Blog Posts - Author: Art Williams

Ever since I attended DrupalCon Portland 2024, Alex Salkever's keynote on open source AI has been echoing in my thoughts. As someone who's been knee-deep in the tech world—and with Texas Creative's long-standing commitment to open-source solutions—Salkever’s insights struck a chord that's worth sharing. The Essence of Open Source AI Salkever emphasized that open source AI (not to be confused with OpenAI) is pivotal for ethical development and societal benefit. Open source fosters transpare

It is a significant time in the life of a Drupal website. End-of-life (EOL) for Drupal 8 (D8) was November 2021 and Drupal 7 (D7) will reach EOL in November 2023. If you are wondering why Drupal 8 would end prior to Drupal 7, that’s a fair question. But before we look into the answer, it’s important to understand what End-Of-Life means.   What does End-Of-Life mean for software? Simply put, after EOL there is no more official support for that version of the software.   The Drupal

Wi-Fi is everywhere so most of us don’t think twice about connecting to our local coffee shop and surfing the world wide web.  But the ubiquity of Wi-Fi has created a false sense of security. In reality, connecting to public Wi-Fi can open your device up to being hacked or expose data from sites you access as the packets of data fly around the air.   To be prepared for public Wi-Fi it is important to have good situational awareness, understanding where the threats are coming fro

Most software projects in the PHP ecosystem, including Drupal, can be installed and managed by using Composer, the PHP dependency manager.  A dependency manager is a software tool that reads a configuration file for a project. Then it determines all of the underlying software that the project needs in order to work, along with what versions of those applications are compatible with all parts of the project. This sort of work would be difficult to do manually for a project with more than a h

Providing the content creator a field with a list of values to choose from is a common requirement when building a Drupal site. It’s also something that can be achieved in a variety of ways, each having pros and cons to the approach. Texas Creative’s web team has developed a module that we believe fills a missing gap in this type of field called Existing Values Autocomplete Widget. In the following analysis, we will discuss each possible approach, the use case for it, along with an example.

The loading speed of your website is one of the most important factors toward its success. Since loading speed directly impacts search engine ranking & site visitor satisfaction, it will have a compounded effect on conversions. That should be reason enough for any site owner to spend the time improving load times. There are a variety of ways to make optimizations at the server level, but one of the biggest impacts to site performance is, surprisingly, squarely in the hands of the CMS content

If you’ve owned a site long enough, you have probably had the experience where one day you visit the site and something is out of place or isn’t working exactly as it worked before.  Besides wondering how this happened, you probably want the issue fixed as quickly as possible.  This article will give you a couple of basic steps that will increase the likelihood of a quick resolution. This, in turn, should minimize any potential disruptions to your business operations and save you o

It’s not uncommon for the maintenance of a website to change from one agency or freelancer to another. At Texas Creative, we affectionately refer to these as “adopted” websites. And while we have no intention of pushing this analogy too far, adopting the work of someone else into your family is both a treasure and a challenge. Whether you are the agency tasked with maintaining a website you did not develop, or the client/owner of a site asking someone new to help you with maintenance, we w

In recent weeks, the news has broken that most modern CPUs (the brains of our computing devices) have hardware vulnerabilities that allow a malicious program to steal data in the device’s memory. These vulnerabilities, named Meltdown and Spectre, are unique in that they break down the built-in barriers that secure data on the most fundamental component of any computing device, the CPU. Who is impacted? Everyone. The devices impacted by Meltdown and Spectre include desktop computers, laptops, s

Recently we needed to build a knowledge base for a SaaS client to house support content in both text and video format. Since a lot of this type of content has a progression to it (first do this, then this) it made sense to dust off the Book Module. The Book Module The Book module has been in Drupal core since 2001, so it’s pretty much always been there. It provides a hierarchy to pages in Drupal that allow a next/previous functionality that is useful when you have content with an order to it.