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?

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?

This question has sparked a lot of debates within web developing teams, among programmers and project managers, between those perceiving unit testing as a key software development technique and, well, the skeptical ones. Those considering that unit testing is a waste of priceless time; that writing this kind of tests would automatically add a way too big overhead to the whole development process. Therefore, in this post I'll do my best to advocate for unit testing, to outline its key benefits and how they outweigh the costs resulting from skipping this step. 

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.

Website optimization, SEO best practices, strategic keyword usage, content marketing, heading tags, internal links.... And the “To Do” list unfolding in your head right now seems endless, right? You're well aware that you need to optimize your Drupal website, you also have more than just a clue about the big SEO tasks to  tackle, but all this "ecosystem" of tasks and sub-tasks can get quite discouraging can't it? If only you had an SEO adviser at your service, “slicing” them all into smaller steps to take, clearly pointing them out to you... Well, guess what: you have Drupal 8 SEO Checklist module as your personal SEO counselor!

Here you are, proud of yourself that you've finally decided: you want to become a Drupal developer! Good for you! Now that you've taken this first step, are you ready to face the challenges that any junior Drupal developer deals with? Which is the basic skill set that you need to "come on board with" in the Drupal web development community? What web technologies do companies expect you to be on top of? What tools and languages do you need to master? Let me give you some clues:

“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 to choose? What to choose? Here you are, you've proudly set your new WordPress environment up and running, but you're well aware that there's still a lot of installments and activation to be done for turning it from “just” another (otherwise great) looking WordPress website into a true “feature-reach power plant”. But with such an overwhelmingly rich collection of WordPress plugins out there, how do you know which ones are truly vital for your site? Allow me to share with you my list of 10 best WordPress plugins in 2017!

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?