Drupal 8 is on the verge of release with additional new features, which were available as separate modules in the earlier versions. Without any hassle of additional installation, it will deliver better tools for developers and more value for customers.

I have listed below some of most important features of Drupal 8, we have been waiting for :

Managing your content- from Mobile

Any person who ever administered a website better knows that, it’s best supported on Desktop or laptop rather than a Mobile. That why! Drupal 8 is being developed with Mobile First Architecture. The Drupal 8 Mobile Initiative is a group effort to have a platform suitable for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

In Drupal 8, special care has been taken to make all built-in-themes more responsive. Also, with simple administration page and admin toolbar, it is easier for you to make changes from any mobile or tablet with ease.

The tables shrink properly, so that the contents get scaled to fit into any mobile device. So it provides better user experience for not only the administrator, but also the users.

As you all know HTML5 plays key role in making websites fully functional and compatible on mobile screens. The happy news is that this industry standard is now included in drupal 8.

Multilingual Capabilities

Even though earlier versions of drupal including Drupal 7 supports multilingual functionality, Drupal 8 will have more. With Drupal 8 multilingual functionality, it is possible to translate anything in the system.

The multilingual functionality provides language configuration, assignment and detection functionality. It also provides a user interface to the existing backend support for automatic software translation. Now it’s more easier to translate contents with the build-in user interfaces.

New Configuration Management

In drupal 8, the configuration management settings will not be stored in the database anymore. Instead, it will be stored in the master folder. Thus the configuration management will be kept away from the database.

Whenever you enable the module, the system copy the default setting into the master configuration folder.  Now, when you modify the configuration settings, the new settings get stored in the master configuration folder. It even lets you use version control for your configuration and makes it easier to push configuration changes from staging to production.

Thus In Drupal 8, configuration will be managed efficiently in a professional way.

Accessibility Integration

Till date drupal 7 was the most accessible content management system available. But the upcoming Drupal 8 is going to top the race with additional big enhancements. One such enhancement will be the adoption of WAI ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Application) suite.

By using WAI ARIA, you can make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. Thus it allows more consistent and predictable experience for all users.

Drupal 8 can be used to address accessibility issues also like color contrast, size, list elements and blocks, comments and book pages etc and specific problems with browsing on firefox, safari and iphone.

Better user experience

Drupal 8, use advantage of Jquery UI’s autocomplete and modal dialogs for providing better user experience. Jquery UI’s autocomplete make entering information much easier and modal dialogs display clean, elegant messages in a simple way.

Drupal 8 has additional features for content editing like Inline editing, CEK Editor, WYSIWYG etc which improves user experience and  is made with web security in mind.

Built-in Web Services

In Drupal 8, with build-in web services, you can allow external applications to read, and update information on your site through the web. You can authenticate a client with HTTP authentication, to provide username, password and other fields as required, to allow external applications to access and use information from your site without accessing your code. REST is one of the popular ways of making web services work in Drupal 8.

Fast theming

In Drupal 8, you will get an additional feature called Twig, which is the flexible, fast and secure template engine for PHP. With Twig, templates can be written as easy to learn syntax. Which in turn brings simplification and greater security to Drupal powered sites.

Designing, beautiful and functional Drupal sites will be much easier with Twig.

Views, out of the box

As you all know, Views is one of the most commonly used contributed module in Drupal 7. Views enable you to easily customize the front page, listing blocks and more in your drupal powered site. Also it allows you to simply create custom admin pages and customize the filters and action.

With the increase in demand for this module, drupal community has now planned to incorporate views into the core CMS in Drupal 8.

If you want to have more insight on the new features available in Drupal 8, do go through the following articles -

https://dev.acquia.com/blog/ultimate-guide-drupal-8-episode-5-front-end-developer-improvements
https://www.drupal.org/node/1912118
https://www.drupal.org/documentation/modules/rest
https://www.drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core/usability
https://www.drupal.org/about/accessibility
https://dev.acquia.com/blog/ultimate-guide-drupal-8-episode-4-multilingual-improvements
https://www.drupal.org/documentation/administer/config

Contact us to learn more about how Valuebound can help your organization tp use Drupal framework for your new business idea.

