Blog Posts - Web Development

I started in web development about a year ago. When I was hired on at Texas Creative in early October of 2016, I still only knew the bare minimum, but I was eager to learn more to further my career path.  Here at Texas Creative, we use Drupal, a content management system (CMS) I had no prior experience in. The idea of that seemed daunting, but I was eager to learn, and with the mentorship of my team in the past few months, I've certainly learned a lot and have grown to love Drupal. At first

The improved blocks system in Drupal 10 provides a lot of flexibility to the site builder.  But, have you ever had the problem of blocks showing on undesired pages because of the limits to visibility patterns? The Problem Scenario Say you added a custom block that only shows for users, so you set a visibility path with a wildcard like so: “/user/*”. All works great, as it should, and life is great! Oh but no! Don’t celebrate too fast says your project manager. Here comes the problem.

We, the website development team at Texas Creative, are big fans of the Paragraphs Module. For the last couple of years, it has become a larger and larger part of our Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 websites. In this post, I will give three tips we’ve discovered that make Paragraphs even easier for the end-user to use, in our case clients. What is the Paragraphs Module? To quote the Paragraph module description page: “Instead of putting all their content in one WYSIWYG body field including images and

Google is leading the charge to a more secure web. The tech giant is taking steps in the way it handles non-secure websites in both search rankings and for its over 1 billion Google Chrome users. In search results, non-secure websites will now take a back seat to those that are secured with trusted SSL certificates. Texas Creative has answered the call by retroactively adding free SSL encryption to all of our Drupal websites. What is SSL? SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a web technology that creat

It’s Official!  We have finished setting up the necessary infrastructure and processes for building client sites in Drupal 8 moving forward.  A lot of that work was done during our first Drupal 8 website build, which is nearing completion.  What follows is a brief glance of my first impressions and future aspirations about Drupal 8 development. The Project As website builds worked their way through the pipeline in the first part of 2016, I was on the lookout for the right one to

Whether you are new to Drupal or a total Drupal superstar with 1,000,000 hours on the metaphorical “Drupal wheel”, making decisions about what modules to update to what version is not as straight-forward as it sounds. We’ve found many situations where the Drupal update page actually suggests that you “upgrade” a module to an older version. This has resulted in regressions and extra work more times than we’d care to admit. But it is clearly a problem begging for a good solution. Our f

This series will cover three Drupal 7 mistakes that I see regularly when training developers, or perusing the issue queues of Drupal modules, and I’ve personally made each of these mistakes.  Getting a handle on these concepts, and breaking these bad habits will make you a better Drupal developer. Using [‘und’]? You’re Doing It Wrong Whether it’s in your theme’s template.php file or the custom field formatter module you wrote, don’t use [‘und’] ... ever ... seriously ... d

#Celebr8D8 with @texascreative developers @To_Be_Benji & @jvative. pic.twitter.com/LM1E2IcvX5 — Art Williams (@ArtisWilliams) November 20, 2015 Inevitably, if you are a Drupal-based agency, and have been around for awhile, with the trumpeted release of Drupal 8, you will get some variation of the following questions: Client: “You tell me my site is on Drupal 7, and that you keep it up to date, but I see that Drupal 8 is out ... what!? And why do I need to rebuild a ‘new’ site to get

Sometime back in the mid to late 2000s when most web developers/designers began seeing the writing on the wall when it came to content management systems, most of us bit the bullet and also decided try one out. After all, our clients were pushing for it and it’s what all the cool kids were doing, so we begrudgingly fit it into our workflow. Open-source CMS's drew the most attention, especially the ‘big three’ — Joomla, WordPress and Drupal. Naturally, I was curious about each so I evalua

As a client of a communication firm or marketing agency, why does it matter what content management system (CMS) is used to build your site? More importantly, should you even care? These are difficult questions, but that’s why we’re here to help you answer them. The Right Partner If you don't read any further, pay attention to this … the right development partner that understands your objectives and has the expertise and desire to help you attain them is worth more than any CMS. No matter