Digital Assets Management in multi-channel publishing environments

Drupal Europe offers up a plethora of cases and solutions to help you with your DAM integration.

Multichannel publishing by Oleksiy Mark on Shutterstock

With so much to organize and store, publishers typically use Digital Asset Management Systems (DAM) to manage their assets. Add multiple channels to the mix and you have big operational hurdles. Thanks to the Media Initiative, Drupal now has a well-defined ecosystem for media management and its architecture is designed to play well with all kinds of media, media management systems, and web services that support them. The system is highly adaptable — the media management documentation outlines 15 modules shaping Drupal’s new ecosystem for media assets.

The Drupal Europe program offers several sessions to help you learn more about solutions building on this foundation. Case studies of demanding media management projects around the publishing industry include:

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How to Get Gatsby to Work with Drupal: Building a Gatsby Site with a Decoupled Drupal Back-End radu.simileanu Mon, 08/13/2018 - 13:48

Just imagine: putting together the powerful UI creation tools of a static site generator — more of a modern front-end framework rather —  built for high speed, like Gatsby.js, with Drupal 8's content modeling and access system! Putting their powers together into a blazing-fast website! But how to get Gatsby to work with Drupal?

How do you build a plugin that fetches data from API-first Drupal? In short: a static, conveniently simple, yet robust Gatsby site powered by a powerful, decoupled Drupal back-end?

You've got the questions, we've got the answers...

Content Staging With Drupal Deploy Module Gaurav Kapoor Mon, 08/13/2018 - 11:52

There might be instances where an editorial team comes across challenges in the process of publishing its content. These include:

1. Living a number of articles at the same time.
2. Sending the final copy of approval on a website to different people but not living it. 
3. Publishing a number of articles on different websites/subdomains. 

Luckily, the Drupal Deploy module allows content staging and publishing without the user requiring to log into the target site. This is very handy when there are a number of people involved or multiple sites, in case of media and publishing websites especially.

What is Content Staging?

Content Staging is an in-house development environment where a team is involved in creating various kinds of content. This includes all the stages a piece of content has to go through before actually going to the production site. 

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People often ask about the free software tools Agaric uses to manage our cooperative business. In this article, we share some of the free software tools we use for office tasks and administration as well as communications. These are Agaric's chosen resources -- the tools we use today for our daily business operations.

Agaric uses free software whenever possible. We build websites using Drupal, a free software content management system, and we are long time participating members of the Drupal Community. When we cannot use free software, we actively search for and contribute to groups working towards solutions.

Here is our reasoning behind the choice to use Free Software whenever possible:
The Need for Accountable Technology - Part 1

You may also wonder why we say "Free Software" and not "Open Source" since the code in both instances is essentially the same. We use the term "Free Software" because it includes the ethical principles about respecting user's freedom. Free software ethics say that users deserve control over the code they use, whereas using the term "Open Source" cites only the goal of letting users participate in the development. We support the ideals of software protecting your rights and not leaving you vulnerable.

What is Free Software?

A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

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The Problem

I imagine many of us have been there: there’s some CSS class in your markup, and you need to do something with it. Maybe you want to remove it, change it, or perhaps alter its style declarations. “Easy peasy,” you think, “I’m a developer. I got this.” And so you should.

Next, if you’re anything like me, your first instinct is to fire up your search tool of choice and search your codebase for that string. You’d expect that would lead you to where that class is getting added to your markup, along with anywhere CSS rules are applied to it… right?

Except it doesn’t. Phooey. That class string doesn’t appear anywhere except in your browser's dev tools. At this point, you either toss your developer pride overboard and hack a fix in some other way, or you search for assorted variations of your string in ever shorter segments until you find something resembling this:

$classes_array[] = 'some-' . $class;

Aha! It was helpfully obfuscated for you. And of course, you could hardly expect to simply search for that class name and find its CSS rules. That would be too easy! So naturally, they were written in SASS like this:

.some-#{$class} {
   // Some declarations…
}

Now that’s just what it might look like in PHP and SASS, but I’m sure you can imagine what it might look like in your templating language, javascript, or whatever CSS-pre/postprocessor you might abuse.

