A: Hi everyone, welcome to The Duo Dish, my name is Ariel Upton and I am marketing coordinator here at Duo Consulting. We’re going to be bringing you one-on-one interviews and conversations with members of our Duo team, discussing all things Drupal, digital marketing, enterprise social and UX design. Our first guest is our Director of Development, Scott Weston, and today we’re going to be talking about DrupalCon 2013. I have to ask, what was your favorite part of DrupalCon?

S: The keynotes were amazing, first Dries’ keynote on the state of Drupal 8 and what’s to come and Karen McGrane’s keynote on content and how the day of the WYSIWYG editor should be passed. Particularly, forward thinking for content. As she put it, how should the content be structured so that ten years from now it’s reusable. So when the content is being put on a digital billboard, a scoreboard at a sports stadium, or that delicious piece of toast, what are things we can do as developers and content modelers to be ready for those eventualities.

I also like in general, the community. This is my third DrupalCon and every year I love going and spending time with other Drupal professionals. It’s amazing that on any other day in any other scenario we would be competitors with another firm or another individual, but DrupalCon is really an opportunity for everyone to come together. We can share what we know so that we’re helping each other out and we’re really growing as a community and improving so that what we deliver is even higher quality than what we’re doing now.

A: That’s what I noticed as this was my first DrupalCon, that all of these other Drupal shops even though in some scenarios you would be competitors, there really is a sense of camaraderie and collaboration within the community which is a unique part of Drupal.

S: Another great thing about DrupalCon is the ability to take a step back. When we’re doing the day to day executing, building of sites, and planning of sites you can get in a rut in a sense and going to an event like DrupalCon resets everything and you get excited about what’s to come and what you can do. You come back and you’re ready to go at it again. This is another reason I love going to DrupalCons, that opportunity to reset and level set where I am.

A: This was your third year attending but this year you were a session speaker. How did this effect your experience?

S: It gave me a new appreciation for the other speakers, both this year and others in previous years. I had the luxury of giving a more theoretical talk on gamification rather than a highly technical talk about implementing a new module or how to build Drupal 8. I think I had it a little easier than my peers who were also speaking at DrupalCon. It did give me a new appreciation for what it takes to present and to prepare to present at DrupalCon.

It also gave me a sense of responsibility. I do maintain a couple of modules in Drupal contrib, but when I was presented with the opportunity to speak it really did instill in me a responsibility to my peers that were attending DrupalCon to provide them with an excellent learning experience. There were 8 other sessions going on when my session was going on, and for the 100+ people that picked my session I wanted to make sure that it was going to be worth their time, energy and effort. They gave up a lot of really great sessions to come to mine.

It also gave me a really good appreciation for what the Drupal Association does in putting on a DrupalCon and what the local groups around Portland, the amount of effort and energy they put into hosting DrupalCon Portland. It amazes me that there are wonderful people that are committed to the Drupal community and are excited about what the Drupal community does and can do. They put in all these extra hours and all this extra effort just to host an event.

A: In addition to all of the incredible sessions, BOFS, and different sprints that took place, the most talked about issue was Drupal 8. From a marketer’s perspective, I was geeking out during Dries’ keynote as he was talking about in-place editing and updating content across multiple devices. From a business standpoint there is a lot for Drupal 8 to interest future clients and content authors but for developers, what does Drupal 8 mean?

S: Drupal 8 is a game changer, just like the transition from 6 to 7 changed the landscape for Drupal, from 7 to 8 will also be a change. There are several reasons for that. Number one, Drupal is becoming really mature. With the inclusion of Symfony as the foundation for many of Drupal’s functions, this will actually lead to a long learning curve for developers.

It’s good in that it keeps Developers on our toes, we’re always learning something new and we aren’t getting complacent in what we’re doing. As Dries talked about in his keynote, you mentioned the in-page editing, he was also giving us a challenge in providing personalization. His example was with Iceland Air, if I’m looking for flights from Boston to London and I click on a search result, I should see a landing page tailored to me, someone who is looking for the flight from Boston to London.

He really challenged us as developers and as a community to be forward thinking in how we build sites. With the release of Drupal 8, hopefully at the end of this year, the framework will be there for us to do those sorts of things, much more quickly and much more efficiently from a performance standpoint.

Personally I’m excited about the transition of configurations for Drupal itself will be in code now, instead of this mix of code and configuration in the database. Hopefully the dance of moving the site or moving changes from development to stage to production, will be a quick tango rather than this elaborate waltz that we have to learn.

Throughout my career I’ve gotten to the point where I can pretty much tell what the culture of a given web shop is going to be: geeks, problem solvers, and the rare combination of both. Since I already know which category I (mostly) fit in to, I wanted to find out what shops would be the best fit for me.

