Drupal is one of the most trustworthy and effective content management framework you can rely on, with a wide range of search engine friendly tools for impactful brand experience optimization. Nowadays, the web is becoming deeply integrated and more powered by social search than ever before. The search engine friendly architecture and open source nature of Drupal is making this CMS, the first choice for online branding.

More specifically, Drupal 8 is developed in order to deliver a consistent brand experience for your customers across multiple platforms. Also it will help you unify your brand experience and present it in a compelling and engaging manner.

Keys for Brand success

Socialising your Brand

Becoming social is an imperative for brands today, as being social is nowadays equated to global brand growth. After all every brand experience is intended to be fun and to make people happy, then only it will give you return in terms of growth.

Basically socialising your Brand means bringing a brand to your life socially.  But how will socialising help you win brand success? The key way to success is the direct social connection between the customer and the brand. Connecting with customers or users socially will make your customers feel like they have a say and that brands are listening to them. It will give your customers a feeling that their voice is directly reaching the brands i.e you.

Socialising is like a driving school, where customers are allowed to steer a bit, but the control is with the company brand. But the advantage is that it will help to create a big buzz as people would start to realize that, they could link directly not only to the brand online, but even to the founder and face of the brand.

Using Drupal for online branding will give your brand a consistent, modern, cross-platform and luxury standard. You can directly integrate a social sharing tool like “add this into your Drupal site” which will help you socialize your Brand. Thus it will allow readers to share contents within their network of friends, thereby increasing traffic and referrals to your website. This, in turn, provides brand exposure that leads more visitors to your website which helps generate new leads.

Hyper-personalization

Hyper-personalization plays an important role in marketing and commerce. It means delivering individualized experience by connecting social signals with transaction history and online behavior.

For example, customers receiving personalised notification via smartphone, when they are just a few blocks away from your shop, regarding an offer for an item, they have recently added to the online shopping cart. Since they did not complete the purchase the day before, you get a better opportunity to provide some best offers today knowing that your customer is right around the corner. This is what is referred to as Hyper-personalized experience.

Personalized experiences like this will put your brand apart from the rest. With the right mix of technology and creativity, you can make the personalized digital experience a reality. Personalization based on social data, like the one explained above is revolutionary and a key for brand popularity.

Likewise you could realize the benefits of social search specifically for your brand. For this, you have to identify clear use cases and cater to those needs. Most brands are still working from personas, for which they can create content that are universally accepted by people who matches with characteristics of the other persona.

With Drupal platform, you can create brand identity which includes a robust set of unique and targetable attributes, that can be leveraged to customize content depending on intelligence, all in real time before the page renders. This means you can deliver contents to your site visitors, that is relevant to their interests and that represent your brand using Drupal. This can be achieved using Drupal taxonomy feature.

Now if your requirement is to add powerful user item based recommendations to your site, you can make use of advance and proven recommendation engine Apache mahout, the Recommender API for Drupal.

Content is the king and seamless experience across channels is the queen

Whether it be part of a digital marketing strategy or delivering actual product information, it is important to provide relevant content across channels seamlessly. What brands can focus on in near term is becoming content experts.

Your brand can make use of new ways to engage consumers, specifically by creating editorized content. For eg: Timex brand effectively sells Iron man watch collection by sponsoring athletes, who blog their running tips on timex site. Timex also creates videos that help athletes take advantage of their watch features. They then place their content on up and coming social sharing tools, thereby marking strong brand presence in social media. This marketing technique is referred as content syndication and is a key element for brand success.

Content syndication is the process of pushing your blog, site or video content into third-party sites including social media as a complete article, snippet, link or thumbnail. Drupal allows you to syndicate content from another Website with the help of Syndication Modules.

With Drupal it is even easy to publish contents that are easily accessible on multiple devices. Also using Drupal it is possible to integrate your site with other tools such as social media, customer relationship, email and campaign management system.

