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Kanopi Team

Kanopi Studios Named an Industry Leader on Clutch

Allison Manley
Allison Manley

In today’s burgeoning digital marketplace, finding a reliable digital partner has become more important than ever.

And Kanopi is proud to be one such partner to our clients, from development to comprehensive web design, our team creates solutions that empower our incredible clients.

As we mentioned before, we have enjoyed a positive presence on Clutch, a ratings and reviews platform for B2B service providers. Although we have always been a top firm on Clutch, we just received a new accolade. We are excited to share that we have been awarded the title of industry leader, topping the list of the best web design companies in San Francisco. After being put through the wringer with nearly 400 of San Francisco’s top web designers, we were listed as eighth overall.

Clutch analysts use a number of metrics to evaluate service providers, but the top consideration for quality is what a firm’s clients have to say about them, and our clients have delivered in spades. With eight verified client reviews, we maintain a perfect rating of five stars, and we have received feedback such as:

“I think there’s a professionalism at Kanopi Studios that is not always present in the web development world. They’re adept at bridging the gap between plain language and tech-speak. They also make sure they’re thinking about any possible side effects caused by executing a task and they’ve mastered the almost lost art of effective, friendly customer service.”

We always appreciate hearing from our clients, and what they have shared is better than anything we could have hoped for. Their feedback is valuable as we look forward to improving our offerings.

In addition to being named an industry leader, we have also been featured on Clutch’s sister-site, The Manifest. The Manifest is a resource that provides help to firms of all shapes and sizes, offering industry insights and how-to guides regarding a number of projects and challenges. We were featured on their list of the top web development companies in San Francisco, with notice being taken of the quality of our work and the reputation of our clients. Our feature on both Clutch and the Manifest highlights our ability to design and deliver web projects of the highest caliber. And to demonstrate that, we have put up a portfolio on Visual Objects, a place for prospective clients to compare the work of various web designers in San Francisco.

We are hopeful that the expansion of our digital presence will help us build new partnerships, but we must take the time to acknowledge the partnerships we have made along the way. A huge thank you to all of our clients! Your support means the world to us, and we cannot wait to see what you have for us going forward.

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Ready to launch? Here’s a pre-launch checklist

Tim Tufts
Tim Tufts

It’s been a lot of hard work and the time has finally come to launch your new website. Congratulations!

But before you push that launch button, take a minute to think; are you REALLY ready to launch your website?

  • Multiple rounds of quality assurance testing? CHECK!
  • Cross browser and responsive testing? CHECK!

But is there something else you might have missed?

The items above are some of the more obvious steps a team may go through when preparing a site to launch, but there are some lesser known or sometimes forgotten steps that are just as important to take when launching a new website. So what do we also include in our pre-launch checklist?

  • Set up redirects
  • Check links: Absolute vs Relative
  • Accessibility checks
  • Decide what to do with your old site
  • Decide who will maintain your new site

Set up redirects

Over the years you may have amassed a great deal of content on your old website, and  chances are that in the course of creating your new website you’ve changed how that content is organized. This can lead to content revisions during the process of migrating  that content to the new system. Any team that has gone through this process can tell you that it is a massive effort; even if you’re automating the migration of content in someway. During this flurry of activity in moving content from point A to point B, it’s easy to forget one simple matter: How will users find the same or similar content on the new website?

Creating Redirects ensures that users who arrive at the site via an outdated URL, say from a bookmark or external site, are automatically sent to the appropriate content. Setting up redirects is incredibly important to creating a solid User Experience and it’s good for SEO. Just about every URL on your old site should have a redirect if the URL has changed. This may seem like a herculean effort, but it actually pairs well with the process of moving content from the old to new website.

First off a brief explanation of Absolute versus Relative URLs. An Absolutely URL encompasses a URL in its entirety. ie: https://kanopi.com/about-us. A Relative URL is just the portion of the URL that occurs after the “.com” in the example above. ie. /about-us. In the course of preparing a new website by loading copy and uploading images, you most likely are working from a temporary Development URL. When the time comes to launch the new website, the Development URL will change. When the URL is changed, any links that are pointing to the Absolute Development URL will break. This is a common mistake, and one that can have disastrous results once your new website goes live.

As a general rule of thumb try to avoid Absolute URLs when loading content to any environment. This ensure that if the core URL ever changes, your links won’t break. Leading up to launch, try to work with your Developer to identify and rectify any Absolute URLs.   

