strong.

Competing against a record number of entries, the Media and Community Relations department at the University of Science and Arts brought home seven awards for media excellence from the 2012 Oklahoma College Public Relations Association (OCPRA) conference.
Two projects scored second place awards.

Drupal Made Easy

Here at the Worx, we love Drupal. We have been using it since 2005 and are fully commited to it. In fact, in 2008 we made the decision that all new projects that we accept will be done only in Drupal. This has worked very well for our clients as well as for us.

My client wanted to be able to search their list manager archives (uses mailman) with Solr. We already had a pretty major investment in Drupal with about 80K PDF files. In the past, each of the different databases were managed by separate dtSearch indexes. With the new, Drupal system, we are now able to consolidate everything into one master index. With the special ‘faceting’ that is provided within Solr/Drupal, it becomes very easy to drill from the general request down to the specifics.

Websites are a critical component for any business striving to succeed in today’s competitive landscape. But just having a website is not enough, you need invested knowledge and expertise into the site design for the most efficient and effective online presence possible. Every website has the potential to reach its target audience and maximize its return on investment, but not all websites succeed. It is the sites that are consistently using professional Drupal website design components to exude credibility and trust that experience true online success.

Here at the Worx, we often build Drupal websites as intranets. These have on many occasions, become full office automation centers and allow for faster work and better communications. But, they are also VERY custom and require a large degree of testing by the customer as we move towards production.

There are a variety of 'tests' that an application must go through before it becomes production. Most of this is done behind the scenes by the developers as they work their way through the development of your new application.

If you've ever used the drupal views module, chances are at some point you've needed to suppress any output until AFTER the user has made a selection from one of your exposed filters.  Views actually DOES make this possible, but it's not exactly self-evident.  I'm going to run you through a quick "howto" on this as I'm sure many people have needed it at some point.

Currently there's a pretty in depth discussion surrounding hosting install profiles on drupal.org and what the legal/other implications of such a thing are.  I feel this is an important issue to highlight to the community at large, and since I feel rather strongly about it, I'm using this forum to point it out, and also to focus a bit on my own feelings concerning this.  For those of you who would like some context, read this post on drupal.org.

It's about freaking time!  As a professional web development shop, sometimes your website can suffer from the "cobbler's kids" effect, namely you're so busy working on other people's websites, that you haven't taken any time for your own.  I've been working to remedy that for a little while now, but I'm always up for trying something shiney and new, so... I decided to do it in the (fairly) newly released Panels 3 module. For those of you who have not yet tried Panels I can offer no stronger encouragement than to say it is the best thing since cck and views.