Drupal 8 Review: Part-2

Drupal 8 Review: Part-2

This is the second in a series of 3 blogs discussing Drupal 8, including its installation & configuration process, first impressions, and the pros and cons of upgrading to Drupal 8. As a recap, we have just installed Drupal 8 on top of the current local MAMP configuration. Here we explain some of our first impressions looking through the Drupal 8 site on our locally hosted Drupal 8 Core site using MAMP.

Semi-Responsive Menus & Content Management

One of the items we noticed right off-the-bat was the responsive menus. This was an interesting new feature which, when used on a mobile device allows users to easily update and administer their Drupal 8 site on their tablet or smartphone. We’ll chat a bit more later about theming and the built-in responsive Drupal 8 modules. Figures 1 & 2 below show how extending and compressing the screen allow the menu’s size to scale.

Figure 1: Top-Admin Menu

Figure 2: Side Admin Menu

Content Development and CKEditor

Yes, they made Drupal 8 a bit more “Content Manager” focused and less developer-oriented. Including the WYSIWYG Editor, CKEditor as a default text editor is one way to show Drupal’s attempt to become more content manager and editor focused.

Drupal 7 and all previous versions of Drupal required you to install and configure the CKEditor Module in order to enable these abilities to edit pages and documentation. Drupal 8 saves you the time, and provides this functionality up-front as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: CKEdtior & Content Management in Drupal 8

Users can also directly access their site assets & files (such as images used for the site) under the new “Files” tab. This is similar functionality already built into WordPress.

Themes

The “Appearance” section of Drupal 8 provides you with the capability to Install & Configure themes. There are currently 702 Themes and Theme Options available for Drupal 7, compared with only 124 options for Drupal 8 with themes ranging from complete 1.0 releases to those still in the Alpha and Beta testing stages. Drupal 8 takes full advantage of HTML 5 in theme development compared with Drupal 7’s wide use of XHTML. Themes in Drupal 8 use the Twig framework for building and developing front-end themes.

Building responsive sites is key to increasing your site’s overall search ability and improving your site’s SEO. Drupal 8 comes out-of-the-box with two modules which help enable responsive sites, “Responsive Image” which provides an image formatter and breakpoint mappings, and “Breakpoint” which helps track of height / width / resolution breakpoints required for a site to scale across multiple screen types (i.e. Mobile).

An interesting note, Drupal 8 has dropped support for IE 6, 7, & 8 with its use of jQuery 2.0, HTML5 & CSS3. The wide use of HTML5, jQuery 2.0, and CSS3 by Drupal 8 has modernized the U.I. of the CMS by leaps and bounds.

Extend (Modules)

The Modules section (now called “Extend” in Drupal 8) features similar functionality to that in Drupal 7. Users can install modules using a URL or uploading the file directly. All modules installed are stored in the “Modules” folder in the Drupal 8 file application. After installing a module, the user can enable and configure the module, or turn it on / off as required. There is also a new Drupal 8 section for “Experimental Modules.” Experimental Modules are included in the build for testing purposes only (they are not fully vetted) for possible integration into Core. It is recommended not to enable these modules on a production site as they may expose security flaws or functionality issues.

While scanning available modules for Drupal 8, we noticed many of the popular modules in Drupal 7 are currently going through a development update in order to be compatible with Drupal 8. As of September 2016, there are approximately 12,296 modules built for Drupal 7. This is compared to only 2,103 modules built for Drupal 8. Many of the Drupal 8 modules are still in the Alpha, Beta or first release phases.

Figure 4: Module Installation & Configuration Screen

Documentation Updates

Much of the Drupal 8 documentation is still in the process of being developed. If you visit the Drupal 8 documentation center here: https://www.drupal.org/docs/8 you’ll find a lot of empty pages. This is in-part due to the Drupal Documentation Migration occurring and the relative “newness” of Drupal 8. A lot of the documentation under Drupal 7 covers sections regarding Drupal 8 (strange this is not all compiled under the /docs/8/ path), but there is some documentation out there:https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/choosing-drupal-version/overview. Acquia has a better documentation library, so I would recommend searching their site first before going to the drupal.org site for Drupal 8 documentation information.