If you’ve ever worked together with a group of people on a project, then you definitely know the annoyance of constantly swapping files. Either you would prefer to do it by email or by uploading the files or some other means. Whatever it is, its a burden and every designer or developer knows that.

Version control helps you overcome this burden. Not only developers or designers, but every person can get benefited by using version control. It helps you to keep copies of required files and designs. Setting up and using version control has perhaps the best outcome, in terms of improving your research effectiveness and general happiness.

You must be wondering why there is a need for this? For that you must understand what is version control and what it does.

Release control or version control is a repository of files, that tracks revisions of data along with the person who made the changes and for what reason. It keeps record of the changes made over time, so that you can revert back to previous versions at any stage.

VCS keeps references on problems that has been fixed in the past or any enhancement introduced due to recent changes. It also keeps backed-up versions of your work or code , so you need not worry just in case anything goes wrong.

There are basically two types of version control that is being commonly used: distributed and centralized VCS.

• A distributed version control system is a system which stores complete history of the project files into another special folder which is hidden and kept inside the working copy of hard drive. So the developer can add changes to his work or code both when he is online or offline. Examples are Git and Mercurial.

• A centralized version control system keeps history of changes on a central server from where everybody calls the latest version of the code and moves the latest changes to. CVS, Perforce and SVN are some commonly used centralized version control system.

Next lets throw some light on the development process. Usually in development process, you require 3 distinct sites.

First is the production site, the one that world sees. Next you need to have a staging site which apears as staging.yoursite.com, dev.yoursite.com or test.yoursite.com. This is your test site and you need to put a username and password in front of this site so that the search engine’s can’t index it. The last one is a local version of the production site that a developer will have on his local machine.

Lets see how it works:

• Once a developer starts working on a site, what he does first is pulling the production code from the git repository and copying the production database down from the production site.
• By doing this, even if the developer commits some mistake and completely mess up the site thus displaying some errors. He need not have to worry since it’s visible only to him. But if he had done it directly on the production site then, the customers would have seen this.
• Now when the developer feels that the features are running as desired, he need to push the code changes to the repository. Next he reaches for the staging site and pulls these changes from the repository and makes necessary database changes.
• The customer can now go to the staging site and test the changes . If the customer approves the change, the developer goes to the production site and pulls the changes from the repository and makes the required database changes.
• With this you can test one set of changes on staging while you are running a tested code on production. And without this you are more likely to display errors to your customers.

Version control makes your everyday working process simpler and less annoying and gives you confidence to carry out more ambitious experimental work. For a successful software project, a version control tool and a test site is a necessity.

Successful eCommerce is not just about selling products online. It involves managing your data as well as your client interactions across a wide range of platforms. So your website must have both content and commerce.

Drupal commerce is an open source eCommerce solution built on top of drupal. It consists of powerful set of modules which provides out of box solution for most of eCommerce requirements and can be used to build online stores of small to large size.

Why drupal commerce is best suited for your business

Drupal commerce is build on proven enterprise CMS. Unlike Magento, OpenCart, KonaKart and many other off the shelf eCommerce solutions which concentrates primarily on product management, drupal commerce is best for both product as well as content management.

It helps in integrating digital contents such as blogs, videos, and editorial content to the purchase path without any need for separate research and checkout experience. Thus improving your online as well as offline sales by providing better user experience and improved traffic.

Drupal uses same strategy for a heavily trafficked site like Examiner.com or WhiteHouse.gov and an eCommerce site processing thousands of transaction a day.

But your business needs may change every now and then. Yet you need not worry since drupal commerce is modular and flexible enough to fit into your changing business requirements. Not just that, even a non technical person can execute changes and try out new ideas without any expert guidance.

One of the biggest concern of online merchandisers nowadays is the increased dependence of customers on smartphone for online shopping and transactions. But drupal commerce has solution for your concern. Commerce Mobile, a native cross-platform mobile app of Drupal commerce optimize contents from merchant website to suit any mobile phones or tablets.

After mobilizing what's next? As a next step every company wants to get a social recognition since, social medias are the latest source of new age marketing.

Using Drupal commerce, you can easily integrate your site to all social networks like twitter, facebook, linkedin and others. Now that will make your customers, share their purchases and promote products across their networks. Ultimately it will enlarge your market reach and potential audience.

You would now agree that drupal commerce has solution for all your business headaches.