Accessibility checks

Accessibility was not exactly a top priority of early website development; supporting users with impairments is becoming an ever increasing need for any modern website. Accessibility starts early on in a project’s planning, and should be discussed early and often. From initial designs through to development, there are many touch points where a project team can ensure that the site is compliant with standards.

But what if your site is about to go live and you haven’t considered this? Luckily there are tools like Site Improve that allow you to run automated tests to see where your site may need remediation before it can be compliant. Not only is it good for SEO, but making sure your site is accessible to the widest range of users ensures you reach a wider audience and that they have the best user experience possible.   

Bot Mitigation

With the ever-increasing presence of AI, bots are crawling the internet seeking answers to our questions and returning the most relevant results to users. The strain and stress this places on an unprepared site can affect performance, degrading the overall experience for human users or even bringing down a site entirely. Bot mitigation needs to be considered when launching a website nowadays.

Making sure your site has an llms.txt file that allows Large Language Models to more easily parse your site’s content. Creating a plan to ensure your site isn’t overwhelmed by the wrong bots; nefarious bots who can bring down your site through Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are becoming increasingly common, trying to blend in and take advantage of the rise in bot traffic. These are just a few factors to consider in your bot mitigation plan. Contact us for more insights and to help develop a plan tailored to your website launch.

Decide what to do with your old site

In the activity leading up to the launch of your new website, it’s easy to overlook this question. Regardless of how confident you are in the new website, it’s important to have a plan in place for what to do with your old website. Here are some important questions to consider when considering the fate of your old website:

Will you need to reference your old site at any point in the future? Perhaps you weren’t able to move all the content to the new site before launch or maybe there is old content that won’t be migrated, but you still need to reference it in the future. Whatever the reason may be if the answer to this question is yes, you’ll want to keep your site up in some capacity.

Can you afford to host two websites at the same time? This one is a little less straightforward; depending on the size, state, and makeup of your old website, you have options. From a budgetary standpoint, paying for a website that no one will really visit is probably not going to look all that great to accounting. The good news is that with no traffic visiting the old website you probably don’t need all that expensive infrastructure; many enterprise level hosting providers have a free tier that is great for storing a legacy site on.    

Regardless of your situation, you can always find options. What’s most important is that you have a plan.

Decide who will maintain your new site

Building a website is a process; one that requires regular upkeep and ongoing maintenance. Understand that your website is a tool, and built right it should be designed to grow and adapt to the changing needs of your business. This is the philosophy we at Kanopi believe in, and try to instil in our projects. So with that in mind, it’s important to consider who will be responsible for ongoing improvements, maintenance, updates, and bug fixes when the times arise.

While not uncommon for teams to try to take this on internally, it’s important to consider if you have the right skill sets, let alone bandwidth for this to be a viable option. Another solution is to work with an agency like Kanopi to provide ongoing support for your site. An agency will have access to a wider range of expertise and ensures maximum flexibility for the future growth of your site.

Need a more in-depth checklist?

If you want more beyond this list, we do have a multi-page checklist you can download that goes into much more granular detail, covering everything from SEO to GDPR to accessibility, and so much more. You can download that checklist here.

Use our pre-launch checklist, and you’re good to launch!

These items may seem like big additions to your plate leading up to launch, but they pale in comparison to the what could occur if you leave them out. Plan for these pre-launch checklist items early on, and it will ensure your launch goes off with one less hitch. And contact us if you need help.

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Kanopi Studios is a Top Provider on Clutch

Allison Manley
Allison Manley
Screen grab of the Clutch website home page

It’s not easy to find a development partner you can trust. Particularly if you’ve never been immersed in the world of web development, it may take you some time to learn the language. That can make it even more difficult to know whether your partner is really staying on track with what you want to accomplish.

Luckily, knowing what to look for in a business partner can save you from all of the potential troubles later on. Ratings and reviews sites like Clutch can help you get there. This platform focuses on collecting and verifying detailed client feedback and then using a proprietary research algorithm to rank thousands of firms across their platform. Ultimately, Clutch is a resource for business buyers to find the top-ranked service providers that match their business needs.

Luckily for us, users on Clutch will also find Kanopi Studios at the top of the list to do just that. Kanopi has been working with Clutch for a few months to collect and utilize client feedback to find out what we should focus on in the coming year. Through the process, we’ve coincidentally been named among the firm’s top digital design agencies in San Francisco.

