Articles

In our last post, we talked about how great DrupalVM is by providing Drupal developers a robust development environment that can be used with multiple types of applications. And while the installation process is fairly straight forward, it can take some trial and error in updating your config.yml file for the perfect hosting environment. Are you managing multiple virtual machines for multiple client project? This can take up a significant amount of space on your computer’s resources (RAM and hard drive space). This post will walk you through how we addressed some of these common problems to optimize your DrupalVM environments.

Drupalcon New Orleans was the 3rd Drupalcon I’ve attended, and it never ceases to amaze me how much Drupal has changed over the years, and how much time and effort the community has not just put into core and contrib, but also building out 3rd party tools, scripts, and methods that will benefit other agencies and freelancers as well. It really is a privilege to be a part of a community that is incredibly committed to the values of open source and always willing to share their experience along the way.

New Tech Event Model (blend with House of Genius model?)

At the very bottom, add

The hardest part of starting up is starting out.

It’s known that theming in Drupal is not the easiest thing in the world. There’s generally a lot of markup to deal with, specific hooks and JavaScript behaviors can be confusing, and honestly – it’s takes a ton of time to build a new theme. Depending on the project, you are probably building a custom theme every

Social media is an incredibly powerful tool to help you grow your business, advertise your mission, or even brand yourself as an individual. Think of it as a free and effective way to gain exposure, make connections, and attract new clients. Social media has become the technology version of word-of-mouth marketing, and by being a little creative and a bit personable, it can make a big impact on you or your organization.

DrawAttention is a Denton-based startup co-founded by Kyle Taylor, a 2012 UNT alumnus, that creates whiteboard stickers for laptops and other devices. Though it’s such a simple idea, it has caught the attention of whiteboard enthusiasts and tech publication all over the world – not just because of that market potential and simple design, but also because of how they bootstrapped themselves into success starting with only $13, the price of a domain name.

http://www.geekwire.com/2015/ultimate-bootstrappers-how-two-guys-sold-thousands-of-laptop-whiteboards-with-13-of-capital/

Startup Weekend Denton

When you’ve been working with any platform for a long time, you start to build a relationship with that platform. For Drupal in particular, a lot of developers seem to take similar paths when it comes to building this relationship. At first, we’re struck with awe as we admire the sheer power of Drupal, and then we start marching up the roller coaster some of us would call the “learning curve”. We love it, we hate it, but most of all – we learn from it. After visiting the issue queue and StackOverflow for the millionth time, we start keeping a few tricks up our sleeves for the common “features” that Drupal sometimes throws at us.

In my last post, I gave an unbiased look to compare a series of load tests, performance, and hosting features of some of the most popular Drupal hosting platforms from Acquia, Pantheon, OpenShift, and AWS, to get you the best bang for your buck with free Drupal hosting. In this article, I’d like to go a bit further and explore the types of tools and features that each platform also offers for free, and why. Of course, this is going to require more criticism than the last article because this isn’t analytics, but it’s also the internet and expressing opinions is what we do here! So let’s get started.

I’ve been moving my blog around for about the past 2 years because I could never find a platform that I just really enjoyed. I tried Wordpress, Drupal, Tumblr, and even Jekyll/Octopress, but I was just never very happy with any of them. So the search continued.

It’s a tough life in the open source world. We have constant access to thousands of free repositories, tools, and systems… and we love it. It’s like a digital flea market, but everything is up for grabs and there isn’t a limit of how much you can carry (except your hard drive). But one of the hardest resources for us to find for free is server space for hosting the awesome things we build. We can use Github Pages for static site hosting, but you’re limited to only HTML/CSS/JS. In this particular case, we want to host things with a backend and a database, like Drupal. I’ll be going over a couple of the free platforms you can use to build your Drupal site on, and which one will give you the best performance and tools for the big ol’ price of nothing.

Last night I went to Oak Street Draft House where I had the chance to join a group of over 150 of the most creative and talented individuals in the city of Denton.

If you are a site builder or themer in Drupal, you might have a similar situation happen to you. You obtain a set of requirements for a content type, create all the necessary fields with semantic labels, and start building the displays and views. Great! Life is good. Now your project manager waltzes over to your desk to deliver an updated set of wireframes, and before you even get halfway down the page, you feel a breeze as you notice a person-shaped cloud of dust where your project manager just stood. You look at the document and see that on some displays, you will find a field label with a colon and some… without. Of course, you appropriately let out a lion of a roar that echoes throughout the office, because not only do you have you remove that colon from specific labels, but some of the labels even have different names depending on the display by dpm-ing the crap of the field template.

Radioactivity is an awesome Drupal module that gives you a "hotness" metric for content, basically popularity or trend by the number of views the content receives. Based on how a lot of the other popularity-based modules work, such as FiveStar and Rate that requires user interaction, Radioactivity will give you the most organic results. This method works great if you publish a lot of content that is aimed for public consumption, magazines or media publishing sites like Popular Science and the Bravo TV network.

If you have ever worked with Search API, Facet API, and Solr, you know how awesome and powerful these tools are, especially when combined with Views. Unfortunately the way it works, sometimes you’re forced to build some things a little bit differently to get around some of these pitfalls. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen one piece of documentation on the Facet Block views plugin, and it took me awhile to figure out that the hell it was there for, so I’m sharing my research with the people of the internet.

This is a compiled list of questions and thoughts about various aspects of the North Texas startup community, and how we can get more engagement from the cities, local businesses, and community. In the larger picture, how can we empower and support entrepreneurs to build their startups right here in North Texas.