The point is, you’ve gotta slow down and tread a little more carefully here; this isn’t a simple find-and-replace job anymore. There are a few reasons why such code might have been written:

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Ahmed Jarrar August 9, 2018

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a hot topic when it comes to the discussion of online marketing. In today’s Internet climate, most people usually find websites by typing in a few keywords into their search engine of choice, like Google. Folks trust Google to present only the most relevant sites to their search queries, so it’s only natural the first couple of sites that get thrown up are the ones that get the most clicks and visitors.

As a consequence, those top page rankings are viewed as a prime real estate by those who want to boost traffic to their websites. After all, hardly anyone would bother checking the sixteenth results page when searching for a word or phrase. This is where SEO comes in.

 

What Is SEO? 

 

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From Conception to Reality: Drupal for Futuristic Websites Shankar Thu, 08/09/2018 - 16:15

“Great Scott!”, exclaims the scientist in the renowned science fiction trilogy ‘Back to the Future’ which hit the cinema screens in 1985.  This exclamation by the scientist, who travels 30 years into the future in his flying car, is suggestive of remarkable inventions by the homo sapiens which is a colossal conundrum to solve in the present world set in this motion picture.

 

Drupal has been revolutionising the web application development with its flexibility in integrating with futuristic technologies

Since the first ever website, invented by British Scientist Tim Berners-Lee, went live in 1990, the tech enthusiasts have been looking at the enormous technological advancements in the years that followed. In a similar fashion, Drupal has been revolutionising the web application development with its flexibility in integrating with futuristic technologies.

What is Drupal doing with the futuristic technologies to give you the “Great Scott!” moment?

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What is ReactJS?

Created to enhance speed, simplicity, and scalability, ReactJS has been doing wonders ever since its initial release in 2013. It was basically created by Jordan Walke, a software engineer at Facebook. And its first deployment on Facebook’s newsfeed turned out to be so successful that it was later on adopted by Instagram too. Amongst all the open-source platforms used today for front-end web-application development, ReactJS is the library which is reaching heights these days. And there are multiple reasons for such a booming popularity in such a short period of time. Each adding to the enhancement of current front-end UI scenario. No wonder it looks like, ReactJS is here to stay!

 

What is Drupal?

Drupal is the big name from the open-source community for web content management. Prominent names from journalism leaders like ‘The Economist’ to ‘The Royal Family’ of Britain. The security and scalability of Drupal are so high that it has made it the most trusted platform for web development.

Even after being a not-too-easy-to-use platform that requires technical expertise for building and maintaining it; Drupal has been chosen by the top-notch players from various industries like Harvard University, Tesla Motors, ABS-CBN News, Warner Bros. Records, et al. In addition, the Decoupled Drupal is the concept where Drupal can be used for building a strong back-end and opening up the doors for upscaling the front-end scenario even more by letting it being build with some other framework. And this is one of the best things ever happened to Drupal.
 

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Camps are Drupal’s growth engine and they take place all over the world. They attract local developers, connect them with resources to learn how to use Drupal, and most importantly, they provide on-ramps into the community. We are incredibly thankful and amazed at the level of commitment and contribution that organizers invest in their events. This is a very important way to contribute back to the project.

The Drupal Association supports camps as we can. We provide grants to new events through Community Cultivation Grants (check out this GoaCamp story). We also provide fiscal sponsorship to camps. This means we let organizers deposit their camp income into the Drupal Association bank account, taking advantage of our non-profit  status. Then, they work with our operations team to pay bills out of the account.

It’s been an honor to help several camps this way. However, this program has two major challenges. 1) We are not able to support camps globally because we can’t work in every currency, so most of the camps we support are in the U.S. 2) As we became a smaller organization, we have fewer staff to support this program. We haven’t been as fast at processing funds as we would like or our camps need.

Knowing how important camps are to Drupal, how organizers need their work made easier, and that we need to provide global support, we decided that the best way to provide better fiscal sponsorship is by referring community groups to organizations whose business is set up to provide this service. Over the years, we have watched several organizations get very good at providing fiscal sponsorship to open source projects.