Here are some of the leading client reviews that led us to this recognition:

“They were fantastic overall. We had great success communicating to their team via video conferencing, and they were able to answer every question we had. They also worked quickly and were very efficient with their time, so we got a great value overall.”

“Kanopi Studios’ staff members are their most impressive assets — extremely intelligent, experienced, and personable. Building a website is never easy, but working with people you both respect and like makes a huge difference.”

“Kanopi Studios successfully migrated our Drupal platform while preserving all the content that we’ve built up over the years. They worked hard to achieve a responsive design that works well on both mobile and large desktop displays.”

Not only have these kind words earned us recognition on Clutch, but we’ve also gained the attention of the how-to focused platform, The Manifest (where we are listed among top Drupal developers in San Francisco), and the portfolio-focused site, Visual Objects (where we are gaining ground among top web design agencies site-wide).

Thank you, as always, to our amazing clients for the reviews and the support.

Contact us if you’d like us to do amazing 5-star review work for you.

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Kanopi 2019 DrupalCon Seattle Sessions

Allison Manley
Allison Manley
Screen grab of DrupalCon Seattle website banner

We are thrilled to have had three of our sessions chosen for DrupalCon Seattle in April 2019. You’ll find us at the booth, in the hallway, and out and about in Seattle, but make sure to visit us in our three Builder Track sessions:

Keep Living the Dream! How to work remotely AND foster a happy, balanced life

Virtual. Remote. Distributed. Pick your label. This style of organization is becoming wildly more in demand and popular among many Drupal shops. While many folks have gone remote, some people find the experience quite isolating and disconnected.

In this session we will talk about how to be the best remote employee, as well as provide ideas if you are a leader of a remote team. We will talk about key tactics to keep you (and all other staff) inspired, creative, productive and most importantly, happy!

Presenter: Anne Stefanyk

Date: Thursday, April 11, 2019
Time: 3:15pm-3:45pm 

Deep Cleaning: Creating franchise model efficiencies with Drupal 8

COIT offers cleaning and 24/7 emergency restoration services. Their 100+ locations serve more than 12 million homes & businesses across the United States and Canada.

It had been years since the COIT site had been updated, and it posed a host of technical challenges. Franchise content optimizations resulted in redundant updates for the SEO team. The mobile experience wasn’t optimized for conversions. There was a mountain of custom technical debt. And despite the current content administrative challenges, the localized experience lacked the level of context-awareness that consumers have come to expect. It was time for COIT to clean up its own mess.

In this case study we will cover the more technical parts of this Drupal 8 implementation: how we kept a multinational but distinctly separate brand presence with geolocative features, maintained custom promotions tailored to each franchise location, and kept the existing hard-won SEO and SEM business drivers intact.

Presenters: Anne Stefanyk and Katherine White 

Date: Thursday, April 11, 2019
Time: 9:45am-10:15am
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Image of the code behind the Paragraphs module

Easier Editing with Drupal 8 Paragraphs Edit

Jim Birch
Jim Birch Director of Engineering, AI Practice Lead

The Paragraphs module in Drupal 8 allows us to break content creation into components.  This is helpful for applying styles, markup, and structured data, but can put a strain on content creators who are used to WYSIWYG editors that allow them to click buttons to add, edit, and style content.

The Drupal Paragraphs Edit module adds contextual links to paragraphs that give you the ability to  edit, delete and duplicate paragraphs from the front end, giving editors a quick, easy and visual way to manage their content components.

Installing

Install and enable the module as you normally would, it is a zero configuration module.  It works with Drupal core’s Contextual Links and/or Quick Links module. I did have to apply this patch to get the cloning/duplication functionality working though.

Editing

To use, visit a page and hover over your content area.  You will see an icon in the upper right corner of the Paragraphs component area.   

Screen grab of hover state for Paragraphs component

When you click the Edit option, you are taken to an admin screen where you can edit only that component.

Screen grab of admin screen for Paragraphs component area

Make your changes and click save to be taken back to the page.

In components that are nested, like the Bootstrap Paragraphs columns component, you will see one contextual link above the nested components.  If you click this, you will be taken to the edit screen where you can modify the parent, and the children.  That is the Columns component, and the 3 text components inside.

Screen grab of editing with the Bootstrap Paragraphs columns component
Screen grab of editing with the Drupal Paragraphs Edit module.