Performance

A lot of performance for Drupal 8 is based around the idea of “caching”. Caching allows Drupal to generate pages or page elements one time, and store these pages / elements in memory so that it can be easily retrieved. Rather than making constant calls to the backend Database, this enables you to have all your elements / pages ready after a user accesses them once.

Varnish continues to be one of the best caching reverse proxies for Drupal 8, caching many of your static assets such as images, JavaScript, CSS, and anonymous user requests.

A new functionality for site caching appeared in Drupal 8, the Cache Context API was introduced to cache individual blocks or pages through configuration rather than coding. This allowed you to cache specific blocks within the page appearing the same for all users. For instance, if you have a block on your screen with a calendar or blog updates, you can cache this for all users.

Despite all its hype, there are some initial benchmarks with Drupal 8 showing it to be a slower solution than 7. Because Drupal 8 was architected to be more Object Oriented (OOP) than Drupal 7, a lot of the PHP functionality is broken out into individual files. This requires Drupal 8 to scan these PHP files to find the functionality it needs to execute. Thank you Jeff Geerling for revealing this information: Jeff Geerling: Yes, Drupal 8 is slower than Drupal 7 – here’s why.

Views

Love it or hate it, Views is now part of the Drupal Core install. Views is a query builder. It allows you to pull certain types of data and present them in a section of your screen through a block or a separate page. Since its continued popularity and use by many contributed modules in Drupal 7, the Views module has been integrated into the Drupal Core code. Overall the Views module acts very similar to Drupal 7’s View add-on. The User Interface allows you to create pages or blocks with specific data displaying in the view. The figure below provides a UI of a sample content-based View I created in Drupal 8.

Figure 5: Views Configuration Page

Popular Modules…Gone?!

Interestingly enough, the Drupal community made an attempt to de-focus Drupal 8 from Blogs, Polls, and PHP Embeds, focusing more on Content Management. The reasons the community left these modules out varies, but on the whole the community decided were not adding anything to the value of Drupal.

Blogs: You can either install the un-supported Blog module into your Drupal 8 instance, or create a new Content Type and include custom fields associated with that type.

Polls: This is now available as a contributed project / module you can install. It does not come with the Core install any longer.
PHP Filter Module: The PHP Filter module allowed you to include PHP snippets in posts. Its no longer a part of Drupal Core, for more reasons than one. But, one of the main issues is that it was a security risk if it was enabled. Providing users the ability to embed code directly into a page.

Conclusion

At this point, we’ve seen both the installation process and our first initial impressions of Drupal 8, including functionality built into the system and functionality no longer apart of the CMS. For the final blog in this series, we’ll review the Pros & Cons of Drupal 8 and provide feedback to help you make an informed decision on upgrading your website to the Drupal 8 CMS.

Drupal 8 Review: Part-1

Drupal 8 Review: Part-1

Introduction to the Blog Series

I wanted to put together a series of blogs covering Drupal 8, including the installation process (mostly for a local machine), our first impressions, and finally the benefits for organizations to upgrade or to just keep Drupal 8 “on their radar”.

Drupal 8 is Drupal’s long awaited upgrade from the popular Drupal 7. Drupal 8 began development after Drupal 7 was released and subsequently stabilized. The Alpha releases for Drupal 8 began around May 2013. As the core team received feedback, Drupal 8 was re-coded, updated, and released again. After much trial and error and following the Alpha & Beta process, Drupal 8 was officially released November 19, 2015 with the first full-on stable release uploaded to the drupal.org site for download.

So it was released in November, 2015…why are we reviewing it now? As an Acquia partner and longtime promoter of Drupal, we enjoy experimenting and testing new systems and modules. There have been quite a few updates since the initial release, and modules (the life blood of Drupal and extending core functionality) are finally being released for Drupal 8. Many sites are still using Drupal 7, but since its release several months ago, more are beginning to use Drupal 8…err well at least many of the organizations using Drupal 7 are beginning discussions on such topics as “Should we start planning for Drupal 8?”

The other reason we are reviewing Drupal 8 now: I wanted our team to have time to absorb Drupal 8, compare it to Drupal 7, and understand the design decisions of Drupal 8.

