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Jun
11

DrupalCon Follow-up – Future of Views

One of our favorite sessions at DrupalCon Portland was the Future of Views from Tim Plunkett. Since we returned last week, this session – which addressed upcoming changes for Views in Drupal 8 – has been on our minds; so we decided to recap a few high points along with thoughts and opinions from the New Target team. If you were in the session and have additional comments, please chime in!

The most prominent change is that Views will no longer require a separate download and installment. Drupal 8 will include Views as part of the core which essentially enables it as a default setting for all websites. Our team considers this a major improvement… particularly, because Drupal 8 will simplify the process for overriding the default views template and because Views will be stored as configuration files.

The Views bulk operations (VPO) has been a helpful module operating as an add-on for Views. As part of the core Drupal 8, various operations like changing entities and updating nodes can be done in bulk by using VBO.
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May
21

DrupalCon Portland – Drush on the go!

From The Code Corner

Scenario: It is Wednesday, May 22nd and the Views vulnerability patch is released in middle of Matt Chapman’s session on “Making Drupal the best REST server for Single-Page Apps.” Can’t call home, office lines are dead, nobody is responding. You have to handle this on your own, Special Agent Burt Macklin.

Challenge Accepted!

1. Slowly pull out your smartphone, launch SSH app (ConnectBot) and connect to development server.

2. Once shelled in, run drush up -n | ‘SECURITY-UPDATE’ to get a list of pending security updates. It should only be the newly released Views update.

3. Run drush and create backup of database. drush sql-dump –gzip –result-file=/var/www/yoursite/filename-$(date +%m%d%y-%H).sql.gz
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May
8

3-2-1 GO! Drupal 7 Deployment Checklist

From The Code Corner

Over the years, we have launched over 100+ Drupal sites and when it’s time to deploy we use our time-tested comprehensive deployment checklist.

Each site is very specific so the list generated for each deployment is different depending on the website’s modules and features. From a small 1,000 node site to an enterprise Drupal implementation with 100,000+ nodes, these are a few of the most common deployment checklist items.

Did we miss anything? Leave us a note in comments and we will add them to our list here. (PDF)

=== Drupal 7 Deployment Checklist === … »

Apr
9

Setting Website Goals

From The Think Tank

Time for Spring Cleaning

It is April and in lieu of spring cleaning, this is a great time to establish fresh goals for your website. Every year methods for building your web presence, reaching new audiences, and providing benefits to site visitors are being revamped and improved. To help keep your website relevant to your audience, we pulled together a few potential goals you can get started on this spring.

Usability Testing

An increasingly common and very successful method for determining how to meet your customers’ or organization members’ online needs is to perform usability testing. And there’s no time like the present to test your website with real website visitors. You can uncover valuable market validation from users to indicate whether the navigation, page layouts, design, and functionality are intuitive, effective, and usable—or where they may require revisions.

Test calls-to-action, content presentation, and site navigation to confirm that your website is user-friendly through sites such as TrymyUI.com let you do this for a nominal fee – or for more in-depth results, work with our Certified Usability Analysts. … »

Mar
22

Website Redesign and Usability Testing for Local Association

From The Design Desk

New Target recently completed website usability testing and a website redesign for the National Hospice & Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO). They approached New Target looking for the best way to tackle their website design and development project for their main association website, www.nhpco.org, while improving integration and site features to offer their members an exceptional user experience.

We began their project with a strategic planning phase that included usability testing. The results from these tests along with interviews of NHPCO stakeholders informed our reorganization and redesign of the website look and feel. The features desired by members and NHPCO staff, along with the discoveries made during requirements gathering about the future of the organization led us to choose a Drupal content management system. Through Drupal’s strong, flexible framework we were able to provide a foundation for the website that will allow NHPCO to continue integrating the site with features, third parties, and microsites as the organization continues to grow and expand. … »

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Our services are focused on five areas of expertise:

Within each of these areas of expertise, we offer services and leading products that meet the ever-evolving online needs of our clients throughout the Washington, D.C. area and nationwide.

Whether it's the strategy behind translating a concept into reality, appealing to a demographic through cutting edge design, integrating a content management system with CRM customer database for a personalized experience, providing 99.9% uptime in web hosting, or driving site traffic and visitor conversion through online marketing, we provide our clients with full-spectrum web services.