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Drupal 8.6.x is now in a beta phase, which means we will now undertake disruptive cleanup tasks like adjusting coding standards. The main standards change in this release cycle will be the adoption of Prettier code formatter.

Work is underway to patch core for this change, which will touch many files, so be aware that you will need to reroll patches for conflicts and adjust them to use the new code style rules set by Prettier by running yarn prettier.

Google’s AMP is an open source project that stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. As the name implies, this project aims to serve mobile pages instantly without long load times. You can get a feel for AMP by searching for anything on your mobile on Google and clicking on links with a lightning sign beside them. Speed is an important factor for any website as it has a number of benefits including making a massive impact on a site’s SEO. In this post, let’s take a look at AMP for Drupal 8 and a brief overview of its implementation on the CMS.   There’s a module for that! As always, there’s a… READ MORE

Our board of directors is responsible for the Drupal Association’s financial health and as part of their duty, they review and then vote to approve monthly financial statements. The board met virtually on July 25, 2018 and voted to approve the Q1 & Q2 2018 financial statements, which can be found here.

Each month we compare our results against the financial KPIs we have set with the advice of our virtual CFO, Summit CPA. These KPIs were set to help us focus on increasing our net income so we can build a stronger cash reserve to ensure the organization’s sustainability.  

Our 2018 Financial KPIs are:

• Cash Reserve: have a cash balance of 15% of Total Revenue
• Net Income Profit Margin: end 2018 with a net income profit of 4%
• Increase our Non-Event Revenue to $1.6M
• DrupalCon Profit Margin of 27%

As of our June financial statement, which was approved by the board, the organization is tracking well against these KPIs.

KPI analysis through June 30 is looking positive for money in the bank, net income, non-event revenue, and event profit margin.

You can see that April was lower than the ideal target, due to missing revenue in a couple of areas. One with DrupalCon Nashville, where ticket sales came in lower than expected, and the second was some hosting contracts coming in later. These contracts will be reflected in future months.

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The dream of many website owners is to have email sending opportunities on their websites. Of course, it’s possible with Drupal 8, because it has infinite powers.

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The dream of many website owners is to have email sending opportunities on their websites. Of course, it’s possible with Drupal 8, because it has infinite powers.

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Dr. Matthew Tift, Senior Drupal Developer at Lullabot, musicologist, podcast host and educator, sits down with Ivan Stegic to discuss his fascinating career and passion for those things open source. Discussing: Matthew's midwest ties, Walking meetings, The advantage of working at home, Working with Wisconsin Public Radio, Sea Grant Non-Indigenous Species Project. Dogpile and Metacrawler, Automate that process, C#, ColdFusion, VB6 Discovering Drupal, TTBOOK (To The Best of Our Knowledge), Accessible public information, Teaching kids to code, Finch Robots, Tonka Coder Dojo, "The Open School House", Live coding, Algorithmic Music, Algoraves, Toplap.org, Syncthing.

Alan Onnen is the Associate Director of Marketing for the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Recognized as #1 in rehabilitation for 27 years in a row. AbilityLab introduces its revolutionary care through 5 Innovation Centers - state-of-the-art hospital facilities and equipment for exceptional patient care provided by the best medical and nursing support.

With 15 years of experience in the marketing industry, the past 5 being with SRA and being a part of the team that helped adopt Drupal, Onnen has seen firsthand how Drupal 8 powers digital strategy. 

Mediacurrent Interview with Alan Onnen 

Mediacurrent: What does “digital transformation” mean for you? 

Alan Onnen: Digital transformation means a constant evolution. There’s no single transformation; it’s a constant state of change, staying on top of trends at once. As a digital marketer, you need to know a little bit about everything, UI, UX, nerdy stuff, best practices, changes in the digital environment, what people expect from websites in your vertical, etc. Some people think transformation is a binary term - something new - but it's not.

Mediacurrent: How does open source fit into the equation?