This series of blogs to be released over the next week would cover the installation process for Administrators & Developers for testing on their local machines, our first impressions (what we see in Drupal 8) and pros & cons of upgrading to Drupal 8 and subsequent benefits for organizations. We split them into 3 blogs so not to overwhelm the reader, with the first one being the most technical and focusing on the installation of Drupal.

Environment Configuration

Let’s begin our Drupal 8 journey with a review of the installation and underlying tech stack we used for testing Drupal 8. As with Drupal 7, Drupal 8 follows a similar Content Management System (CMS) configuration: Web server + Application Server + Database Server. Figure 1 provides an overview of the current environment I am mimicking on my local machine to host Drupal 8.

Figure 1: Typical Drupal Architecture Using MAMP

The installation I used for this evaluation was pretty straight forward, I used MAMP basic (version 3.5.1) as the core environmental component for hosting Drupal. MAMP provides users the ability to create a localhost, providing the Apache Web Server, PHP, and MySQL stack required to run CMSs such as Drupal / WordPress / Joomla. I used the following configurations on my Mac OSX system:

  • Apache v2.2.29
  • MySQL v5.5.38
  • PHP 7.0.8 (to be fair, Drupal requires PHP 5.5.9, but I wanted to see how it would run on top of PHP 7.x)

You can also host Drupal using the WAMP tool for Windows or LAMP for Linux.

To make life a bit simpler, after starting MAMP on my local machine, we completed the following configurations in order to prevent any hiccups when undertaking our evaluation:

  • Ensured PHP Memory was set to 128MB (sometimes it defaults to 8MB)
  • Create a separate Drupal Database and user for the MySQL Database through PHPMyAdmin
  • Set the Apache Webserver Port to 8888
  • MySQL Port set to 8889
  • Enabled PHP 7 OPCache (you can easily do this in MAMP)

After the environment was configured, we downloaded Drupal 8 (specifically 8.1.8) from the https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/ site (the tar.gz version as opposed to the .ZIP file). Navigating to the Applications directory in my terminal, I did the following:

  • Copied the tar file to Applications/MAMP/htdocs
  • Unpacked the tar.gz in the Applications/MAMP/htdocs folder using the Mac UNIX command (tar xopf drupal-8.1.8.tar.gz)

Installing Drupal

Now that our environment is completed and we have Drupal unpacked into our webserver folder, we are ready to begin installing Drupal! We go to the following link in the browser (http://localhost:8888/mydrupalfoldername/core/install.php) and execute install.php. Here, we are greeted with a clean install screen. To save time, here’s a summary of my selections:

  • Choose Language: English
  • Choose Profile: Standard
  • Verify Requirements: Ensured OPCache was enabled
  • Setup Database: Entered my Database Credentials
  • Configure Site: “Check for updates automatically” and “Receive Email Notifications” were both checked.

Overall, a cleaner beginning than what I was used to experiencing when installing Drupal 7. These UI updates, along with the cleaner look & feel resonate across Drupal 8, including the installation process, content management, and administration functionalities.

Figure 2: Drupal 8 Installation

After a minute or two, we finished with the installation process are greeted with the new Drupal 8 layout as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Drupal 8 Layout Including Administration Menus 

Conclusion

Not a bad start to Drupal 8! So far we have found that it is easy to install, it follows many of the same patterns for installation as Drupal 7, and this new layout we saw in Figure 2 & 3 is getting us excited. In our next blog, we’ll take you through the features of Drupal 8, and our first impressions of the site overall.

Social Media: Not Just “A Place for Friends”

Social Media: Not Just “A Place for Friends”

Who didn’t have a “MySpace” account? The hours spent listening to friends’ music, viewing profile pictures, creating interesting (and  preposterous) page backgrounds are imprinted on us and our memories. My first social media account, admittedly was not MySpace, but Facebook in early 2005, when only College Students were allowed to join. MySpace, Facebook, Friendster were just “A Place for Friends”, as MySpace put it so eloquently in their original slogan. These sites have come and gone in countless corporate and popularity battles, but today Facebook now commands a great deal of market  with a market capitalization of over $350 Billion, Twitter at $13 Billion, Instagram at $37 Billion (according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts), and LinkedIn at $25 Billion.