Useful features of drupal commerce

Now the very next question that comes to your mind is how drupal commerce adds value to your online business. The reason why Drupal Commerce is the best choice for building next online store? Well, there are many.

• Apart from the primary features like creating product display, price, description, comments, reviews etc. You could have any number of custom fields such as adding supplier details, invoice details, putting radio buttons for selecting pickup or delivery, seasonal category setting and lot more as per your requirements.
• An additional feature provided by drupal commerce is, it allows you to create a new product and a content page for that product at the same time in your store. Thus it reduces the amount of time it takes to add new products to your store with this quick and simple interface.
• You can view, manage and update orders on your website using Order management tool of Drupal commerce. It allows customers to confirm orders via email, creates your stores own checkout workflow with custom order status and create pdf invoices that can be easily customized.
• Before a user adds an item to the cart, you need to make sure whether the tax amount is included in the total amount or not. Drupal commerce has flexible system to add multiple taxes depending on the region. You can also display itemize tax portion of the total to the customers.
• You may at times, provide some discount coupon codes to your users as part of sales promotions. Drupal Commerce Core allow you to add coupons via line item or via Checkout which your customer can avail for any additional discounts.
• After adding an item to the cart, next you want users to be redirected to the secure payment gateways. Like any other ecommerce platform drupal commerce integrates with third party gateways and provides both on site and off site payment facilities.
• These payment gateways will redirect users back to site after successfull payment process confirmation. Your data is safely managed with the high security and accessibility features of Drupal. Some major payment gateways include Authorize.Net, Paypal, Clickbank, eWay, CCAvenue, Payseal ICICI, etc.

It’s not just the features but the trusted clients who strongly believe in the power of Drupal commerce like U.K postal service Royal mail, international language school Eurocentres, McDonalds France and lot more consumer brands that makes it popular.

The future is Drupal and Drupal commerce is the only proven platform that can serve both your content and commerce needs by providing the best eCommerce solution.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company based in Bangalore. Contact us for more information on how can we build your next e-commerce idea using Drupal commerce.

Recently while developing a custom Drupal module for a client, I was asked to do git commit everyday. While doing it few days regularly missed one step and deleted the file difference by mistake. This made me to write down steps to follow every time for this project.

Getting started with Git

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is all about composing and saving snapshot of your project.

The three main sections of Git project are index which acts as a staging area for your snapshot, Git directory where Git permanently stores the snapshot of your project  and a working directory where you can modify your files.

First step with git is cloning a remote repository

Clone to create local repository

git clone

Using clone command, you can create a working copy of a local repository. it helps you to clone a repository into a new directory.

git clone https://github.com/neerajskydiver/shippingeasy_order

Updating local Git repository

To fetch from and integrate with another repository or a local branch , use

git pull

It will pull down from remote whatever you ask and merge it instantly into a branch you are in when you make a request.

To extract data from remote serve to origin, use

git pull [options] [ [...]] git pull origin

Adding files

In Git, you have to add file contents to your Index before you commit them. If the file is new, you can run

git add

Using this command, files in the current state will be sent to the index for commit.

If you want to add multiple files to the index, you will have to add them as shown below

git add file1 file2 file3 ….. git add -A e.g. git add readme.txt or git add -A

This adds the files file1, file2, file3, and adds readme.txt to their updated content to the index.

Verify Status

While coding, you may want to see what all files have changed, before you do a commit to store them in the git repository. For that you can use

git status

The status command will show all files that have changed since your last commit.

Finding difference between commits

Apart from just viewing what all files that have changed, if you want to see the actual difference in the source code. use

git diff

The above command will show a difference with respect to your last commit and current changes. The git diff command can be used to compare difference between any commits.

Below command shows unified diff format as to what code you have changed in the project.

git diff [options] [] [--] [...] git diff README.md

Commit

Git commit is used to store the changes you've made to git repository.

git commit

It stores the current contents of the index in a new commit along with a log message.

git commit -m “COMMIT MESSAGE COMES HERE”

here m switch is used to specify commit message. You can put anything between the quotes for your message.

git commit -m "Adding Readme.txt"

Pushing your code back to the repository

In order to send changes made by you from your local working copy to remote repository for your branch,

You can use the command

git push -u origin git push -u origin 7.x-1.x git push -u origin master

This example shows how to push modified changes to the repository with branch master or 7.x-1.x

The increasing popularity of mobile internet and high competition in the business world has made it virtually impossible for  any marketers, organizations, corporates and advertisers to exist without a Mobile compatible website.