Duplicating/Cloning

The term that is used most often for making a copy of something in Drupal is to “Clone” it.  This is a little more complicated because it is technically complicated, but once you get the hang of it, it will become second nature.

Hover over a contextual link and click Clone.

On the edit screen, you are presented with a new Clone To section.  In this section you can choose where to send this clone to, whether that be a Page or a Paragraph.  In this example, I want to duplicate this component to the same page.

  • Type: Content
  • Bundle: Page
  • Parent: (The page you are on)
  • Field: (The same field on that page.)
Screen grab of editing with the Drupal Paragraphs Edit module.

You can also make any edits you want before saving.  For example, you could change the background color. Click save, and your new component will appear at the bottom of the page, with the new background color.

Screen grab of editing with the Drupal Paragraphs Edit module.

There are a bunch of possibilities with this way to duplicate components.  To clone to another page, change the Parent. To clone to a nested paragraph component, change the Type to Paragraphs and configure the settings you need.

Deleting

Deleting a component is as you’d expect.  Once you click delete, you are taken to a confirmation screen that asks you if you want to delete.

Conclusion

The Paragraphs Edit module is a simple and powerful tool that gets us a bit closer to inline editing and making our content creator’s lives easier and allows them to be more productive.  Give it a try on your next project and spread the word about this great little helper module!

Need help with your Drupal site? Contact us

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Image from WordPress for Publishers

WordCamp for Publishers 2018: Hard Questions and Answers

Jim Birch
Jim Birch Director of Engineering, AI Practice Lead

WordCamp for Publishers 2018 was a community-organized event for people who build, manage publications using WordPress. In its second year, the event attracted professionals from higher ed, agencies, and both tech and content teams from national, regional, and hyper-local media organizations.

This was my first time attending the event, which moves host cities every year. This year the event took place on the shores of Lake Michigan at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in downtown Chicago.

The theme of this year’s event, and the challenge put out to potential speakers by the organizers was “Taking Back The Open Web”. Inspired by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s blog post “Can We Save the Open Web”, the organizers asked for sessions that discussed whether an open web ever existed, it’s current state, consequences of a closed web, and how publishers may exist moving forward.

The result was a plethora of amazing sessions that delved deep into many aspects of the topic, and how it ties into WordPress and publishing. The presentations ranged from technical topics like designing and developing for the new WordPress Gutenberg editor, to case studies and panels about paywalls, implementing large networks of sites, and sustaining hyper-local newsrooms.

I was humbled to be asked to speak and kicked off the second day with a technical session on implementing Schema.org vocabularies for structured data and current best practice meta tags in WordPress.

This session presents a whirlwind, two fisted, no holds barred, data filled session that has almost too much information. I present how to implement and test Schema.org schemas, and current meta tag best practices in WordPress to gain search features in Google and enhance the look of your content on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. I even got to introduce the new Speakable vocabulary for which Google announced support just a few days before, and discuss Google’s support for Datasets, HowTo, QAPage and FAQPage all of which are especially pertinent to publishers.

All of the sessions from the event were recorded and can be found online at WordCamp.tv. I have a newfound respect for those working on balancing the need for independent journalism with the need to make a profit. Publishers and the tech teams that work with them cover the full gamut of types of stories, editorial workflows, business models, site and app performance, search engine optimization and more. Each one of these things can make or break a site or company. WordCamp for Publishers 2018 provided a unique opportunity to come together to listen, discuss and learn from unique voices in the publishing industry. I will be sure to keep an eye on which city the event moves to next. Thanks to all the volunteer organizers for their professionalism in making WordCamp for Publishers 2018 an amazing and informative event!

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Pelo Fitness spinning class

Drupal Security: 7 Strategies for Longterm Protection

Kat White
Katherine White Chief Technology Officer

One of the best things about Drupal is its security. When tens of thousands of developers work collectively on an open source project, they find all the holes and gaps, and strive to fix them. When one is found, patches go out immediately to keep sites safe and secure. But a site is only secure if those patches are applied when they are released.

Pelo Fitness is a Marin County-based community dedicated to a culture of fitness. They offer cycling, strength, yoga & nutrition programs customized to an individual’s needs and fitness level. Whether someone is a competitive athlete, a busy executive or a soccer mom (or perhaps all three), their programs are designed to build strength and endurance, burn calories and boost energy.