Drupal started as a content management system, but due to its continuous evolution and flexibility, it was redefined as a content management framework. With the ideal user experience it provides, Drupal can be considered more as a digital experience platform rather than a content management system.

Consistency is the key to success in online branding and that can be achieved using Drupal.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company based in Bangalore. For more information on how to achieve unique Brand identity with Drupal CMS contact us.

For most business owners, finding ways to manage their web content and creating a beautiful website can be a disconcerting and time consuming task. The road to success is in making smarter use of existing technology platforms that enhance engagement, improve outcomes and reduce system wide costs.

Drupal offers unique ability to provide an intuitive, fully integrated and cost effective solution that can adapt to the ever changing needs of Business. Many business operate on legacy systems that are slow and inefficient. Drupal is an open source software that benefit digital business and today that means every kind of business.

Drupal is an excellent tool for building and operating a wide range of client facing websites and corporate intranet sites.

The key ways Drupal will help you win

Continuous Innovation

With good community support and over 6,30,000 users and developers constantly contributing to Drupal platform, it is continuously growing and improving. Community driven nature of drupal help you break free the barriers to innovation development through collaboration.  

With each improved version of Drupal, it has continuously innovated and have resulted in a framework designed specifically to support enterprise sites and more. A phenomenal group of really smart folks works to ensure that this content management system stays cutting-edge always.  

Cost Efficiency 

As with all things in life, staying under budget is a vital part of the equation. Drupal as open source platform will help you save your cost. Drupal open source platform is free to download, use and share. The advantage is in long term, that the agency will save huge cost for licensing websites.

Drupal is being developed and maintained by large community group, so thousands of modules and extensions are available for free in the community. The technologies are contributed and updated all the time. So your business website will have no outdated technology.

Risk Mitigation  

Drupal has justified itself as a secure and strong medium for enterprise needs. Infact Drupal core systems have been strengthened to mitigate common vulnerabilities. It addresses critical security risks with professionally audited methods.

Drupal security team works along with the drupal community to rectify any security issues found in the code hosted on Drupal.org. The published security advisories disclose vulnerabilities and weaknesses in core and contributed core separately and provide mitigation solutions.  

Through the power of single sign on, drupal can be leveraged to give users the ability to access all the systems, they are permitted to access with one password and one username from one central sign on location. Think of facebook as an example. This limits password fatigue and potential compliance risks based on human errors.

Drupal can be a conduit for your data throughout your entire system. By tying the disparate source together through sophisticated integrations, drupal can provide a 360 degree view to any critical data within a single pane of glass platforms. This can provide the organisation, any necessary information within their organisation, system wide access and lower cost of ownership by reducing the overhead of managing multiple platforms.  

Extensibility and Interoperability

Drupal is renowned for its extensibility, flexibility and integration power. Drupal can connect with multiple systems extending the functionality of each through a seamless integration of numerous platforms. Through seamless integration Drupal can extend  legacy platform while mitigating IT disruption and switching costs.  

Improved flexibility and adaptability are the two factors that makes drupal so unique and different.  Drupal is an incredibly flexible and powerful tool that lends itself very well to customization.

A solution built on drupal framework eliminates vendor lock in and allows any organization to rapidly adjust to new trends in technology environments. For eg: If there is demand for a video chat feed, but the explicit functionality does not exist, then Drupal’s flexibility allows it to rapidly adapt to meet those needs.  

Rather than being locked into a closed system, Drupal gives you the freedom to build upon the framework and create a truly engaging platform to satisfy your needs with ease. It will lower your cost burden systemwide and ultimately provides interoperability between systems which can improve efficiencies and data portability.

Access Management 

Drupal has highly granular and customizable permission settings which allows high level of control and access to each section of application. Drupal’s role based permission system provides granular control over a significant number of user actions. This system is extensible and can be enhanced to fit particular needs that are unique from site to site and user to user.

Drupal allows permissions to be programmatically set and administratively overridden, which allows for roles of varying functions on the application from content viewing, to editing and deleting. Permission settings can be configured on a per content type level, so a user may be able to view one data field, but not another, based on his or her permission settings. Thus it gives you and your user a good control and access over your website.

