"Begin preparing now! First of all, keep Drupal core and all contributed projects up to date" (source: Acquia.com) is Acquia's advice... that we all know already. And Composer is one of the best options for updating your Drupal 8 website. But: how precisely do you update Drupal 8 core with Composer? What are the: key steps to take, best practices to apply, main issues to prepare for, special considerations to keep in mind? In this post, I'll do my best to answer some of your legitimate questions with respect to Composer and Composer as the most efficient update tool for Drupal 8...

How easily do manage to keep your balance “surfing” on the huge wave of content personalization these days? The wave of delivering only user experiences personalized in the slightest details which, on many competitive websites, has even turned into hyper-personalization? Do you find it easy to play the role of a private eye “spying” on your website's visitors? Creating user personas based on their top interests, anticipated needs, preferences, demographics and... on a whole lot of other critical data that help you tailor your Drupal site's content?

Can you feel the wind of change blowing, the “scent” of new possibilities in the air? I know I can! And I've been feeling it and embracing it ever since I discovered and started to harness its power in my own Drupal web development projects. I'm talking about the Paragraphs module for Drupal, a module that's so much more than... just another innovative, buzz-generating Drupal module to be added to the “pile” of groundbreaking Drupal “tools”. It's a whole new way of creating content on a Drupal site, an entire bundle of possibilities for crafting a Drupal's site look and feel. But now let's cut the abstract talk and talk “real” features, real functionality.

I'm back, as promised in my previous post, with a new “load” of must-have Drupal modules for you to add to your toolbox! With 5 more key functionalities to implement when you build a site with Drupal. It's perfectly true that choosing from and using these modules depend greatly on the of nature of the Drupal web development projects that you'll be working on: whether it's a multi-language Drupal site that you'll build, a Drupal social intranet or maybe a high trafficked e-commmerce Drupal website.

As a site builder you already know the right sequence of steps to carry out when you build a site with Drupal, right? You first set it up and running, next you get your hands dirty and configure all the right options for adding some basic or extra functionality to it! The question that arise then is: “How much functionality?” Do you stick to creating content types, defining roles and permissions, creating menus and lists or do you aim for more? And supercharge it with an entire bundle of functionalities, turning it into a powerful beast?

Now you didn't think that precisely a powerful Google tool like Google Tag Manager would be left out of the Drupal 8's whole “constellation” of modules now did you? Not only that there's a dedicated module for it (although, for the time being, available in GitHub only https://github.com/mikeyp/google_tag), but the whole installation process is nothing but a sequence of a few highly intuitive steps to take. A click here, a click there, entering a name or two, copying and pasting an ID and that's pretty much it. The whole process's summary! You'll have your GTM integrated on your Drupal 8website in no time! But let's cut it short: here is my step-by-step guide on how to install Google Tag Manager on Drupal:

With their powers combined, Drupal and Angular 2's duet is meant to write history! The history of web development! It's aimed at marking a new era for all developers out there: the era of building rich apps, both for web and for mobile platforms, with much less effort. Drupal working as a backend data source and Angular 2 complementing it as an ideally intuitive, fast front-end framework! They're both leading technologies, they're both open source web technologies, both innovative. It sure looks like such a promising duet! And yet, you can't stop wondering: why Angular 2 in particular?

"The Most Common Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 Migration Issues AND THEIR FIXES" would have been the longer version of this post's title. It's a fact now: you can no longer escape Drupal 8's “influence”, your job as a Drupal developer implies regular Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration "marathons". And since everyone around you's overly excited about Drupal 8's purely innovative features, about its irresistibly cutting-edge capabilities (and where do you add that these include a Migration module in its core, as well), you suffer major “shock” discovering that, well, moving websites to Drupal 8 is not always a “boringly” smooth and event-less process.

“Why You Should Avoid Optimizing Your Images Prior to Uploading Them to Your Drupal Site”, this could have been a possible subheading for this post here! It will just lead to “excessive optimization” and to some blurry or over-sized images (and you definitely don't want that). Especially with a CMS like Drupal, equipped with all the right tools to handle all the image optimization for you, during the upload, it would be a pity not to “lay back and let it do the work for you”, right? Now let's get into details! Let's see which are the best practices when uploading images to your Drupal site and what “ handling images in Drupal differently ” really means:

How do you strike a balance between the hard-to-resist-to-temptation of turning your (or your client's) Drupal website into a powerful “SEO machine” and risking to “exhaust” your server with way too many SEO modules and tools (some of them) overusing its resources? Speed (still) is a crucial ranking-influencing factor, but on the other hand Drupal's modules, the SEO-oriented ones in this case, are a “blessing” for any web developer, SEO specialist or website owner. Now let me point out to you which are the truly essential Drupal SEO modules that you should install on your website:

What does a Drupal developer do? What skills does a Drupal developer need? More than likely, especially if you're a business owner looking to hire a team of Drupal developers, your first answer would be: "He/she needs to know Drupal". It's pretty obvious, isn't it? Or, if you're not that "new" to Drupal, you might consider a Drupal developer as: “Someone who can build a Drupal site and manage it on a server”. Well, in fact, there are a bit more "facets" of what it means to be a Drupal developer!

Can Drupal play a key role in the Internet of Things' arena? If so, how precisely? How can Drupal, which is still perceived mainly as "only a tool for developing websites", actually power ioT-based systems?

Eager to “exploit” Drupal 8 modules in your web projects? Then why don't you? Even if this innovative version of Drupal is still work-in-progress, lots of valuable modules have already been released and are ready to be... tried out! Give them a “test drive”. In this respect, I've hand picked 11 most useful (in my opinion) ones, “useful” in various stages of building and managing a Drupal 8 website.