drupal

According to Drupal.org, the Drupal 6 platform will no longer be supported by the community, starting with the 24th of February 2016. Drupal 6 has proven to be a versatile CMS, but it has reached its end of life, as the technology around it tends to become obsolete in the modern web environment.

New official projects, documentation, bug fixes or updates will no longer be available and no core commits on Drupal 6.x to the official tree will be performed. At the same time, the security team will no longer provide any support and Drupal 6 releases on project pages will be flagged as not supported.

This means that is high time for Drupal 6 website owners (personal, corporate or government) to consider updating to the modern Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 platforms. This update will ensure full security support for their sites, as well as access to top tier web technology in terms of design and functionality.

A few vendors have announced that they will provide paid support for the older Drupal 6 sites beyond the 24th of February, but this is in fact a costly, temporary alternative. The best solution remains to migrate from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 or Drupal 8.

The Vertical Wave Solutions team is proud to announce the launch of C.D. Howe Institute’s new website. With the mission to raise living standards by fostering economically sound public policies, the C.D. Howe Institute is a prestigious, independent not-for-profit research organization, considered by many to be Canada’s most influential think tank.

According to the Institute’s requirements, our VerticalWave Solutions team migrated the original website content from an old platform to Drupal CMS, created a fresh and modern look for the new website, as well as improved the administration and content management procedures for the client. The challenge was to create a new, visually appealing website, rich in features and easy to manage, while staying true to CD Howe Institute’s brand and substance. Our team successfully delivered a website that met all these principles.

The new website features a modern, responsive design, which renders perfectly on desktops, laptops and mobile devices, boasting a user friendly front end interface which makes browsing simple and intuitive, and provides fast access to content. The C.D Howe Institute website now integrates complex features like subscription system, advanced search, structured library, event management platform, third party service integration, dynamic featured content and more.

Backed up by a user-oriented and easy to use back-end administration system, as well as by an organized structure, the site can be easily managed without advanced technical skills. We are proud to have put technology in the right form, right at our client’s finger tips.

VerticalWave Solutions also provides ongoing support and maintenance for C.D. Howe.

Considered the ‘next gen’ of web development, MEAN Stack represents a collection of technologies that merge together perfectly in order to offer a a full-stack JavaScript implementation of web applications. Mean Stack consists of MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js, hence the acronym MEAN.

These combined technologies allow for easy, intuitive and efficient development of scalable, user-friendly web applications which offer a new level of performance and reliability for the end user. And the flexibility and ease of use make MEAN Stack a powerful competitor against proven archetypal web service solution stacks such as LAMP. Comprised of Linux operating system, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP programming language, LAMP is still powerful, but starts losing ground in front of the MEAN newcomer.

And there are a few good reasons why MEAN Stack has the upper hand over LAMP in some particular areas. MongoDB is cloud-ready and offers reliable support and automatic replication over the cluster of servers, compared with MySQL, which might provide a strong relational database, but it’s a bit more restrictive, requiring data to be pushed into tables.

Another advantage of the new MEAN Stack is that Node.js simplifies the server layer. It does the work with some JavaScript and having everything in one layer prevents confusion and minimizes the occurrence of bugs. LAMP features multiple layers of navigation with various configuration files and differing syntax, which all combined can make a developer’s work quite difficult at times. Another advantage of Node.js is that it is faster, which makes it perfect for mobile apps.

AngularJS is another advantage of MEAN Stack. It adds consistency and stability by anointing one client framework, by allowing easy migration of code between content management systems and by allowing the coder work without hassle on the client’s side. LAMP benefits from solid PHP-based frameworks that work with MySQL, but has nothing to offer close to AngularJS.

Part of the developer community considers that LAMP might become obsolete in the near future. It’s not the case yet, as LAMP is still a reliable ‘player’, which has proven its efficiency over the years, but MEAN Stack is definitely a new, innovative, cutting-edge technology package that will most likely conquer the market soon.

