There is a lot on the line when rolling out a new CMS. It powers your website, which is your primary marketing tool. Getting it right is important, and yet so many get it wrong. Many CMS projects end up delayed and over budget.  And then after a few years, the situation can deteriorate to the point where the organization tries again with a shiny new CMS that promises to solve all of its problems, and the cycle begins anew. How do you stop this from happening? In this ebook, you'll learn the top eight reasons why your CMS project might fail and how to overcome them ..read more

Migrating your content to a new CMS can feel daunting. You have years and years of content to sort through and move over, and you have no idea what obstacles might be hiding in the weeds. In the back of your mind, the question looms: “Do we really need all of this content?” You don’t want to waste time. But you also don’t want to miss anything important. After hundreds of successful migrations, we’ve developed processes that help streamline them, save time and money, and make your team’s life easier now and in the future. With Iowa’s Department of Transportation, we’ll show you an example of t ..read more

AI has wiggled its way into the design space the same way it has wiggled into every space—clumsily, in fits and starts, and with too much confidence. It will continue to evolve and improve, but for organizations desiring excellence, it’s not something you can trust or depend upon on its own. However, in the hands of professionals, AI-powered design tools can be useful. Here are some ways we’ve found it enhancing our work. Dummy text that’s better than “lorem ipsum” In page mockups and wireframes, you need text copy in the right place so people can give proper feedback on font, margins, and mor ..read more

Higher education institutions often have challenges with content discoverability and content governance. How do you keep a web platform unified with so many different schools, departments, and administrative units? How do you surface the content people seek in so many different contexts? During this webinar, panelists will draw on real-world examples from Harvard and Brown University. You will gain insight into how institutions navigate the complexities of varied stakeholder priorities while maintaining a coherent digital presence.   ..read more

"Which content type should I use?" This is a content editor's first question when entering content into a content management system (CMS) like Drupal. Sometimes, it's easy to answer. Sometimes not. What happens when they are presented with a list of twenty content types, and the content they want to create reasonably fits the definition of three different options? This type of fuzzy choice causes frustration in the editor, and over time, the website can get fragmented, polluted with duplicate content, and harder to organize. This fragmentation makes an editor's job more difficult and will even ..read more

Drupal 11 was released on August 2nd, 2024. A lot has changed since Drupal 10, and a lot of preliminary work has been done that will help with Drupal Starshot. Besides improvements made to CKEditor integration, a revamp of the Field UI, performance improvements, and revisions for taxonomy terms, several big changes have been included to help the ambitious site builder. Administration UI improvements with new Navigation The new navigation is now an experimental module in Drupal core. It represents the summation of much user testing and research. The new vertical menu can be expanded ..read more

The goal of Single Directory Components (SDC) is to simplify front-end development workflows and improve the maintainability of Drupal themes. And they are ready to use right now. Organizing your Drupal front-end with SDC promises to reduce bugs, enable rapid prototyping, allow easier testing of new features, and lower the development burden for both back-end and front-end developers. The result: increased ROI on your development efforts. Modules and themes have already started shipping with SDC, and these components will be a big part of Drupal Starshot in the future. The benefits of using th ..read more

Resolving merge conflicts is a great advanced part of Composer’s documentation, but we’ve found that it leaves many readers more confused than confident. If there is a composer.lock conflict, all you get is this error message: $ git pull origin main Auto-merging composer.lock CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in composer.lock Recorded preimage for 'composer.lock' Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result. Thanks, git! But how do you fix these conflicts? First, you must know what Composer commands were run on your own branch. In most cases, it’s running composer requir ..read more

This article is the second part of our series on using Jira. Previously, we talked about choosing between Scrum and Kanban. Before diving in further, we need to cover another choice you’ll make when creating a project. Will it be company-managed or team-managed? Company Managed Projects Company-managed projects are like orchestras—structured, harmonious, and with a clear conductor guiding the melody. They're ideal for projects requiring strict governance and standardized workflows. Here are the highlights:   Structure and Standardization: These projects follow a standardized ap ..read more

Long gone are the days of using HTML tables for page layouts. That time almost seems shrouded in myth. One of the (many) reasons tables fell out of use was the advent of responsive design to meet the needs of different contexts and screen sizes. Tables are rigid. Their presence naturally hampers the responsiveness of a website to conform to a smaller screen size. But tables are still useful. In some cases, they are necessary. Tables are an important resource for any organization that wants to communicate tabular data on the web. They often serve as a bridge between traditional spreadsheets and ..read more