Yet their site was weak since they hadn’t applied a few major Drupal security updates. There was a concern that the site could be hacked and jeopardize client information. Pelo Fitness customers use the site to purchase class credits and reserve bikes for upcoming classes, requiring users to log in and enter personal information.

Want to keep your site secure? Contact us to get started. 

The solution

Kanopi performed all the security updates to get the Pelo Fitness on the latest version of Drupal. All out of date modules were updated, and the site was scanned for suspicious folders and code; anything that looked suspect was fixed. Care was taken not to push code during high traffic times when reservations were being made, so code was pushed live during specific break times that would allow for the least disruption. Lastly the site was also moved over to Pantheon for managed hosting.

Due to the Drupal support provided by Kanopi, the Pelo Fitness website is now protected and secure. Inspired to make all their systems stronger, Pelo Fitness also switched to a different email system as well so all their tech solutions were more up to date.

How to keep your site secure

Websites are living organisms in their way, and need constant care and feeding. It’s imperative to always apply critical security patches when they come out so your users information (and your own) is kept secure at all times. There are a few simple things that you can do on your Drupal site to minimize your chances of being hacked.

  • Stay up to date! Just like Pelo Fitness, make sure you pay attention to security updates for both Drupal core and your contributed modules. Security releases always happen on Wednesdays so it’s easy to keep an eye out for them. To stay up to date, you can subscribe via email or RSS on Drupal.org or follow @drupalsecurity on Twitter.
  • Enable two-factor authentication on your site. It’s a few seconds of pain for an exponential increase in security. This is easily one of the best ways to increase the security of your site. And besides, it helps you makes sure you always know where your phone is. The TFA module provides a pluggable architecture for using the authentication platform of your choice, and Google Authenticator integration is available already as part of their basic functionality.
  • Require strong passwords. Your site is only as secure as the people who log into it. If everyone uses their pet’s name as their password, you can be in trouble even if your code base is “bulletproof” (nothing ever is). The Password Policy module sets the gold standard for traditional password strength requirements, or you can check out the Password Strength module if XKCD-style entropy is more your thing.
  • Make sure you’re running over a secured connection. If you don’t already have an SSL (TLS, technically, but that’s another story) certificate on your website, now is the time! Not sure? If your site loads using http:// instead of https://, then you don’t have one. An SSL certificate protects your users’ activities on the site (both site visitors and administrators) from being intercepted by potential hackers.
  • Encrypt sensitive information. If the unthinkable happens and someone gets hold of your data, encryption is the next line of defense. If you’re storing personally identifying information (PII) like email addresses, you can encrypt that data from the field level on up to the whole database. The Encrypt module serves as the foundation for this functionality; check out the module page and you can build up from there.
  • Don’t let administrators use PHP in your content. Seriously. The PHP filter module can get the job done quickly, but it’s incredibly dangerous to the security of your site. Think seriously about including JavaScript this way, too. If your staff can do it, so can a hacker.
  • Think about your infrastructure. The more sites you run on a single server, the less secure it is. And if Drupal is up to date, but your server operating system and software isn’t, you still have problems. Use web application and IP firewalls to take your security even further. 

Contact us at Kanopi if you need help with Drupal security.

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Image of MVP in task board

Defining a Minimum Lovable Product

Tim Tufts
Tim Tufts

Congratulations! Your Boss just gave you approval to build the website you’ve been pitching to them for the past year. A budget has been approved, and you have an enthusiastic team eager to get started. Nothing can stop you… until you receive the deadline for when the website has to go live. It’s much earlier than you planned and there just simply isn’t enough hours in the day, or resources available to make it happen. Whatever will you do?

Let me introduce you to the minimum lovable product, or MLP.

What is a minimum lovable product (MLP)?

You may have heard of a minimum viable product (MVP). Where a minimum viable product is a bare-bones, meets your needs solution; the minimum lovable product can be described as the simplest solution that meets your needs and is a positive step toward achieving your goals. It’s easy to view every aspect, every deliverable, as being fundamental to a project’s success. But when you actually look at each nut and bolt with a more discerning eye, you begin to realize that each component is not fundamental to the overall product’s success.

So basically the MLP is the sufficient amount of features your site needs to be satisfactory to your business goals for launch.

It’s important to note that an MLP is not necessarily a reduction in scope. It’s more a prioritization in the order for which things are addressed. The project team can circle back on anything that wasn’t part of the MLP. The goal behind an MLP is to deliver a functional product that you’re excited about, within the confines of the project.