With these sites continuing to mature, the ways in which users interact with them continue to change. With social media beginning to encompass new features, users view social media less as a casual social hub, but a place to network (professional and casually) and a center of information. Users are spending more time than ever on social media, as Digital Trends reports social media users check their sites 17 times a day, at least once to twice an hour. How are social media sites taking advantage of these trends, and how do they continue to draw users in? Let’s look at common social media features, the largest advertisers, monetizing their user-base, and the future of social media.

The Big 3

Developing a social media platform is outwardly simple: create an attractive, easy to use UI (Instagram), create pathways within the network to keep users seeking information from sources they may not conveniently have access to outside of their network (Twitter), and provide users multiple ways to generate and share content on a single platform (Facebook). Since Facebook was launched in 2004 there have been a number of social networks that have been founded, launched, and closed. What differentiates a “good” a platform and a “great” platform is their ability to maintain users and harness their user-base to build and maintain advertising revenue. Platforms like Facebook have been relatively successful at advertising and generating ad revenue, whereas companies like Twitter have recently faltered, with single digit growth projections.

Digital Ad Kings

Let’s be honest, when is the last time you “Yahoo’d” something? I bet it felt strange saying “Yahoo’d,” didn’t it? The truth is, much like Google owns nearly all search traffic, Facebook dominates the social media advertising game with last quarter’s ad revenues topping $4.3 Billion with total revenue rising 52%.

Google (now Alphabet) currently generates more than 40,000 search queries per second. However, with users generating more information from social media (and spending significantly more time on social media sites), ad revenue for Facebook continues to grow where Google ad revenue has begun to plateau, growing only modestly from $17.3 Billion in 2015 to $20.3 Billion in the first quarter of 2016. While Google still commands the lion share of the market, the numbers show Facebook is continuing an upwards ad revenue growth trajectory driven by increased user engagement through their platform.

Monetizing the User-Base

Within a social media platform, users have the ability to customize news feeds and follow pages or celebrities. Mainstream media, such as news outlets are so active on these platforms that a user no longer needs a standard news app. Companies are capitalizing on Facebook’s live streaming and Snapchat stories in order to bring amazing experiences right to the consumer from anywhere in the world. Instagram, Twitter and Facebook all have direct messaging services, making communication an ever-growing component of social media designed to keep you interacting with the platform longer periods of time.

So what are these platforms doing with this strong user base? They’re monetizing it with paid advertising. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn (and many others) all have comprehensive ad platforms complete with reporting, creative assets, and competitive bid recommendations. As the active user-base continues to grow, social advertising will become more in-tune with these user bases, allowing marketers to zero-in on custom audiences and deliver high-quality, effective advertising.

Moving Onward & Upward

Social Media has evolved from an extended online chat room to a powerhouse of functionalities and features with unprecedentedly large user bases. It is not just “A Place for Friends” anymore. Whether you’re an avid social advertiser or a general consumer, your presence on social means that these networks will continue to evolve to suit your interests, behaviors and needs. Social media will continue to join forces with popular consumer brands, so much so that you may no longer be able to notice the transition from your Facebook native feed to your Amazon cart (notice the right-hand column ads in your Facebook feed, those items look familiar, huh?). One thing is for certain, Social Media isn’t going anywhere but up anytime soon, so keep on posting!

Co-Authored: Michael Brown & Ben Dickshinski of Ascend Integrated

Keep them Coming Back: Brand Loyalty

Keep them Coming Back: Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty may seem to be an arduous and expensive endeavor for a small or mid-sized firm. With the advent of Social Media Marketing, an additional layer of complexity was added to marketing: engaging your clients directly through posts and tweets. While social media adds complexity, it also enables you as a firm to engage directly with your customers and in the process building your brand loyalty.

We’ll discuss the key differences between brand loyalty and customer loyalty, examples of brands who exceed, and ways social media enables brand loyalty.

Brand Loyalty vs. Customer Loyalty

Oftentimes, brand loyalty and customer loyalty are used interchangeably. Customer loyalty relies on the ability to generate repeat customers based on incentivized offerings such as promotions and lower prices.  Brand loyalty revolves around the customer’s perspective of your company, depending little on discounts, deals or incentives and instead zeroing in on the complete customer experience. Other factors such as quality, brand-to-customer interaction and appeals to Pathos will further dictate the success of your brand loyalty campaign.

