Podcast Episode 65: Web Accessibility
Blog postJoin Amber Matz as she chats with web accessibility aficionados Mike Gifford, Chris Albrecht, and Helena Zubkow about what web developers and Drupalistas can do to build more accessible web sites. How has web accessibility changed over the years? Who is being left behind? What are some common gotchas? What are some easy ways to get started testing for accessibility? All these questions and more are discussed in today's podcast. Don't forget to check out the links and resources in the show notes for all sorts of useful things mentioned in our discussion.
Illustration Made Simple with Shapes
Blog postWhether you are a designer, or haven't doodled anything since you were bored in study hall, have you ever wondered what it takes to successfully illustrate something fun and compelling? After all, illustrations and graphics can be powerful visual tools used to enhance our content. Luckily, the answer is quite simple: all you need is creative problem solving, basic shapes, and a few tricks up your sleeve.
We are excited to introduce our latest series, Introduction to Project Management. This series is quite a bit different from our usual format. Instead of screencasts and walk-throughs, we've interviewed Lullabot's technical project managers, the Chief Operating Officer, and the Account Director, and organized the footage into a series of lessons on topics that project managers deal with on a regular basis, including contracts, communication, estimation, tools and methodologies.
Need some insight into the estimation process? New to the world of software project services contracts? Looking to become a project manager or improve your skills? This week, we are pleased to release the next three videos in our Introduction to Project Management, a series of interviews on topics related to project management, leading teams, reporting, tools and methodologies and more.
In this next installment in our Introduction to Project Management series we're going to look at the people on a team. We'll cover how to figure out who should be on a given team, some ideas about how to break work up on large project teams, and then talk about how to keep in touch with the human side, keeping your team happy and productive.
One of the hardest things about a project is finding the right balance when working with your client. This week in our Introduction to Project Management series we take a look at client relations. Lullabot's project and account management teams discuss client communication, managing expectations before and throughout the project, and getting the project started off right from the kick-off meeting.
This week we are wrapping up our Introduction to Project Management series. We've talked with the Lullabot sales and project management teams about many aspects of working with people, and setting your project up for success. As we wind things down we're going to discuss dealing with problems and and red flags that may be taking the project off course, along with different ways of adding quality assurance. We'll then get to talk about demoing your work and conducting retrospectives to review your processes. Finally, we get to tips for a successful launch and the importance of celebration!
Using Tail to Debug Drupal Sites
Blog postPodcast Episode 66: Project Management
Blog postIn this week's Drupalize.Me podcast, hostess Amber Matz chats about all things Project Management with Seth Brown (COO at Lullabot) and Lullabot Technical Project Managers Jessica Mokrzecki and Jerad Bitner. To continue the conversation, check out Drupalize.Me's series on Project Management featuring interviews and insights from these fine folks and others at Lullabot.
Drupalize.Me Update, June 2015
Blog postIt's that time again! Here's an overview of what we've been working on at Drupalize.Me.
Learning Drupal 8 from Boilerplate Code
Blog postThis week we're kicking off our new, and completely free, Using MailChimp with Drupal 7 series. This series will teach you everything you need to know about integrating Drupal with the MailChimp email marketing service.
This week we'll be continuing our Using MailChimp with Drupal 7 series. And like last week, all the tutorials are free. Last week we looked at creating, and collecting contacts for, a MailChimp mailing list. This week we'll look at all the different ways we can send email to our lists.
PHP Classes and Objects
Blog postObject-oriented programming (OOP) is way of organizing your code to be more efficient, and it takes advantage of some really nice features in modern versions of PHP. One of the basic concepts of OOP is, not surprisingly, an object. Directly related to working with objects is understanding PHP classes. Drupal 8 is taking big steps to move to an OOP architecture, and so you will get very familiar with both of these as you start to jump into Drupal 8 development.
This tutorial, based on the video Create a Basic PHP Class, will explain what a class is, show you how to set up a class, and look at a PHP object. By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to create a class, an object, add a property to your object, and set the value of the property inside the class.
Load Testing your Site with Siege
Blog postSiege is a useful load testing tool to add to your performance testing tool kit. From the website: "Siege is an HTTP load testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It lets its user hit a server with a configurable number of simulated clients. Those clients place the server 'under siege.'"
Load testing is useful for testing the performance of your site, and the infrastructure that it runs on. There’s nothing worse than having one of your blog posts end up on Hacker News and then having your site crumble under the load. Siege can simulate activity on your site, and you can then use your site from your browser as you normally would, while your siege is running and really get a feel for how your site responds under load.
This blog post will cover installing Siege on OS X and Linux, and running a basic load test with Siege.
Why is SEO important to site owners? What tools and strategies can be used to gather and analyze site visitor data?
Release Day: Object-Oriented PHP Part 2
Blog postWe've recently switched from weekly releases to working towards releasing an entire series all on the same day. The Object-Oriented PHP Part 2 series is the first one we're doing with this. You get access to the complete series today! This second part of three on object-oriented PHP, provided by KnpUniversity, continues on from our Introduction to Object-Oriented PHP series.
Tutorial: Panels as Blocks
Blog postIn this tutorial, you will learn how to place panels in any region of your theme using Drupal's Blocks UI and a module packaged within the Panels project: Mini Panels. This tutorial is based on a free video in our library, Placing Panels in Blocks with Mini Panels
React.js, CouchDB, Node.js, de-coupling Drupal; if any of that sounds cool to you, then this is the podcast for you.
You know all those JavaScript tracking codes that get added to the footer of every page on your site? Google Analytics is the classical example, but there are tons of others out there. They are slowing your pages down, which in turn slows down your test suite. In this post we'll look at how you can skip unnecessary resources when using CasperJS for testing.