Nowadays even busy consumers are converting their non - productive time into value added activities using their Smartphone. With all services and necessities just a click away that to with a high speed data device, it is possible to stay connected with all the customers anywhere anytime.

Do you want your organization to be tossed aside in this competitive world? If your answer is no, then it is the right time to take advantage of the mobile Technology. After all you have to take decisions based on the interests of your targeted customers.

Why choose drupal for Mobile Friendly Website

There is no doubt that Drupal CMS is one of the most powerful and popular open source platform. With Drupal it is easy to manage, publish and organize wide variety of contents.

But the most inevitable advantage of choosing  drupal is that, it works well for almost all devices including iPhone, iPad, android and even blackberry. With each improved version of Drupal from Drupal 7 to the latest Drupal 8, the focus is centered around a “Mobile first architecture“. So it meets even the future needs of Mobile Experience.

Apart from that Drupal provides some unique and mobile friendly themes and templates which are easier to use. It also provides additional tools useful for Mobile Websites like Mobile Tool module which inform users that a mobile version of the website is available.

With high security features of Drupal, it is possible to overcome almost all common security risks and attacks providing long time business security.

Options available to make mobile friendly website using drupal

Native Smartphone Applications

To identify the best way to provide contents on a smartphone, it is necessary that the mobile application has to meet the content requirements. With Drupal, building mobile apps has become easier and less confusing. 

For Drupal sites, an open source mobile application development kit Drupal Gap is usually used. With Drupal Gap, it is easier to create and customize multi-platform Drupal mobile app that can communicate with the websites.

Such applications can be easily installed on almost all mobile devices. Once installed these mobile applications can be interfaced with Drupal Gap enabled site.

Native smartphones applications that provide unique and useful services, developed for mobile devices can produce high popularity and revenue potential. The distribution and subscription of apps can be done through the appstore or even the Google Play itself. 

Also It opens up the application to all features of the mobile devices including GPS system, accelerometer, compass, map, gyroscope, text, video, camera and voice features. 

Native apps can be configured to cache data locally, so even if device is out of range, applications works effectively.

Native apps using web services to retrieve data

The best method to retrieve data in this way is using native apps to contact drupal website through web services. It is simpler and Offloads much of data processing to Drupal Website. Also as data is stored in cloud, There is no need to redeploy new version of native application. 

Usually Native application provide interface through native API. But since data can come from Drupal website, it allows users to access and update contents from any device.

Responsive web design

Can you imagine to read a full Website or even a single line on a mobile without any finger zooming? But so many finger zooming can make the users frustrated. 
As per google reports more than half of Mobile users do not wish to revisit a website without a non-mobile theme. 

There comes the role of Responsive Web design. It delivers Optimal viewing experience and easy navigation regardless of the size of user display, limitations or capabilities of the device being used. Drupal provides backing for web services as well as responsive web design. 

Responsive themes use media queries to serve CSS. These media queries work in real time, so when a viewer rotates his smartphone, the media query updates the style sheets simultaneously to accommodate the full width of the device.

Responsive themes usually loads lower bandwidth items first in order to avoid any lag that occur while loading a webpage. Then when the media queries detect a larger screen display, it adds heavier graphics elements. Another advantage of responsive web design is the quick transition of legacy websites.  

The most common and powerful Drupal themes are Omega, Adaptivetheme and Arctica. It reduces formatting of your Drupal website to meet your mobile device requirements. 

Third party Gateways such as mobify

Third party Gateways play the role of a mediator between your existing site and mobile browser interface. Mobify is one such gateway which integrates with your existing website. If your organization need to build mobile capability without redesigning your website, then mobify helps 
you in that. 

Thus Drupal helps in simplifying and speeding up Theme development process with its modules and tools. Hence making it easy to serve mobile-optimized content.

As in the upcoming years, all what we need is, one site , one theme with simpler CSS and no duplicate content issues. This can be achieved using Drupal.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company based in Bangalore. Contact us for more information on how to create mobile compatible Website.