These factors prove both in theory and in practice, how businesses are implementing and benefitting from Drupal today. Drupal provides a rich digital experience irrespective of your business, which help you stay ahead of the competition.

Valuebound is a leading Drupal development company based in Bangalore. Contact us for more information on building a successful Drupal Website for your Business.

The increasing popularity of smartphone among the teens has anticipated a new technology revolution within many educational institutions and universities all around the world. This is the beginning of a new reform of the educational system.

Small changes in education may have large social returns in health, wealth and well being. Hundreds of reforms are already being introduced into education system each and every year, but now with the advance in technology why not take advantage of it for the betterment of both institution and the students.

So why you need to adopt Mobile Technology for your university ?

Mobile makes learning more interactive, flexible and convenient

As per latest studies, rate of students using smartphones and tablets for academic purpose doubled in just one year.This is due to the reason that students finds mobile and tablet as a powerful learning tool which offer convenience, flexibility and interactivity.

This gives universities or institutions an intervening opportunity, to take advantage of students interests for tablets and mobiles in education through technology applications.

For providing real-time information

Universities can make use of new methodologies to create a personally tailored experience based on the latest learning methods, skills or interests. Universities or institutions can make use of mobile technology for providing real-time information on getting directions, getting information on campus events, for news alerts and social recommendations for their students.

Research intensive universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford university have already been involved in Mobile web development for a while. And some other forward thinking colleges are also utilising mobile technology by conducting new experiments like;

• Rio Salado College introduced a data program called Rio Learn which can predict how good students can perform in the class depending on their past performance. Thus allowing for more informed course selection at the time of registration.

• The University of Texas introduced a concept called vTRAC which allows professors to see how well a student answered the questions or assignments in real time from their own devices whether it be laptop, smartphone or tablet and from where.

• Arizona State University has offered web based courses through eAdvisor that help students shape and personalize their learning experience. They even offer a facebook app that mines students profile to match with other students of similar interests to make friends within the university.

• WVU school has introduced an app iWVU app that shows everything from athletics to shuttle bus info to their students.

Empowering Mobile Commerce

Mostly nowadays online shopping, bill payments and lot more are either done by means of mobile or tablet. Universities can take advantage of the power of this mobile commerce for making things easier for  them and the students.

The famous university of Denver has partnered with Mocopay, a coffee shop to test mobile commerce on their campus. Also Stanford University has partnered with bling Tag stickers which charge students paypal accounts for any purchases made on campus.

For Creating a safer campus

The rise of mobile technology can empower students more than ever before, to report dangerous situations happening in and around campus and thus help remain safe from any harm. Many institutions and universities including the princeton university, has already implemented student body SMS alerts for emergency situations.

With the new apps like MyForce campus interface, we can get the detailed crime data report about the campus and the surrounding areas. So with Mobile technology, universities can now bring both real time knowledge and assurance to their students.

For Brand Reputation

Recently we have noticed a sudden proliferation on use of QR codes. We are definitely moving towards a digital world and QR codes are part of that expansion.

QR codes represent a combination of technology and advertising that focus on brand recognition. So Universities can make use of QR codes on campuses across the nation to create campus brand awareness initiates, video streaming, location based discounts and even for mobile payment option.

Also Branding can be done by means of social networking as well. Developing a strategy to share mobile activity on social medias can help your students, share what they are up to with their friends, mapping directly to the brand of your institution.

Take a look at some of the universities who have already adopted Mobile Technology

Stanford University

Stanford university has already implemented standard mobile apps that provide information on shuttle service times, events catalog and online directory to students. Apart from that, Stanford boasts a mobile learning environment program (SMILE), that allows student use their devices to create, collaborate and evaluate questions on educational topics.

Everest University

Everest university make use of mobile apps that enable students participate in class discussions, view grade and instructors comments and see upcoming course events. So it is both a calendar and a classroom.