Brands Who Get It

Apple

Apple has revolutionized Brand Loyalty, plain and simple.

Today many customers either associate with an Android or Apple product (with some drops of Microsoft). This loyalty extends to personal computers, tablets and smart phones. When Apple launches a new product, thousands of people wait for days outside of Apple stores to be the first with the latest Apple tech.

Apple’s success lies in its marketing strategy; marketing their products as being technologically superior and prestigious. When a customer thinks “Apple” they associate it with “Bleeding Edge.” Other brands have captured this essence in their marketing strategy, such as Gucci and Rolls Royce.

While this gamble and strategy has paid off for these luxury brands, Apple’s price point allows them to sell more and service a higher volume of customers than traditional products marketed in this way. Given the affordability, prestige and consistency in the Apple experience, Apple has secured a fierce and loyal following.

Patagonia

As one of the best brands to embrace the concept of “user generated content,” Patagonia has developed a sincere relationship with their customers going beyond the brick and mortar store. This relationship is alive and well as displayed here on their Instagram profile. Appealing to the customer’s passion for adventure as well as for the environment, Patagonia frequently features user content on their profiles. This strategy is mutually beneficial because it allows Patagonia to use amazing content generated by users while simultaneously promoting their products and cementing a personal relationship with that customer (being featured on a page with 1.8 million followers is pretty cool).

Compared to its competition, Patagonia clothing comes at a premium, however due to their sincere content strategy, appeals to Pathos and commitment to quality. They have been able to cultivate an authentic customer experience that empowers the customer to become brand ambassadors.

Taco Bell

Yes, Taco Bell.

While we do not see many folks talk about how much they love Taco Bell, Taco Bell has been able to do something many companies fail at, they took a product not associated with luxury and built a dominating social media and online marketing presence. Many customers, while not directly Taco Bell fans can tweet a post and tag Taco Bell, and Taco Bell will instantly respond and / or retweet. Focusing relentlessly on customer service, especially through social media and marketing has helped Taco Bell continue to succeed.

Momentology discovered how Taco Bell’s marketing strategy on Social Media has been such a success in driving customers and interest in a brand associated with fast food. An excellent example of brand-to-customer interaction!

Conclusion:

Establishing brand loyalty is a difficult undertaking for many firms, requiring them to utilize different strategies to reach out to customers, and make them feel a passion for the products or services provided. Using a combination of social media (including Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / LinkedIn) along with associating customers to a certain feeling (Apple with quality & superiority).

Have a strategy in place before you begin selling your product, what feelings do you want your customers to associate with your product / service and your brand as a whole?  How will you reach your customers to keep them interested even when they are not on your site or at your store? Without a strong Brand Loyalty strategy in place, it will be difficult for a firm to grow their customer base and increase their bottomline.

Co-Authored by Mike Brown & Ben Dickshinski

Do You Really Need SEO?

Do You Really Need SEO?

In order to answer that question you need to ask yourself two things:

  1. Do you have a website?
  2. Do you want people to find your website?

As of February 2016, Google had over 47 billion webpages indexed. Granted, you won’t be competing for the first page against every single webpage because Google’s search algorithm is engineered specifically so that the user can find the most relevant pages relating to their search as quickly as possible (otherwise, what’s the point?).

Today’s blog will serve as a general overview of how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can help your business navigate the complexities and nuances of online marketing.

SEO entails content, links, marketing, and keywords.

Who Needs It?

Whether you’re a small mom-and-pop shop or a global organization, SEO will help your business thrive in today’s fast-paced and rapidly changing digital landscape. Ecommerce businesses can make great use of SEO because of the wealth of content and keywords embedded on each page of their site. Further, product pictures, descriptions, new products/promos and reviews make great resources for sharable social content, link-building and blog writing.

Businesses that use their website solely as a content platform (i.e. advertisement and online footprint) benefit from on-page SEO by finding out the keywords ranking highest for their particular industry and using them organically within their own content (blogs, ‘About Us’ section, etc.).

