As a Drupal architect I’ve been building web applications for clients for years, starting with sales, working through the technical architecture, and all the way through to the final touches. I build web applications for projects of varied sizes—some have only a couple of stakeholders (like the CTO and CMO), and others touch dozens of departments across an organization, all with varied technical ability.
Why should web developers care about SEO? It might seem like the very essence of “not my job.” Developers build the site. Content creators fill the site with content. The quality of the content, plus the content creators’ amplification efforts is where SEO lives. Right?
The fact is, though, web developers can do a great deal to increase a site’s search engine visibility. Which means that if we view SEO as someone else’s job, we’re holding content creators—and website performance—back.
There are three stages of SEO:
WordPress is currently changing a lot in terms of how we develop for it. The new “Gutenberg” editor is built using React. React is a very popular framework for building component-based interfaces that encourages us to develop our applications in reusable pieces. This is part of a larger trend in web application development - we are moving from building one large, monolithic app to developing collections of services.
We chose to standardize on MariaDB as the datastore to power over 100,000 Drupal and WordPress websites. To do this, we manage almost 275,000 individual database containers. Choosing our database technology is not something we take lightly. These databases aren’t just sitting around; the platform averages over 100,000 MariaDB queries per second every day, answering a total of over 260 billion queries over the lifetime of the currently running containers (some have been running for hours, others for months).
Thanks to everyone who came to see me and Howard Tyson of Zivtech present our session on ElasticSearch at Drupalcon LA. We decided to nerd out, both doing our slides in code with Bespoke.js and focusing on getting
If you are still using the same Nginx configuration that you have been for Drupal 7 on your new Drupal 8 install, most things will continue to work; however, depending on the exact directives and expressions you are using, you might notice a few operational problems here and there that cause some minor difficulties. The good news is that the Drupal configuration recipe in the Nginx documentation has been updated to work with Drupal 8, so if you have a very basic Nginx setup, you can just g
WordPress 5.0 was the first WordPress release to incorporate the new React-powered Gutenberg UI framework. With Gutenberg as the standard for WordPress interface development, WordPress developers can now benefit from more from the awesome React and JavaScript ecosystems to improve the developer experience and user experience of creating and using our plugins, themes, and sites.
Ever wonder exactly what is going on inside WordPress? As with any PHP script, you have a lot of good options for debugging and tracing what is going on. However, if all you want is a quick dump of the actions and filters that WordPress is calling, there is a very easy way to do this.
Props: I was inspired to write this plugin during a talk Helen Hou-Sandi gave. I believe it was at WordCamp NYC. Thanks Helen.
As I have written and talked about before, my favorite feature of Drupal 8 is Configuration Management.
Editor's Note: The structure of Terminus commands have changed since this post was written. The example commands have been updated to reflect the current structure of terminus command:subcommand <site>.<env>. Also when this post was written, Drupal 8 was the newest version of Drupal and was a large technical departure from Drupal 7 (hence the need for robust migration processes described in this post).