AO: Open source is something that’s not new but it’s getting so mainstream its part of that digital transformation. It’s about adjusting to the new worlds where open source doesn't mean unsecure - it means that it’s open and honest. We had to get buy-in from stakeholders. They dismissed it at the beginning of the RFP bc they thought you needed a Sitecore or an AEM. It took a long time and a lot of agency people to show how safe it is to help make them believe that open source isn’t a dirty word.

Mediacurrent: What current challenges are you trying to solve for?

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Security maintenance — and the ability to apply security updates quickly — is part and parcel to open source project success. 

Updating is typically done as part of the normal software release cycle, however, there are times when a security advisory needs to be released ASAP. A strong incident response plan builds a first defense line to mitigate and patch vulnerabilities. 

But what does a successful security response look like in action?

On the heels of a recent Drupal security update on August 1, 2018, Mediacurrent’s Senior Project Manager Christine Flynn had the same question. To find out, she interviewed our Open Source Security Lead, Mark “shrop” Shropshire, to get a layperson’s perspective on the security team’s approach.

 

“An off-cycle Drupal security advisory dropped on August 1, 2018. What does that mean for folks who aren’t developers?”

Flynn: I was watching the Slack channel as our team fixed sites, and I got some idea of what was happening. I’m not going to jiggle anybody’s elbows while they’re applying a security update, but I’m really curious now that the fixes are all in. 

Shrop: The official Drupal Security Advisory came out late in the day, after Symphony published their announcement in the morning. There was also one from Zend.

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Malicious users can intercept or monitor plaintext data transmitting across unencrypted networks, jeopardising the confidentiality of sensitive data in Drupal applications. This tutorial will show you how to mitigate this type of attack by encrypting your database queries in transit.

by Nick Santamaria / 8 August 2018

With attackers and data breaches becoming more sophisticated every day, it is imperative that we take as many steps as practical to protect sensitive data in our Drupal apps. PreviousNext use Amazon RDS for our MariaDB and MySQL database instances. RDS supports SSL encryption for data in transit, and it is extremely simple to configure your Drupal app to connect in this manner.

1. RDS PEM Bundle

The first step is ensuring your Drupal application has access to the RDS public certificate chain to initiate the handshake. How you achieve this will depend on your particular deployment methodology - we have opted to bake these certificates into our standard container images. Below are the lines we've added to our PHP Dockerfile.

# Add Amazon RDS TLS public certificate.
ADD https://s3.amazonaws.com/rds-downloads/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem  /etc/ssl/certs/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem
RUN chmod 755 /etc/ssl/certs/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem

If you use a configuration management tool like ansible or puppet, the same principal applies - download that .pem file to a known location on the app server.

If you have limited control of your hosting environment, you can also commit this file to your codebase and have it deployed alongside your application.

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Last night one of our former company's customer called me and need help to recover their hacked website,  First of all, I install the Hacked module, and check the changed files and recover them, then looking and cleansing some backdoor files which their job is to inject codes for external codes(most of the time, js files to traffic hijacking) to the website.  

Read our Roadmap to understand how this work falls into priorities set by the Drupal Association with direction and collaboration from the Board and community.

Announcements

Git remote URL changes for full projects and sandboxes

Git authentication methods for Drupal.org hosted projects are changing as we approach upgrading our developer tooling stack.

In particular we are:

• Deprecating password authentication for Git
• Deprecating the full project Git remote format
  <username>@git.drupal.org/project/<yourproject>.git
  in favor of:
  git@git.drupal.org:project/<yourproject>.git
• HTTPS clone urls for full projects will not be changing.
• Sandbox URLs have changed from: <username>@>git.drupal.org:sandbox/<author-username>/<project-node-id>.git to git@git.drupal.org:sandbox/<author-username>-<project-node-id>.git
• HTTPS clones sandbox URLs have changed from:
  https://git.drupal.org/sandbox/<author-username>/<project-node-id>.git
  to
  https://git.drupal.org/sandbox/<author-username>-<project-node-id>.git

We have updated the version control instructions for Drupal.org projects, and put a message in our Git server for any user who makes a push using the deprecated format.

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