Blog Posts - Web Development

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

To say 2020 was a year unlike any we’ve experienced in our lifetimes would be quite an understatement. And while we’re all very happy to put the last 12 months in our rear-view mirrors, the team at Texas Creative has been reflecting on some positive aspects of this extraordinary time. Through all the adversity we’ve faced, a new normal has emerged. One that has revealed what is truly important in our lives: Family, Friends, and Community. With that thought in mind, we’re starting this pr

It's important that everyone, regardless of disability, has unabated access to information on the web. People with disabilities should be able to comprehend, navigate, and interact with the web just like anyone else. Who doesn't like the idea of more people using their websites? Visual Impairment Snapshot Just focusing on visually impaired Americans alone: 4% Legally Blind 9% color blind 14+% with visual difficulties This equates to millions of people! Minimize Legal Risk - Be Proactive The Su

Everyone enjoys the web and the utility it serves in our everyday lives. However, not everyone interacts with the web in the same way. Many users with visual disabilities rely on screen readers and their keyboard to navigate and engage with websites.  A typical user who navigates the web with a screen reader will tab through key areas of the site using the tab key. This will take them along a path of focusable elements throughout the page in the order in which they appear in the HTML struct

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

So you heard of React, the JavaScript library developed by Facebook for creating fast and interactive user interfaces, and thought “Wow! It would be awesome if I could use this with Drupal.” Well, today I will show you exactly how you can add React to any Drupal site, as well as provide you a module with all the boilerplate code required to get you up and running with React as quickly as possible. Before getting started, we need to understand decoupling. Decoupling is the idea of separating

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

The Migrate File to Media module provides an easy way to migrate old file fields like images, files, videos, etc, into the media entities with a few drush commands. So you can have an understanding of how the migration process works, In this tutorial, we will run through a few quick step-by-step instructions on how to migrate specific image field types to image entity reference fields. Media Module The core media module is what creates the “media” entity types. If you haven’t set

This is a beginner’s tutorial that will quickly get you up and running with media entities and a media entity browser in Drupal 8. One of the best parts of Drupal 8 is the in-core feature of media entities. This allows Drupal to manage resources that otherwise it would not be able to. It accomplishes this by creating a bridge relationship between Drupal’s CMS, media files and external sources. It’s basically an entity referencing all kinds of media files like images, videos, documents or o