Benefitting from a large support community, Drupal is one of the most widely used content management systems today. It is the perfect CMS for personal, corporate or government sites and has multiple uses, from simple presentation websites to custom community or e-commerce platforms. Drupal is intuitive, highly secure, SEO-friendly, mobile-friendly, easy to integrate with existing code and more.

One of the major advantages of using Drupal as your content management system is that it can adapt to virtually any browser and operating system without hassle. It saves you time and money when it comes to render your site’s content on all popular browsers like Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and on the widely used Windows, MacOS and Linux OS platforms. It also works perfectly on less known and used browsers and operating systems.

The great thing about Drupal is that it is backwards compatible. That means that it can easily adapt to previous versions of a particular browser or OS. Other CMSs have the same feature too, but their compatibility can be limited and require longer development time to adapt to older OS and browser versions. On the other hand, Drupal offers a perfect browsing experience (both in terms of graphics and functionality) with just minor tweaks.

It is always recommended to use the latest OS and browser version available, but many users ignore this recommendation. The use the systems they are accustomed with their favorite plugins to or are not interesting in upgrading. This is why Drupal comes in handy and helps you reach a wider audience. And remember that Drupal offers a superior and user-friendly browsing experience on mobile devices running Android and iOS too.

As Drupal is one of the most versatile content management systems today, it is widely used for corporate, e-commerce, government and a wide range of other projects and sites. Drupal is a highly secure, highly scalable CMS which empowers web presence for a multitude of projects.

Flexibility, easy administration, possibility to integrate with existent and future modules and pieces of code, intelligent web publishing, mobile friendliness, huge support community and multilingual capabilities are just a few of the features that make Drupal such a popular and widely used CMS.

Let’s take a look at who uses Drupal:
– The White House: www.whitehouse.gov
– The Economist: www.economist.com
– Oxfam: www.oxfam.org
– The French Government: www.gouvernement.fr
– Eric Clapton: www.ericclapton.com
– Fujifilm: www.fujifilm.com
– The British Government: www.direct.gov.uk
– The Louvre Museum: www.louvre.fr
– Ikea: www.ikea.com
– Chris Rock: www.chrisrock.com
– ING: www.ing.com
– Rafael Nadal: www.rafaelnadal.com

And the list goes on. As you can see, governments, major institutions and corporations and famous artists use and trust Drupal. This makes it one of the most legitimate and trustworthy CMSs on the market.

By now we already know that Drupal is a very efficient content management system, able to meet personal and corporate needs, a reliable way to empower your presence on the internet. Its modules are highly scalable and provide you with access to the latest web technologies.

But Drupal is much more than a simple and efficient CMS. It is a tool that will boost you ROI rate from the first moment you deploy your website on the internet. Let’s see how this is possible.

First of all, Drupal is easy to configure and does not require dedicated admins to run the website. This means that after the site is created, you or anyone else can manage it without any hassle. With little training, you are in complete control of your website.

At the same time, Drupal has powerful SEO modules that can help you increase your visibility on the internet at a fast pace. The better the visibility, the more visitors you get imp source. Running SEO campaigns for a Drupal sased website is very efficient. And this translates into cash. Drupal is also easy to integrate with social media, so you can communicate easily with your friends and customers via Facebook, Twitter or any other media platform.

Drupal is a mobile friendly CMS. By using it, the development team can create mobile versions of your website in a short time, or design adaptive or responsive sites that can be managed very easily. This means that you don’t need to create separate apps or spend tons of money on mobile design.

Drupal websites are also easy to maintain, and do not require additional development when it is time to update them. Security updates are also easy to implement and very cost effective. Thanks to its large support community, Drupal is constantly evolving and grants you access to new and rick open source features that will make your site shine on the web.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is something you really need to take into consideration when designing your site. SEO is now an integrated part of the modern web and helps you gain better visibility on search engines. And this translates into more visitors and better business, whether you operate a corporate business or a private one.

And Drupal is by far the best CMS when it comes to search engine optimization. It gathers lots of CMS tools that grant users the ability to control all elements of their SEO campaign. Drupal’s SEO Tools module offers you an all-in-one suite of search engine reporting, analysis and optimization options.