References:

http://digett.com/blog/05/24/2010/mobilize-your-drupal-site-mobile-tools
http://www.slideshare.net/ChadHart2/mobile-web-withdrupal
http://www.mobify.com/resources/mobify-drupal-plugin/

Personalization enhances your online business. The experts say that decisions have to be taken based on the customer data and their preferences when it comes to product recommendations or home page landscape alteration for the shortlisted customers. Customers from different geographical locations order for the products either in person or online. You need to make sure that the shoppers find your product easy to get a compelling digital experience.

How to create a personalized e-commerce shopping experience

To create a personalized e-commerce experience, you need to develop the content (products / pages / images / product video / comments / testimonials …) strategy that is relevant to the end users. It is necessary to find what customers need. The required content and the form should be designed with right questions in which the customer can share their shopping experience. If your website enables the customers to navigate for specific keywords, it narrows down their search which gives them personalized shopping experience. You can enable personalization in different phases phases.

• Personalization of navigation structure - This is the most important and basic phase of personalization. When a shopper clicks on an item, the website should display the categories of the selected item. E.g. if the user clicks on the books, it should display the categories related to books. Drupal CMS has a powerful menu system in which you can add, modify and remove the submenus as per your online visitor click behaviour. Few modules which can be used to achieve this - Context Menu Block, Personalize, Menu per Role.
   
• Personalizing based on customer’s behaviour -  Order history and customer exact requirements play an important role in personalized shopping experience. Customers have various product requirements which have to be grouped in a segment, taking the front-end (website) and back-end systems (database) performances into consideration. Commerce Recommender which gives personalized products recommendations based on customers purchasing history.  Browsing History Recommender module can give personal recommendation, based on what each user has read the content so far. There is Fivestar Recommender module which can create four different blocks - Similar nodes (by votes), Recommendations (from similar nodes), Similar users (by votes), Recommendations (from similar users).
   
• Personalize using external data source - Personalization can be improved further utilizing shopper location, social network feeds and other factors such as weather to their full advantage. This can be done using a custom Personalize engine developed for your store. Drupal provides excellent integration with Nostro, The Plug-n-Play Recommendation Engine using Nosto Tagging for Drupal Commerce module.
   
• Personalize by foreseeing customer needs - This phase should be implemented once basic level of personalization is in place on your ecommerce store. This enables the organization to visualize the customer requirements in advance and personalize them accordingly. Commerce Reporting provides a reporting system to Drupal Commerce having features like Sales Report, Customer Products, Payment Modes, Filtering order status Datewise and range-wise that organizes the report on a daily, weekly and monthly basis in a tabular format. These data can be used in many ways to add personalized experience based on their buying behaviour.
   
• Personalize by support segment - This is the most advanced and the toughest phase where the customer experience is tracked and personalized individually. This is also referred as market segmentation. At this level, an enterprise is in a position to analyze the customer attributes with third-party data practices to make the website more relevant get more conversions. You can use some of the tools like Testing, User Profiling, Segmentation and Targeting to achieve this personalization.

Drupal Commerce, owing to its advanced analysis and optimization tools allows personalized recommendation and personalized email marketing along with offering an innovative and customized shopping experience.

Drupal provides customization flexibility for all kinds of online stores and can be adapted to any device as per the latest trends which gives a unique feeling to the customers. They can interact either one to one or in a multi-channel way which helps you to eliminate the functions that is irrelevant to the customers, thereby improving their experience. Drupal is well known for content customization and has tremendous capacity to meet these requirements.  Many organizations use this CMS to achieve the kind of personalization that the users need.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company based in Bangalore. Contact us for more information on how to create personalized shopping experience for your next e-commerce project.

Useful Reference:
Content Personalization in Drupal with Drupal WEM Project
You are what you click: Leveraging Modern Personalization Tactics

Apache Solr is a proven and popular open source search platform developed by Apache Lucene. It is an application developed in java and runs as a standalone full text search server embedded in a servlet container. Solr search is server-independent and supports the following features:

Multi Site Search: Multiple search sites can be performed when the large number of websites have a common index. The shared index of these sites stores the documents with a site and a hash field which enables to filter by keywords and generate the results either from a single site or the sites that share the index. There is Apache Solr Multisite Search Module  which adds the tab "Multisite search" to the search page.

