At DrupalCon Barcelona 2024, Dries Buytaert, the creator and project lead of Drupal, delivered his 40th DriesNote, in which he shared an exciting vision of where the platform is heading, with a strong focus on Drupal CMS (the product being developed as part of the Starshot Initiative). As part of the Starshot Initiative’s Leadership Team, I’m the Marketing Lead, working to align the positioning of the product with the needs of our target audiences: primarily marketers, content teams, and site builders, but also evaluators, designers, and developers.    The Drupal Starshot Leadership ..read more

Governments have to meet high standards when it comes to their digital presence. They need to meet user expectations and evolve as public services change. They must be secure, accessible, and inclusive. And they need to comply with various national, provincial, regional, and municipal requirements. On top of all that, they can’t cost too much! It’s a tall order. But the potential for growth and efficiency is considerable for governments who are prepared to invest in their digital platforms. This article explores the challenges and opportunities of government websites, as well as sharing some ..read more

As a Drupal developer, when I worked on my first WordPress theme the first thing I noticed was the messy combination of HTML and PHP in the same file. In Drupal I use Twig to keep the two separate while maintaining communication between them, saving myself a big headache in the process! So the question is, is it possible to use Twig in WordPress? The answer is yes—with a little help from Timber.   This step-by-step guide explains how you can use Timber and Twig together to code cleaner, faster, and smarter in WordPress. It’s ideal if you’re already familiar with PHP, Composer, Wordpress ..read more

In my work for the Promote Drupal initiative, I’ve been reflecting on what motivates people to adopt Drupal. As someone who has run a Drupal agency for years, I'm often asked why our company invests in open source and what the business model is. At the same time, I’ve been reading the book Platform Revolution. It explores technology platforms—especially apps and digital marketplaces—as a business model to disrupt a market by connecting vendors and consumers. Examples range from Airbnb to SoundCloud. This disruption isn’t always positive. There are positive and negative social effects of disru ..read more

This month I went to the charming town of Olds, Alberta to attend #PSEWeb, Canada’s renowned higher education conference. It was the perfect setting for an informative conference attended by those working in the post-secondary education digital space, whether in marketing, communications, or tech. Special thanks to Simon Labonne, Digital Content Specialist at McGill University for the beautiful cover photo that captured the Olds College Campus.  This year PSEWeb provided virtual tickets, so that institutions and their staff could attend remotely. Whether you missed this conference o ..read more

Usability testing asks real users to interact with a digital product to see what works and what doesn't. It provides valuable insights for fine tuning the user experience. If you want to build an inclusive digital experience (and you should!) then at least some of your testers should have disabilities. You might be thinking: “can’t I just run accessibility tests myself?” It’s certainly a good idea to do that and fix as many issues as possible before putting your site in front of real users. But ticking off WCAG criteria isn’t enough. Accessibility is a complex, human-centered issue that can’t ..read more

CKEditor 5 was introduced in Drupal 9.3 and is now the default WYSIWYG editor in Drupal 10. It’s a complete overhaul of its predecessor — every single aspect was redesigned for a vastly improved content editing experience. But the power and flexibility of the editor’s new framework comes with a cost: a sharp learning curve for plugin developers. Luckily, the ever-resourceful Drupal community has come to the rescue with various contrib modules to enhance CKEditor 5 in Drupal 10. In this article, we’ll be diving into one of my favourites for lessening the learning curve: the CKEditor5 Embedded ..read more

Designing for cognitive accessibility benefits everyone. Ethically, it's crucial to accommodate disabilities since people with disabilities are often underrepresented and marginalized. What's more, you could be missing a large market of consumers. An estimated 27% of Canadians aged 15+ (probably more in reality due to missed diagnosis and misdiagnosis) have disabilities that affect their daily activities. Almost 40% of these disabilities are related to mental health, 21% to learning, and 18% to memory. All users benefit from cognitive accessibility, regardless of whether they have a disabilit ..read more

When I first got into web development after graduating from university, I got excited about how easy it was to build a website. A bit of knowledge goes a long way. I learned HTML, CSS, Ruby on Rails, and PHP, and tried all kinds of platforms and content management systems. Sometimes it felt hard and sometimes easy. But it was those “aha” moments when I could prototype a site in an afternoon that really got me excited. Which is why I think Drupal Starshot is such a promising initiative. The goal of Starshot is to create an out-of-the-box version of Drupal that fast-tracks people through buildi ..read more

We are thrilled to announce that Evolving Web has been honored with the Social Impact Award in the Inaugural Pantheon Partner Awards for our work on the Planned Parenthood Direct website.  The winners were announced at the Pantheon Partner dinner, held during DrupalCon Portland on May 6, 2024. Congratulations to the other winners who took to the stage with us:  Elevated Third – Partner of the Year Award WebMD Ignite – Innovation Award HoundER – Rookie of the Year Award Forum One – Customer First Award Danny Pfeiffer – Friends of Pantheon Partners Award Pantheon’s Partner Awards re ..read more