Strayer University

Strayer’s mobile online app enables students to view their academic calendar, join class discussions and check out new assignments and grades. Videos are also available to view via the app, that brings in voices from alumni and faculties.

Mobile is the next imperative channel for all industries and educational industry is not an exception. Until we have minds which think about the future of our country, we cannot expect our future to be bright. So its time to foresee the future technology and take a step forward to adopt and experiment the mobile technology for your educational institution. Its never too late to do start something new.

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

Of the open-source content management systems available today, the most widely accepted and popular ones are Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. But how will you choose the one suitable for you.

Wordpress is best suitable for you, if you require a simple and fast blog or easy to operate website which does not require much enhancements or modifications in the future. But if you are having or thinking of a small or medium sized business website which do not require future contingencies that are too intricate, Joomla is the best. And if you are planning to set up a enterprise class website that require more content oriented features like forum, blogs, news, analytics, product displays etc that requires large scale changes in near future, Drupal is the best open source CMS platform.

Remember the bad old days, when you used to run bunch of programs on your computer just to create a website or for doing simple webmastering tasks. Gone are those old ways which requires installing lot of expensive software on your own computer. With the evolution of CMS, you can just put the burden on to the website programmer and get relieved from all these technical hassles and difficulties.

In the early days, CMS’s were just employed by big-budget websites like amazon.com which was programmed mainly in C++ and run on commercial databases like oracle and the cost of setting up was in million dollors. But as time progressed, observers could notice a new kind of economy emerging as a result of open source.

Now open source CMS has evolved into a world class software platforms which is used to build simple websites to some of the biggest and sophisticated sites on the universe.

Choosing Drupal for your project

We all know that, one of the strengths of all open source community is flexibility, so that it can adapt to users needs with extreme efficiency. Drupal is the best example of this. The rapid rise of Drupal coincides with a movement that values thoughtful collaboration over aggressive competition.

In 2001 Drupal started as a content management system, but then it kept on evolving. With time, it become so flexible that people started thinking it as a framework rather than just an application for managing pages on a website. Thus Drupal is much more than a CMS. So to cut short, Drupal is a content management framework, which is basically a content management system with hooks to extend it.

Hence Drupal became a well known Content Management Framework written in PHP, which was widely used to create not only personal blogs but also professional websites. As an active member of Drupal community, we strongly believe that Drupal is a Content Management Framework for developers and Content Management System for non-programmers.

Now lets have a clear understanding of what a CMF is

A Content Management Framework is a system that make use of reusable components or custom- build software to manage web content by storing and organizing files and data. It shares features of both web application framework and content management system. For developers, CMF as a development tool is a software framework, that supports them to make customized web applications as well as dynamic websites, web services and web resources required for business applications.

So what makes a Content management Framework different from a Content Management System ?

In general, CMS is a system that allow you to manage your website content through a user friendly interface. A Content Management System will usually provide some tools to create a custom theme or template. But a CMF is more flexible than a CMS and provide some mechanism to extend its functionality to manage contents on a website. A CMS can be build on top of CMF, but a CMF has no direct relationship to a CMS. In short, a Content Management system is something that even a non developer can easily setup and use. Whereas a Content Management Framework, if in the hands of an expert can be used to make either something very simple or something very complicated.

Drupal as a CMF

Drupal was more considered as a CMF since it had built-in ability to grow according to the changing needs. It can be scaled to handle large number of traffic as well. Drupal also allows users to organize, publish and manage variety of content with ease. It maintains a vigilant security community, providing security release updates regularly to achieve maximum site security, which is one of the reasons even the U.S. Government and governments around the world use Drupal.

But the main challenge that a Drupal adopter have to face whether it be a new site owner or a fresh developer is, figuring out what is easy and what is hard to do with drupal.

So Drupal has evolved and is still growing as a Content Management Framework, from which you can build a CMS tailored specifically for your needs.