Distributed Search: Takes place either when the length of the index exceeds the capacity of a single system or when the execution of a query takes a long time and splits the data into different parts. Solr can query and join the split results.

Faceted Search: This technique is used to minimize the search result according to the categories and get the relevant information. The end users are able to extract adequate information in several ways to meet their needs e.g. in a retail website, when a product is searched, the users get additional options to narrow search result in the left hand side. These options make the search more accurate and specific.

Solr also has an edge over drupal core search with respect to indexing and scalability.

Java Installation
Tomcat and Solr are dependent on Java Development Kit(JDK) and run on Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JDK consists of JVM and Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Therefore, we need to install full JDK.

aptitude install java7-jdk 

Tomcat 7
Apache Tomcat is another open source web server consisting servlet container. It enables us to view and run jsp and servlets in the browser. Apache Tomcat consists of configuration and management tools. However, it can be configured by editing XML configuration files. Tomcat 7 runs on Servlet 3.0 and JSP 2.2 specification. It requires Java Development Kit (JDK 1.6) and later version.

Installing Tomcat 7

1. Add a user and associated permission

   useradd -Mb /usr/local tomcat
   chown -R tomcat:tomcat /usr/local/tomcat
   

2. Get the Tomcat’s latest version from  http://tomcat.apache.org/download-70.cgi and download the file tar.gz binary to usr/local/src server and extract the file to usr/local/tomcat

   wget http://apache.tradebit.com/pub/tomcat/tomcat-7/v7.0.53/bin/apache-tomcat-7.0.53.tar.gz
   tar -C /usr/local -zxf /usr/local/src/apache-tomcat-7.*.tar.gz 
   mv /usr/local/apache-tomcat-7.* /usr/local/tomcat
   

3. The default HTTP connector port and AJP connector port is 8080 and 8009 respectively. We had varnish installed on port 80 & Apache running on 8080. To avoid, we have to change port number Tomcat listens to. Command line to find & replace port number -

   sed -i s/8080/8983/g /usr/local/tomcat/conf/server.xml
   // You can give any non conflicting port number
   

4. Test the successful installation of Apache Tomcat

   sudo -u tomcat /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
   

You are good to go if you don’t see any errors on your termial.

Solr Installation steps

1. Download Solr 4.7 from http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ and extract the downloaded file

   cd /usr/local/src
   wget http://apache.tradebit.com/pub/lucene/solr/4.7.2/solr-4.7.2.tgz
   tar -zxf solr-4.7.2.tgz
   

2. Copy the Solr java library files from Solr to Tomcat library directory

   cp solr-4.7.2/dist/solrj-lib/* /usr/local/tomcat/lib/
   

3. Copy log4j configuration file from Solr to Tomcat config directory

   cp solr-4.7.2/example/resources/log4j.properties /usr/local/tomcat/conf/ 
   

4. Install Apache Solr’s war into Tomcat Webapps directory

   cp solr-4.7.2/dist/solr-4.7.0.war /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/solr.war
   

5. Add Solr context file in /usr/local/tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/solr.xml and add the following code

Solr Configuration with Drupal

1. Create the Solr directory and copy the example Solr configuration

   mkdir -p /usr/local/tomcat/solr
   cp -r solr-4.7.2/example/solr/collection1/conf /usr/local/tomcat/solr/
   

2. Get the latest version of Search API Solr Search from Drupal ( Apache Solr Drupal module didn’t worked with Solr 4.7.2 though it used to work with Solr 4.4 )

   cd /usr/local/src
   wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/search_api_solr-7.x-1.4.tar.gz
   tar -zxf search_api_solr-*.tar.gz
   

3. Copy Solr configuration files from Search API Solr Searchl module to Tomcat configuration directory

   rsync -av search_api_solr/solr-conf/4.x/ /usr/local/tomcat/solr/conf/
   

4. Create Apache Solr Drupal setting in the path /usr/local/tomcat/solr/solr.xml and paste the following to define valuebound core (you can have own name for the core)

5. Make valuebound Solr core directory and copy Solr configuration files to new core

   mkdir /usr/local/tomcat/solr/valuebound
   cp -r /usr/local/tomcat/solr/conf /usr/local/tomcat/solr/valuebound/
   

6. Now just stop tomcat and assign the permission and check this

   /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh	
   chown -R tomcat:tomcat /usr/local/tomcat
   sudo -u tomcat /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
   

Now you will test your new the valuebound Solr core admin interface in yourdomain.com:8983/solr/#/valuebound. But you should be using yourdomain.com:8983/solr/valuebound URL while configuring Drupal Apache Solr.

