Drupa give

The last year has highlighted to us all how important it is for the global community to come together and solve problems. We rate ourselves highly at ComputerMinds, and figure it's time to share and stretch our abilities to the full. So I'm here on this special day to announce that we are branching out beyond just resolving bugs on websites, to fixing any kind of bugs in any problem space. There's so much market potential, we're really quite excited at the possibilities for bringing innovative solutions to the world!

Medical bugs

The ugliest bug of them all, COVID-19, has...

So we challenged ourselves to contribute back to the Drupal community this year. How are we doing? Here's a simple update on what each of us has done so far. Hopefully we'll see other ComputerMinds team members join this list by the end of the year.

We've been busy recently, but that doesn't stop us at ComputerMinds contributing back to the Drupal community! For our latest multilingual website, we needed an XML sitemap with alternate links and hreflang attributes. This site uses separate domains for each language - for example, www.example.se (??) and www.example.no (??). Search engines need these alternate links to help them understand how to match up each translation of a page, which are distributed across these different domains. But this site is built on our existing Drupal 7 e-commerce platform that uses the XML sitemap project, which has no support for alternate links (nor entity translation...

We love making great websites, standing on the shoulders of the giants that have gone before us to make Drupal what it is today. Thousands of working hours from fantastic people around the world have gone into producing this digital experience platform. Many of those gave voluntarily for free, while many were directed by paying customers who gave back so the rest of us could benefit. Everyone stands to gain when innovation, graft and capacity are pooled together. All that functionality in your Drupal site has been written by a real person at some point, who considered it worth sharing...

Do you want to reach more markets and people? Do you want to tailor your content for clients from a range of locations around the world, without having to manage every single translation? Then the Language Hierarchy project could be for you! I wrote a while ago about how this module gives editors more power and flexibility without the extra effort that can come with each translation added to a site. Now Drupal 8 sites can use the project with confidence, as I produced its first stable release candidate for Drupal 8 last month! 

Thank you to all those that contributed...

Ten years ago today Adrian Rossouw committed the first code for the Aegir project. ComputerMinds have been involved in Aegir for many of those years, particularly one of our senior developers: Steven Jones. We asked him some questions about it to mark the occasion.

When did you get involved in the Aegir project?

I went to a session at Drupalcon Washington DC in March 2009 and Adrian was presenting this mad thing: Drupal managing other Drupal sites. At ComputerMinds we were looking for something to help manage our Drupal hosting and help update sites and generally make things reliable...

It's a well known fact that a large proportion of sites turn off the node preview button. It just doesn't work well. Your unsaved changes don't show and the admin theme is used in place of your site theme - not helpful.

Workflows like that provided by Workbench Moderation give previews that work nicely, but that involves a lot of complexity with revisions and workflow. It really changes the way you (and your nodes, for that matter) work. For the sites out there that don't have something like Workbench Moderation in place, this usually means that there is no accurate...

Several of our recent projects have involved setting up languages that feel like 'child' languages of other languages, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's for marketing, so that content can be overridden for markets using a specific currency, other times it's to target a specific audience. Our classic examples are 'Euro English' and 'British English' - in either case, these are special cases of regular English. A more traditional example would be Canadian French - where most content would be the same as French, but some pages would want different spellings or customisations. We came across Amazee Labs' work on language fallback which inspired us to work on the Language Hierarchy project.

I recently read the trending article The Web We Have to Save, by blogger Hossein Derakhshan ('Hoder'), who had been imprisoned in Iran for six years. In the article, he talks about how the internet had changed over that time. Quality can be drowned out; what is important is diluted in amongst the trivial.

Personally, I believe any expression of culture will reflect the society it flows from. The internet is a global society, so incorporates so many different aspects of humanity - different, good, and bad.
What does the internet say about our global society? I believe that we should all take responsibility to some extent -- especially those of us in the business of websites and content on the internet! Can we contribute to a more responsible internet? Are we equipped to do so?

We are really excited to be a gold sponsor for the Bristol Drupalcamp. The event takes place on the 3rd and 4th of July and we will hopefully be bringing some super exciting drupal powered remote control cars - watch this space!