When should you consider a minimum lovable product?

An MLP isn’t for every project, but is usually best leveraged when there is a restraint of some sort. I used timeline as an example in my opening, but as you know restraints can take many forms:

  1. Timeline: Maybe the deadline you need to hit, simply won’t provide enough time to complete all the work you have queued.
  2. Resource Availability: Perhaps there are scheduling conflicts, or limited resource availability during your project.
  3. Budget Constraints: Another possibility is that the budget just isn’t sufficient to get to everything you have on your list.

Regardless of the restraint you’re facing, an MLP can help you realign priorities, and expectations to compensate. But how do you go about evaluating your project for an MLP?

Need help with defining your MLP? Contact us.

How do you create a minimum lovable product?

When you’re able to parse the individual elements that are crucial to your website’s success into user stories and features, you’ll have effectively identified your project. But how do you actually go about separating the core building blocks that will comprise your MLP from the bells and whistles?  It all starts with goals.

Goals

Chances are that you already have a set of goals describing  what you’re hoping to achieve with the project. These ideally should be as specific as possible (ie. increase traffic) and ideally measurable (analytics). Without realistic, concrete goals you set the project up for failure. For example if your goal is to make people happy; chances are you’re going to have a hard time measuring whether you were successful. Establishing measurable goals will set the project up for success.

It’s not enough to know your goals, you have to be able to prioritize them. It’s simply not realistic that every goal be top priority. Try to narrow your priorities down to no more than three goals. Goals in hand where do we go from here in our quest to define an MLP?

Definition

Begin by thinking of all the factors that are needed for a User to accomplish a given goal. These could include anything from Layouts, to Features, to Content. Start a list of these factors:

  1. What are the things a User sees?
  2. What copy does a User read?
  3. What actions is a User taking while they navigate through the site?

Everything you write down while asking these questions should be in the interest of one of your priority goals. If an item isn’t directly contributing to accomplishing the goal, then it should not be on the list. If you’re not a subject matter expert that will be directly contributing to the work, you should connect with your team to determine the specific work that needs to be carried out for each of the items you’ve identified. Additional refinement, and further simplification may be needed to compensate for the restraint you’re up against.

By this point, you’ve probably realized that defining the MLP is a difficult task. The choices will be tough, and ultimately everyone is not going to get their way. What’s important is that the work you do strives to meet the goals you’ve set. This sometimes means detaching personal wants from the needs of the company. If you can tie the work back to this core philosophy, you’ll always have a strong direction for your product.

Time to get to work!

All done? Congratulations! You’ve now defined your MLP. Now you’re off to the races. Best of luck on the journey of building out your minimum lovable product.

Need help defining your MLP? Contact us. We’re happy to help.

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Strata Center at MIT

Kanopi at Design 4 Drupal’s 10 Year Anniversary in Boston

Jim Birch
Jim Birch Director of Engineering, AI Practice Lead

Nestled right off Main Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts lies the Ray and Maria Stata Center on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  This abstract building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry was the perfect venue to house the longest running, front-end focused Drupal conference in the US, Design 4 Drupal.  It demonstrates that the modern and abstract design Cambridge and MIT has seen can work perfectly with the structure needed within.

Image of sculpture at MIT that spells out "MIT" in metal, from the at Design 4 Drupal conference.

The Design 4 Drupal conference highlights training sessions and seminars focusing on designing for, and building the “front-end” of websites, or what gets seen and used by end users.  This area of focus encompasses graphic design, user experience, accessibility, performance, tooling, and much more.

Like a lot of our Higher-Ed clients, MIT is a user of Drupal, and is proud to offer this space to the Drupal community to learn and share knowledge.  I was pleased to be asked to present two sessions at the conference, and even more pleased with the knowledge I was able to take away from attending the event.

Meta and Schema: Defining the Content about your Content

The first session I presented focuses on designing and implementing a metadata strategy for your website.  Metadata is the content that describes your content. It is very important in how web pages are found in search engines, and how they are displayed on social network sites.

Image of Jim Birch's presentation in a large classroom with a projector screen at Design 4 Drupal

The presentation is a deep dive into the different specifications for meta tags and Schema.org schemas, how to decide what to markup, and then how to text and validate that you’ve done it correctly.

