DDEV is a tool that allows developers to work with their own sandboxed version of a website. It spins up a set of containers that behave like a regular server-hosted copy of the site. The local version gets a nice URL, has its own database, and can run PHP all in the container—regardless of whether the host machine has that software installed.  While DDEV is pretty ubiquitious in CMS communities like Drupal, WordPress, and Typo3, it's not as familiar to developers working in Node.js, Python, or other decoupled setups. This article is for those developers. What is DDEV? Straight from the d ..read more

Web experiences depend on many diverse elements: who is using a site, their goals, device, and connection speeds, other expectations, ability, and even mood. And that's before we get to the myriad of factors within each unique project. Because of this, "It depends" is a perfectly viable answer to many questions regarding a website, though it may be annoying to hear. So, let's explore context to understand better the impact of different situations on crafting inclusive and adaptable systems. What is context, what types of context are there, and why does this all matter? Why does context matter ..read more

You’ve done your due diligence and secured the necessary budget. Nearly everyone in your organization is excited about the redesign, and you're eagerly awaiting the initial kickoff. But now is not the time to wait around. Preparations for a successful website redesign should begin long before the official project kickoff. Gather the required files and information Your agency partner will likely provide a list of things they need before phase one of your project begins. The earlier you collect these things, the better. Gathering the following information will allow your partner to form question ..read more

Component-based web development has become the de facto approach for new Drupal projects. Componentizing your UI has multiple advantages, like modular development, improved automated testing, easier maintenance, code reusability, better collaboration, and more. Because of these benefits, we led the effort to create a component solution for Drupal core: Single Directory Components (SDC). As part of that suite of modules, we created CL Server. Initially developed for the CL Components module (a contrib precursor of SDC in core), it eventually became the basis for SDC in core.  In coordinati ..read more

We've been working on improving the administration UI for Drupal and have already talked about our prototypes and testing process. A big part of this has been a redesign of the toolbar. But Drupal sites are used for different verticals, scenarios, team sizes, team makeup, features, and more. To make the new toolbar useful, it needs to be flexible and customizable. Our latest work has focused on implementing the backend for administrators to manage the new toolbar. You can try out these changes right now by installing the Navigation module. The goal is to make this a part of Drupal core by vers ..read more

Government websites are littered with PDFs. They force users to download large files, print out forms, and pinch, zoom, and squint on mobile devices. The information in PDFs can be hard to find using search engines, and it's sometimes out of date. PDFs keep important information from your constituents, cause barriers, and create friction in the user experience. But you’re still creating them. You have hundreds, maybe thousands, and the number goes up every day. Addressing this dilemma might seem overwhelming, but it’s not impossible. Find out the why and the how of paring back PDFs.  In t ..read more

Our brains are great at identifying patterns and outliers, but this becomes harder when data isn’t in some logical order. Luckily, as developers, we can use tools to sort data into any order we desire. The basics of array.sort() In Javascript, every single array has a sort() method. This takes all the items in the array and rearranges them into the default order. Consider the code below: const fruits = ['strawberry', 'banana', 'tomato', 'apple']; fruits.sort(); // ['apple', 'banana', 'strawberry', 'tomato'] The sort method rearranged the items in the array into alphabetical ..read more

A website isn't a filing cabinet, but somehow, yours has become a PDF repository. No one sets out to build a digital monument to the PDF. How did this happen? And what are you going to do about it? Why PDFs are a problem PDFs are a barrier between you and your users. They are text-heavy and dense and usually lack their host site's visual context and navigability. Don't serve your audience PDF content that could otherwise be a web page. Good old-fashioned HTML is more accessible, easier to update and maintain, and provides a better overall user experience.  Accessibility. Many PDFs are no ..read more

A design system can be challenging enough to create and maintain when a single team uses it for one specific purpose but what happens if your organization is large? What happens when the design system has to serve not only a single website but several different websites and applications and must also extend to print materials and social media posts? And what do you run into when multiple teams of designers, content authors, and developers need to use the system for different purposes? We've helped create and implement design systems at organizations of all sizes and have experience with design ..read more

Git is a very powerful tool, but the interface can be imposing. Many improvements have been made to Git over the years to help address this, but for compatibility reasons, many of these are not the default.  However, Git can be configured to opt-in to these improvements. Taking a few minutes to configure Git can make your life easier, from improving diffs, better integrating with your IDE, making a shortcut for long commands, and beyond. All configurations are added via the git config command and are saved in a file in your home directory called ~/.gitconfig. This file can be copied betwe ..read more