Here are just a few of the features that the Drupal SEO tools offer: Keyword research, management and extraction, Content optimization, reports, tagging and autolinking, Link management, Cornerstone content and silo management, plus SEO architectural enhancements such as page titles, meta tags, global redirect, XML sitemap, Google Analytics w/ API integration, Google Webmaster Tools and more.

There’s no better way to make your site rank high in search engines than using the Drupal CMS and its rich SEO tools. It’s guaranteed to boost your site’s visibility and attract visitors to empower your business.

Drupal offers a versatile open framework that allows developers quickly code and deploy content based apps for both mobile and desktop interfaces. It is the perfect CMS for going from desktop to mobile experience.

As you already know, Drupal in an open source platform, which comes wrapped in a modular fashion. Drupal is backed by a large number of developers that for a huge support community. The Drupal community is constantly working on improving and developing modules, to offer innovation and flexibility to all users. As a matter of fact, modules are created and updated on a regular basis, to stay on top of the industry trends.

This is why Drupal is able to keep up with the rapidly evolving mobile devices, platforms and networks with ease. As a matter of fact, Drupal is a highly versatile framework for developing native mobile apps, responsive sites, adaptive sites and more.

Here are a few developer advantages of using Drupal as the infrastructure for your mobile projects:
– Abstract content delivery. The content is stored in one location and there’s no need for managing it in different locations. A content type is used for each specific type of content and then associated with unique descriptions. Drupal is able to create nodes that point to the specific content.
– Easy security and access rights management. Application-level services are used to manage users and set their roles and permissions. The site administrator can set them on the fly.
– Easy to customize look and feel. Drupal uses themes to render content, themes based on one or more cascading style sheet (CSS), and one or more PHP-based template. And these are highly customizable.

Thanks to these features, a single Drupal-powered application can manage both a desktop experience, and various mobile experiences running on various devices, browsers and operating systems.

Drupal is one of the most reliable and scalable content management systems today, but its capabilities are way beyond that. It is not just a simple CMS, as it can be used as the framework for native mobile application development. The app can be the front end that talks to Drupal using the Services module, while the Drupal itself is the backend that contains content, business logic, user management and other functionalities.

There are advantages of building a native mobile application compared to designing a mobile web application. You can distribute the app through mobile app stores and gain access to native functionality. And building the app with Drupal ensures reliability. You don’t have to worry about developing future updates, about how the content is rendered on different devices or about restructuring the code. Drupal keeps everything clean and neat.

There are lots of features you can benefit from when having a native mobile application. You can stick it into Google Play or App Store and get paid, you get app purchase and subscriptions through the App Store, Google Play, or other app stores, you can implement app advertising from native mobile app networks; you can access the device’s camera for images or video, the device’s file system for caching, the device’s contacts, map functionality and much more.

These above mentioned features will probably be available for mobile web applications in the future, but for now, only native mobile applications incorporate the full package.

At this point we all know that Drupal is a powerful and easy adjustable content management system. It is easy to integrate with existing technologies, fast and user friendly. When it comes to rendering content on desktop based browsers, Drupal works like a charm. But what about mobile-based websites? Is Drupal still efficient?

The answer is YES, without the shadow of a doubt. Drupal is perfect for designing mobile-specific websites that render beautifully on any mobile device or browser. Let’s say that you’re not interested in responsive sites (although Drupal is perfect for responsive design too) and you need a dedicated mobile website or app for your business. A website that features different markup and layout compared to the traditional desktop site and uses a mobile web framework like jQuery Mobile or Sensa Touch for mobile users.

Well, Drupal comes with the Mobile Tools module which includes extremely useful features such as Web Browser detection, Mobile domain redirection, Mobile specific themes, Mobile site availability, Mobile context, plus other useful tools that make mobile site development fast and easy.

So, Drupal is very capable and versatile when it comes to designing mobile-specific websites. Mobile sites designed with Drupal provide the user with enhanced experience and are very easy to manage by administrators.