This session was not recorded due to technical difficulties, but the slides are available at jimbir.ch/meta-schema-drupal

Building a Better Page Builder with Bootstrap Paragraphs

The second session presented reviews the Bootstrap Paragraphs module for Drupal 8 that I developed and how it combines the power of the world’s most popular front end framework, Bootstrap, with Drupal Paragraphs, the powerful module that allows content creators to build layouts and structured pages using content components.

I have been working on this module since I first presented it at the BADCamp 2016 Front-end Summit.  The module installs a suite of components that allow content creators to quickly build out pages.

I love giving this presentation because I always get great feedback from people who use the module; who are going to use the module; or who are going to use my methodology to create their own version that fits their specific needs.  The module currently has over 25,000 downloads, and has had users from all around the world.

You can watch a recording of the session here.

Need help designing your website? Contact us and we can help. 

The Keynotes

The Building Blocks Of The Indie Web – Jeremy Keith

The conference featured not one, but two great keynotes.  On the first day author and developer Jeremy Keith, who was also in town for An Event Apart Boston, presented a session in which he encouraged a return from social media publishing to independent publishing.  It was a great reminder that the web was ham radio before it was cable, and can still be so.

Exploring the New Drupal Front-end with JavaScript – Dries Buytaert

The second keynote was given by founder and project lead of Drupal, Dries Buytaert.  Dries was the keynote at the very first Design 4 Drupal, so it was a special treat have have him back for the tenth anniversary.  His presentation reviewed the history of JavaScript on the web, API-first vs. API-only approaches and gave behind-the-scenes insights into Drupal’s JavaScript modernization initiative.

Design 4 Drupal Sessions

Thanks to Kevin Thull, and the organizers of Design 4 Drupal,  most of the presentations were recorded and are available to anyone at Design 4 Drupal’s YouTube channel.  There was a broad mix of different types of sessions that covered developers, designers, User Experience (UX), Accessibility (A11Y), and Tools.  Below are some highlights of the sessions I went to.

Web Accessibility Tips and Tools – Abby Kingman

Abby gave a session that was near and dear to my heart.  We are always learning about how to make our websites more accessible, and Abby’s presentation covered where to find current guidelines and specifications, and then when onto to review tools for testing.  There are lots of great links to follow from this one.

This session validated the approach we take at Kanopi to accessibility in design and development.  A lot of the tools and testing techniques were all part of our processes, and I look forward to exploring the ones I didn’t know about!

Webform Accessibility – Jacob Rockowitz

Jacob is the current maintainer and a prolific blogger and thought leader in the Drupal-sphere.  We penned an article in advance of this presentation where he reviewed his thought process, and recorded his presentation.  My favorite takeaway from this presentation was:

“Learning about accessibility can be overwhelming. We don’t have to be accessibility experts. We just need to care about accessibility.”

Kanopi has a long history of both building new and retrofitting existing sites to be WCAG compliant.  This presentation showed me that our approach, ongoing learning and iteration have us on the right track.

Variable Fonts and Our New Typography – Jason Pamental

I’m a big fan of Jason’s body of work, from his book, Responsive Typography: Using Type Well on the Web, to his blog, and frequent appearances on the Talking Drupal Podcast.

Jason’s deep knowledge of typography truly shows in this presentation that gives a brief history of type, how it moved from paper to the screen, and how the future of digital typography will be with variable fonts.

I look forward to exploring more about variable fonts with the designers at Kanopi.  The design possibilities, and the performance gains make these new tools very attractive.

Building a Living Style Guide with Herman – in Your Sass! – Chris Wells

In this technical presentation, Chris Wells, CTO of Redfin Solutions gave a nice overview of Herman, which uses SassDoc to reads comments in your stylesheets to build a static website  that is your style guide. It is not as extensive as a full blown style guide like Pattern Lab, but can be very useful for smaller teams.

This presentation has me researching simple style guide solutions.  Not every project has the budget or need for a solution like Pattern Lab, but since I already try to comment style sheets and templates, it makes sense to do it in a way that something like Herman or KSS Node can parse.

Thanks Design 4 Drupal!

Thanks to all of the volunteer organizers, especially Leslie Glynn, who was my point of contact before, during, and after the event, and in true New England fashion, made sure I took home some famous Boston cannolis for my mother.  Kanopians help organize a few different conferences across the states including BADcamp and MIDcamp, and we know putting on these conferences is a labor of love, so thank you!

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