Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is the largest school system in Virginia and the 10th largest in the United States, with more than 200 schools and centers serving 186,000 students. To keep this large community of students, parents, teachers, employees, and the general public informed, FCPS is building out a network of 195 school websites.
Behavior-Driven Development is a widely-used testing methodology that is used to describe functional tests—that is, tests that operate on the whole of a system—in natural, readable language called Gherkin syntax. The goal of this methodology is to make the contents of the tests approachable to non-technical stakeholders. This makes it possible for a project’s functional tests to be meaningfully used as the acceptance criteria for the product.
Composer has brought the PHP community a long way, making dependency management much more convenient. With the advent of Drupal 8.0.0-rc1, even more people are going to be using composer indirectly, whether they realize it or not. This is because Drupal 8 uses Composer to manage its external libraries. Drush also uses Composer to manage dependencies, which means you can get spectacularly bad results, including some very difficult to diagnose crashes, unless all of Drush’s dependencies are very strictly compatible with all of Drupal’s dependencies.
Updating WordPress plugins and Drupal modules is a pain, but it can become unmanageable when you have dozens or hundreds of sites. Pixo has automated the process to apply all plugin and module updates on Pantheon sites with a simple command. In this post, we explain how to use this automation and we share the code.
As website development contractors, we sometimes come across existing Drupal or Wordpress sites that are just chock full of large, under-optimized client uploads that take forever to load in our browsers. We sometimes find our servers choking to death, not because of [insert disliked developer here]’s rogue php script, but because the server just can’t keep up with the thousands of requests for xyz image at 3000x2000 pixels, uncompressed.
One of the great things about the Pantheon platform is that it provides a very easy way to apply updates to your Drupal sites. All that you need to do is navigate to the dashboard for your site, and if there have been any new releases for Drupal core, you will be able to see an "Apply Updates" button. Just click this button, and you'll be ready to run some tests and deploy to production.
Choosing the right developer portal for your business is crucial. The developer portal often serves as the foundation of a successful API Program—it's a place for your developer community to thrive and grow, and houses your API products. When you use Apigee to manage APIs that you build, it often comes down to a simple choice: the integrated developer portal that comes with the license, or a Drupal developer portal.
Making sure your website is secure is an important part of not only the development of the site but also its ongoing maintenance.
As web developers, we take website security very seriously. Drupal has some security best practices baked into its APIs that let developers create their own modules, hopefully with secure code, to contribute back to the community.