Contact us to learn more about how Valuebound can help your organization use Drupal framework for your next business idea or product.

Commercial enterprises all over the world has started recognizing that using an open source software makes good business sense both in terms of quality and revenue perspective. Open source projects had been a key element for the success of most of the well established companies like Google, Facebook and Apple.

A good CMS must allow even non-technical personnel to have full control over the website including editing and organization of the website. Drupal follows a modular, building block approach that allows for unlimited customization. Open source software, and Drupal especially, allow companies to build flexible solutions that fit their unique business needs, resulting in a tailored solution specific to the company.

What are your online Business Needs and how Drupal helps you achieve this ?

Your website must first have quality content and design. Many business owners do not have time to update their year old websites regularly which results in stagnant content that are out of date or not usable.

• Drupal CMS makes managing websites, simple for everyone. It allows business owners to keep their content up to date and add new contents as desired. It is a good solution for all enterprises who wish to have feature rich website.

You need an open source platform for your web business.

• Drupal is freely available to download, use, modify and remix and there is no fees for purchase, licence and maintenance of a drupal powered site. Drupal is an open source platform with more than 14,000 free modules that helps you create Forums, blogs, review sites, social networks, photo galleries and all that is required for your web business.

Does your Business require a flexible Website.

• Drupal is flexible enough to provide firm base above which all enterprise business developers can build their solutions. It allows even a non technical person to create, edit and delete their website content, without any expert guidance. It’s flexible enough to allow you to add new features in future.

You need to share some common contents on specific or all pages on your website.

• With Drupal it is possible to share events, news or any information within the website or any other sites within the company network. So the contents can be reused on all necessary sections or pages in the website.

For a successful online business it is important to establish connections and stay connected with your customers.

• Drupal goes beyond your website and marks your presence on all social networking sites like twitter, facebook, linkedin and others. Thus you stay connected with your customers as well as the outside world which helps you enlarge your market reach and potential audience.

Whether you have a small website or large business enterprise, you need to have a secured one.

• Drupal's security feature makes it different from other CMS. It is the most secure content management system which is protected from common security threats those which are defined by the Open Web Application Security Project . That is the reason why it is used by thousands of high profile websites.

Your website must represent your company Brand.

• With Drupal it is possible to stick to particular brand guidelines. Suitable design templates can be created for your website following your brand name or choice.You can even create personalised profiles with a certain color, logo and other requirements as needed. Thus delivering engaging web experiences along with brand integrity that helps increase customer response and retention rates.

Future is Mobile. Your Website need to be Mobile ready.

• Happily, that's becoming easier. With Drupal, the focus is centered around a “Mobile first architecture. Drupal Website can be optimised to be responsive on Smartphones and tablets with ease.

If your requirement is establishing and maintaining a heavily trafficked site.

• Drupal powered websites drive more site traffic compared to other CMS powered website. The build-in-features of Drupal provides search engines what they actually want and generate net new leads.

• Drupal is scalable enough to respond effectively to heavily trafficked sites. Websites built on Drupal platform has the capability to sustain light as well as heavy footfall on site. Zappos is one such site that receives billions of visitors on daily basis with average revenue of $1 billion which is built on Drupal.

Who’s using Drupal

Many local and global corporates and organisations uses drupal because of it's flexibility, extensibility and strong developer support. News publishing sites like Nowpublic and Popular Science, Educational websites like San Jose State University, Harvard and MIT has Drupal powered website.

Some corporate websites that use Drupal are Mindtree, HCL, AOL Corporate and Dahon Bicycles. There are Art, Music, Multimedia websites like MTV UK, Sony Music and Social Networking sites like DrupalSN that use Drupal. A few drupal community portal sites also uses drupal like Fast company, team Sugar and Ubuntu Brainstorm.

Your Business website must be such that it brings more and more customers, improves revenue and facilitate business growth. Drupal provides a rich digital experience both in terms of quality and revenue perspective.

If you can imagine it, Drupal can convert it into reality.

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/