How It Works

SEO can be broken down into a multitude of categories, but most business only need to focus on on-page and off-page SEO. On-page SEO primarily deals with Meta descriptions, alt attributes, title tags, H1 tags and even schema.org attributes. The various text associated with the images and content on your page should have high-ranking keywords used in a natural way in order to help boost your SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page).

Off-page SEO is a little more difficult given that it relies on how much other users value your page. This is called social authority. This has a direct connection with inbound links, the more of these you can obtain from other sites with a high authority, the better optimized your site will be.

If you produce quality content and you have all of your high-ranking keywords imbedded in your content and in your descriptions, then your site will have a very good chance of ranking amongst the best in your industry.

Google Analytics: A Popular SEO Reporting Tool

Bringing It All Together

It’s not enough to drive traffic to your site. You have to be aware of the user experience once they land. That’s why it’s imperative you invest time and effort into ensuring you have optimized page-load times (<3 seconds), mobile optimization (avoiding Google penalties) and optimizing the various channels a user could potentially be visiting from (social media, paid search ads and organic keyword searches). These items may seem trivial, but they’re all part of the complete SEO process. Optimizing your SEO will not only drive traffic to your site, but will ultimately help your company stand out from others when clients search key-terms in search engines

Co-Authored by Mike Brown & Ben Dickshinski

Social Media: Why Are You Posting?

Social Media: Why Are You Posting?

If You Think Your Business Doesn’t Need Social Media, Think Again

According to Forbes Magazine several years back, social media was seen by entrepreneurs and marketers as a “temporary yet passing fad that must be taken advantage of while it’s still in the spotlight.” What followed, after corporations discovered this marketing channel, was a marketing frenzy, spam, and uninviting or just plain annoying corporate advertisement posts / tweets / updates through social media. It was easier to block a popup ad in the 1990s in your Netscape browser than to avoid the onslaught of terrible social media marketing posts. Well, like it or not, we’re seeing that social media is here to stay. Effectively executing a social media strategy enables you to advertise and engage with your customers on a more personal level and helps drive traffic to your site.

Executing a great social media plan is a start, but really, why do you need social media and what can you realistically expect in terms of a ROI?

Customize Your Community

Social media has evolved significantly since the days of the Myspace top 10 and a video-less Facebook timeline. With the hashtag revolution, users hold the power to customize what they see on any given topic, anytime. This is significant because as a business owner, you now have the ability to target users in your niche market. Further, it’s a free platform! Yes, you can pay to boost your posts and sponsor your tweets; however you can derive significant organic traffic if you choose to play the game the right way. Hashtag tracking services such as Keyhole.co and Hashtagify.me will get you started with precise search data, while Twitter analytics will give you day-by-day data that will tell you if you’re hitting the mark with your targeted campaigns.

Live Audience Data from Twitter

Reputation Management 

Using social media as a reputation management tool while connecting with consumers in a genuine way is absolutely key in today’s digital society. At Ascend Integrated, we know running a business is time consuming. However nothing beats the feeling of a great review on Yelp, Manta or Facebook . That being said, not every review is going to be super positive. This is where social media can make or break you. Our current social media channels can be as personal as you make them out to be. Responding to consumers in real-time, whether righting a wrong or thanking them for their business, goes a long way in today’s instant gratification consumer mindset.

“A well-executed social media strategy turns average shoppers into lifelong customers.”

Further, if you have an excellent product or service, people should know about it! The good reviews and compliments add to the ways in which customers perceive your brand.

Taco Bell nails it 

The Real ROI 

By now you’re probably asking yourself, “okay, I get it, but how does this affect my bottom line?” A well-executed social media strategy turns average shoppers into lifelong customers.

Twitter Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. provide businesses the opportunity to interact and connect with consumers through a platform consumers feel most comfortable. If your content and presence is genuine, your consumers will feel a stronger connection to you and your brand. Brand loyalty equals repeat sales and affording you a stronger sense of who your customers are and what they really want, giving you the information you need to create the best possible customer experience.

Co-Authored with Ben Dickshinski

References:

Forbes Magazine: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/11/the-top-10-benefits-of-social-media-marketing/#61291f892a4d