Now to start tomcat automatically every time you restart server -

Download this tomcat init script. Create init file for tomcat at /etc/init.d/tomcat and copy paste content of tomcat.txt.

vi /etc/init.d/tomcat

Ref: http://www.lullabot.com/blog/article/installing-solr-use-drupal

Valuebound is a Drupal development company providing Apache Solr Implementation and integration with Drupal CMF. Contact us if you would like to use Apache Solr to improve search result for your Drupal driven web sites and applications..

Inbound marketing aims on being noticed by customers. It is about creating an effective & compelling content e.g. blog, newsletters, landing page, video etc. This gives an opportunity to the company to get the visitors to their website wherein they can be converted into prospects.

Inbound Marketing Vs Outbound Marketing

Traditional method of advertising e.g. cold calling, direct marketing, brochure distribution and advertising through Radio, Newspapers, TV etc are considered as outbound marketing and are considered obtrusive. Whereas in case of Inbound marketing, purpose is to help the customer to make decision and let them approaches the company through the website, email or telephone.

Techniques used in outbound marketing are poorly targeted as the company advertises its product or services irrespective of the customer’s needs. This kind of marketing interrupts the people who are watching TV shows or cricket match in the form of advertisement and is annoying. But inbound marketing methods create awareness and educate customers about the company’s product or services to people through various online platform. These platform enables scope of two-way interaction helping to build a good rapport and relationship with the customers, unlike outbound marketing.

How Drupal can be used as platform for inbound marketing?

Drupal as platform can be used in different aspect of an inbound marketing campaign.

• Attract - The first step for a campaign is to draw attention towards what you are trying to market. We need to know the right content, keywords, blog posts to pull their attention. Once the visitors are aware about the product, you can attract them with an effective content strategy. Drupal can be used for various channels of attracting users - Blogs integrated with social media, Product forum to boost online customer support and Social Commerce. Keyword Research Module can be used to extracts the keyword via content analysis UI from the website.
• Convert - When the visitors contact us to enquire about the product or service, it has to be converted into leads by using a call to action. The landing pages is are ideal place to get the visitors give their personal information such as address, telephone number and email id in exchange for information about the product or service they are researching about. We can quickly create and test multiple landing pages using Drupal CMS. Based on conversion ratio, we can select the landing page which works best.
• Closing - This is the process where the marketer has to handle the objections. Some of the common objections may be raised with respect to price, complacency, trust, fear of change etc. On answering these queries, there is a possibility that the customer may place the order. Leeds need to be prioritized to bring them through the sales process by sending emails. It is necessary to keep track of conversion tools that works the best. This can be done by closed-loop reporting using marketing tools. Drupal has proven capability to integrate with different enterprise as well as open source CRM applications including Marketing Automation tools. Few of the off the shelf module for integration purpose are - Salesforce Suite, Salesforce Webform Integration, Drupal to Sugar etc.
• Delight - It is essential to keep in touch with the customers after making a sale. They promote the business by referring the company to the people they know. They should be updated as and when a new product is launched. Social media channels and emails should be used to engage the customers. Drupal has several modules to integrate with the social media. These module helps you to update your social profile from web pages itself. Even customers can announce their online purchase on their social profile pages. Comments can be collected using inbuilt Drupal system or otherwise it can be integrated with other comment system using various modules available e.g. Disqus, IntenseDebate Comments, Livefyre Comments.

Best part of inbound marketing  is, you can measure everything, from how many downloads happened from specific pages or how many enquiries you have received from different landing pages or from where users are coming to and to what pages. These data helps you to refine further your marketing strategy.

Contact us to learn more how Valuebound can help your organization using Drupal framework for your new Inbound marketing initiative

We, in the Drupal community, have often had to deal with the task of adding new functionalities to existing Drupal sites where content is generated on hourly/daily basis. We cannot put the site under maintenance or stop users creating new content while deploying the additional features we have developed.

