The Future is Hooked on Drupal

The Future of Decoupled Drupal & other Bold 2016 Predictions (E13)

Commercial Progression presents Hooked on Drupal, “Episode 13: Future Predictions of Drupal, Technology, and Powerball Winners".  That's right, you heard it here first folks, someone has already won the Powerball. Ok, so maybe that is old news... but what about the future of Decoupled Drupal website architecture, static site generators, and the next revolution in IOT technology? To receive these clairvoyant predictions along with many important highlights from 2015, you will need to tune into the future with our latest podcast. 

Drupal 8 is Hooked on Drupal

Drupal 8 overview and release party, let’s #celebr8d8! (E12)

Commercial Progression presents Hooked on Drupal, “Episode 12: Drupal 8 is here, let’s #celebr8d8!". With the official Drupal 8 release date set for November 19th, the CP development crew assembles for an in-depth conversation on all things Drupal 8. We predicted the release date of Drupal 8 to within 3 days on our February podcast. Hillary Lewandowski will be presenting an overview of Drupal 8 at our next meetup and Drupal 8 release party with Girl Develop It Detroit at Grand Circus. Approaches for migrating Drupal 6 and 7 sites to Drupal 8 are discussed. Changes in the development cycle for Drupal 8 going forward are mused upon. What does it mean that Drupal 8 is built on Symfony and how will the respective development communities merge, we talk it through.  

Drupal 8 OOP Part 2: Creating an Admin Form

In part 2 of my Object Oriented Programming (OOP) for Drupal 8 series, we are going to create an administration form. If you missed part 1, I talked about how to make a simple custom block in D8, which is something we do here at Commercial Progression to brand our sites. I chose a custom block to show that the new changes in D8 aren’t so scary, and to introduce object oriented concepts and definitions with a real-world example.

Michigan Drupal Summer

Michigan Drupal Developers and their Summer Projects (E10)

Commercial Progression presents Hooked on Drupal, “Episode 10: Summer of Drupal with Special Guests Hillary Lewandowski and Michael Zhang".  In this episode of Hooked on Drupal, the usual crew is joined by two new members to the CP team.  Hillary Lewandowski, the latest member to the development team brings her wisdom from a formal education in computer science.  Additionally, Michael Zhang is one of two summer interns from Northville High School and an active member of Northville DECA, with a focus on marketing. As the Commercial Progression team size grows, our development team has begun to specialize.  Brad has focused on developing new processes for site architecture and shares his discoveries about how to prepare a project for design and development. Other team members share their personal project subject matter.

Drupal 8 OOP Part 1: Building a Block

Object Oriented Programming (or OOP for short) organizes code into objects with properties and behaviors. Drupal developers are comfortable with the paradigm of procedural programming, which uses functions to pass in data, manipulate it, and return something. In the following post, I will help explain to tech-savvy developers how OOP will look and feel in Drupal 8.

DrupalCon 2015 review

DrupalCon LA 2015 Highlights with Steve Burge from OSTraining (E9)

Commercial Progression presents Hooked on Drupal, “Episode 9: DrupalCon LA 2015 Highlights with Steve Burge from OSTraining".  In this special DrupalCon edition of Hooked on Drupal we conferenced in Steve Burge of OSTraining for an on the ground report from Los Angeles.  Held on May 11-15, 2015 DrupalCon LA was the premiere event for the Drupal community.  Steve brings us the inside scoop of highlights and takeaways as the conference wraps up.  Additionally, Alex Fisher (also a DrupalCon veteran) shares his memories and insights from past DrupalCons.  Commercial Progression has recently sponsored OSTraining with a $5000 kickstarter backing to bring Drupal 8 upgrade training to the masses.  This new collection of video resources will be released in September 2015.  With Dries call to support Drupal as public utility from DrupalCon, this announcement seems especially timely.

Backdrop and Acquia Lift

Drupal 8 Release Date from Dreisy-Wan Kenobi plus Backdrop & Lift (E7)

Commercial Progression presents Hooked on Drupal, “Episode 7: Dreisy-Wan Kenobi You're our only hope!".  In this latest installment, lead developers Brad Czerniak and Chris Keller are given a mysterious droid with a message from "Dreisy-Wan Kenobi" concerning the future release date of Drupal 8.  After a brief moment of reminiscing about the highlights of DrupalCamp Michigan, Brad and Chris muse about the cryptic messages that seem to predict when Drupal 8 will launch, what the fate of the Backdrop CMS will be, and what Acquia Lift actually is.  Tune in for cosmic revelations from beyond time and space.

DrupalCamp Michigan 2015 Presentation Slides and Video

Commercial Progression was a proud sponsor of the 2015 DrupalCamp Michigan. With over 100 in attendance, 11 formal presentations, and 1 excellent after party... the survey results are in and the community agreed that this was the best DrupalCamp Michigan to date. In addition to our general sponsorship, the Commercial Progresssion team represented well with 3 presentations covering all Drupal skill levels. This year's media package also included a complete video capture of each session, which you can find on our youtube channel.

Drupal + Grunt + BrowserSync

As responsive design becomes more important with each passing day; it becomes essential to find an efficient way to test your site on as many screen sizes as possible. In the past, responsive design testing meant running around the office and borrowing as many devices as you could. Loading up the site on each and testing individually.

A 5 Step Guide To Easier File and Database Syncing with Drush

At Commercial Progression we rely heavily on Drush. We use it to download modules, enable them, update/revert our features, clear the cache, and make our coffee in the morning (feature request).  It’s hard to imagine life as a Drupal developer without it and I would like to share a feature of Drush that I find very useful. Drush provides an easy way to keep your environment's files and database in sync. I will show you how to set this up and make your life just a little bit easier.

How to do custom processing of feeds imports

Many Drupal developers will agree that Feeds is the go-to module for importing content into Drupal. While it works great “out of the box” for importing spreadsheets, xml files, or nearly anything else you can throw at it, sometimes you need to do more than just save values to a field. What happens if you need to do some additional processing on the values before you save them?

Drupal's Front Page

When I first started developing Drupal sites the front page baffled me a bit. What if I didn’t want the front page to show “No front page content has been created yet.”? What if I wanted to give the client more control over the front page content? As I learned more and more about Drupal I found a couple of solutions. 

hook_menu(): More than you ever needed to know

hook_menu is the most-used Drupal core hook; it's well-documented, and many tutorials are available.

This isn't documentation or a tutorial. What I wanted to know was: how much are each of the plentiful [Drupal 7] API options used? So I set about to collect data, using core implementations of hook_menu(), as well as those from the contrib modules tracked by DrupalContrib.

Get started building your own amazing maps with Drupal

Whenever we get a project that requires creating some sort of visual map I raise my hand and yell “Pick me, pick me!”. There is something about a map that makes me feel all warm and cozy. Some maps remind us of how big the world is. Some maps are just fun to pan and zoom. Other maps represent our data far better than plain text could do alone.

Why Drupal Is A Smart Choice for Libraries

Long rows and rows of books are a beautiful sight, and having an easy to use Drupal website for your library, that is a beautiful sight too.

At Commercial Progression we help support libraries with Drupal, including the Bloomfield Township Public Library and the Canton Public Library. Drupal was a smart choice for these two libraries. Drupal web development allows for information to be kept open and easy to access for those using the site.

Streamline your Style Tiles with Sass and the Style Guide Module

Is your creative team completely opposed to designing in code? They shouldn’t be. Here’s a hybrid approach to rolling custom Drupal themes that has the potential to significantly streamline your workflow and ensure greater visual consistency throughout your project’s lifecycle - all thanks to Style Tiles.