The main problem is that the configuration settings for the Drupal platform are stored in  the same database as regular content. Whenever the settings need to be managed, there is a risk of user-generated content in the database being impacted or lost. This necessitates database backups to ensure content security during configuration management.

Moreover, the modules currently available for handling migration of additional functionalities on live sites such as Features ( along with Features Override, Features Extra, Features Plumber ), Strongarm and Context, work in ways subjective to the individual project, and so, for each project, using these modules entails lots of trial and error learning, with sometimes costly mistakes.

Drupal 8 has now included configuration management in Drupal core. With Drupal 8 you can deploy a configuration from one environment to another (between cloned instances of the same site). You can import, export and synchronize configuration without the hassle of using extra modules.

Configuration management in Drupal 8

In Drupal 8, the configuration settings of the core will not be stored in the database anymore. Rather, they will be stored in a master configuration folder. Configuration management activity will thus be kept away from the database that contains your website content. Stringent security measures have been implemented to ensure safety of this configuration folder.

Modules will ship with their own configuration folder containing default configuration settings. As soon as you enable the module, its default settings will be copied to the master configuration folder containing the configuration settings for the core. Whenever the module’s configuration settings are modified, the modified settings are stored in the master configuration folder.

Thus, Drupal 8 will bring an end to the risks associated with configuration settings being stored in your content database.

Should you wish to gain a deeper understanding on how configuration management will work in Drupal 8, do go through the following articles:

http://www.slideshare.net/swentel/drupal-configuration-system-drupal-campbaltics
https://drupal.org/node/1667894

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. For more information on Drupal development, contact us.

Landing pages are vital to ensuring your digital marketing campaign actually produces quantifiable results. They help prove effectiveness of your campaign, capture data on leads, and guide the customer towards your calls to action. The data you capture through landing pages provides you contacts and profiles of people to enable you to send them customized nurturing, marketing and sales messages.

Establishing such large-scale personal relationships through marketing automation helps you maximize revenue with minimal effort. And it all starts with an optimized landing page.

Landing pages need to be optimized to become the winning combination of headlines, SEO, form fields and content that lead to the greatest amount of visitor activity that indicates buying interest.

An effective way to optimize landing pages is through A/B testing, one of the fastest methods to learn more about your visitors and their preferences. A/B tests determine which changes to the current design of a page produce positive results. This helps you decide quantitatively which new design or change would improve your conversion rate before you incorporate it in your site code.

Drupal 7 has some enterprise proven modules that will help you to do A/B testing for your site. Two examples of such Drupal modules are:

Multivariate module

The Multivariate module is created especially for Drupal platforms, for which it is it more powerful than many external solutions. A/B tests done through this module can take direct control of your Drupal platform and manipulate processes, simplifying workflows.

Salient functions and features:

Simple test-setting interface minimizes time and effort.
Multiple test cases can be parallelly run. 
Success is measured the instant the success condition is met.
Visitor is assigned the desired variant (interface/page) automatically the moment your test condition is met.

Example of A/B testing using the multivariate module:

Say you want to test if a bigger registration link on the home page will increase the number of people who sign up for the site. In just 5 or 6 rapid steps on the simple Multivariate interface, you can set up an A/B test such that anonymous users hitting the home page see one of these two variations:

  The default homepage                      The modified homepage

You can now get speedy reports that help you see if the enlarged "Create new account" link has been clicked on more often than the smaller one on the default page. 

Convert module

The Convert module does all the testing at convert.com. The tracking is done by your Drupal platform. If you have the budget for a pro option, convert module will give you great support with a large enterprise infrastructure.

Salient functions and features:

No coding knowledge required for A/B testing
Seamless integration with Google Analytics - can test large groups of dynamic pages
Live stats and unlimited tests on each account
One snippet of code for the entire site is sufficient, no need for repeated tagging
Stoppage of variations that hurt your conversion with reports and warnings

Tweaks to these modules can be made by your Drupal expert. Additionally, all these modules would serve as useful baselines should you require the creation of a new module for your specific testing needs.

Reference: https://www.drupal.org/node/2087977

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company providing enterprise Drupal web solutions. To help you with landing page optimization for your upcoming project, contact us.