To do this, I came up with a question of my own which I asked at every interview: If you could hire a Star Wars droid for this position, which one would it be?

C-3P0: The geeky protocol droid who knows every language

C3PO might not be big on social skills, but what he lacks in flair, he makes up for in his knowledge of every web development language out there. Have a legacy database using IMS? Have a number of scripts written in Malbolge.

The downsides of having C3P0 as your lead drupal developer are going to show themselves when things inevitably start going wrong. C3P0 is not what you would call a “bug fixer.” In fact, C3P0 has a great fear of bugs, and is likely to look at one and shutter “Oh Dear! We’re all done for!” Even in the face of the most minor and correctible of server crashes, he will annoyingly be in your ear, telling you the odds of your site ever being restored as being “somewhere in the neighbor of 725 to 1.” So if you should ever decide to proceed through an Asteroid belt or survive outdoors on the Hoth Ice Planet, you might just want to shut him down altogether.

R2D2: The Unassuming Problem Solver

If you instead decide to have R2D2 as your drupal developer, what you will get is a pure problem solver.  If your site goes down and you’ve gone through all of your traditional routes; checking the watchdog logs, rolling back code or reverting the database, and nothing seems to be working … R2D2 will simply whip out this scary, protruding metal object from his belly, and stick it in to some dial on the server that you didn’t previously know existed or what it does. He will then start making a series of beeps that you won’t understand, while turning the dial and making even more beeps.

Suddenly, the lights will go back on, and your website will be fully restored. Now imagine your boss suddenly calls with an insane demand, and it has to be done overnight. Your dev team doesn’t believe it’s even possible without hacking drupal core to smitherines. R2-D2 is likely to whip together a custom module overnight. The code might not look pretty, but it will get the job done and you will look like a hero to your bosses. If you are planning on using your  drupal site to take on star destroyers, then you will definitely want R2D2 in your  fighter with you, because he is cool under pressure, and always resourceful.

The downside of working with R2D2 is that he has a propensity to wander off and do his own thing … always wanting to go on some crazy adventure. He exhibits classic “thrill-seeking” behavior, and might get bored working on a simple portfolio site that consists only of an About Us, Blog and Contact Page. And you might have to bail him out of jail after getting drunk and starting a fight with the guys in the Sitecore booth at Drupalcon. Just make sure you keep daily backups and have solid version control in place.

R2D2 exhibits classic “Thrill Seeker” behavior. This makes him an ideal Drupal Developer in many ways, but also makes for a high-risk investment.

#1: Hillary Clinton: Belle of the Twitter Ball

If you weren’t paying attention on Monday you may have missed Hillary Clinton’s sensational entrance to the Twittersphere. Haven’t seen the bio that is causing all the craze?

wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD…

In 23 words Hillary managed to deploy the perfect personal campaign using three obvious tactics. I’m making mental notes in neon to remember to take a page out of her book next time I send something out the door.

#1: Position yourself as a thought leader.

Hillary started her bio with her long (long) list of personal achievements. Wife, mother, lawyer, advocate, first lady, senator, secretary of state? With that resume she has positioned herself as a trusted, knowledgeable, and successful source.

#2: Add a personal touch.
Hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker. She understands her audience and knows that in order to get people to pay attention she needs to add some personal touches. Not only do these adjectives arrest you, they serve as a reminder that Hillary is a person with a personality and a sense of humor.

#3: Leave the user wanting more.
TBD…? HILLARY WHAT IS TO COME?

#2: The Facebook #hashtag… At Last!

It wasn’t as if the inclusion of a hashtag in your Facebook post was forbidden, it just wouldn’t do anything. Never one to miss out on a party, Facebook has announced that searchable hashtags have arrived, but whether or not they add any specific benefits to this platform is yet to be determined. Facebook has listed three main functionalities of the hashtags:

- Search for a specific hashtag
- Click on hashtags that originally live on other platforms
- Compose posts and updates directly from the hashtag feed

What do you think? Will the addition of the hashtag to Facebook enhance your experience or further clutter the ever-evolving platform?

#3: Twitter’s Reaction to Triple OT

Duo takes Chicago seriously. Our coveted views of the Marina Towers, our never-ending lunch debate over the best slice of deep dish and our sports. Wednesday night’s triple overtime game kept me on the edge of my couch, feeling like I was going into cardiac arrest, and up way past my bedtime. Self-induced heart attack aside, last night’s game 1 match-up was the highest rated game 1 since 1997.
Regardless of Chicago’s derecho threat, the Hawks drew quite the audience via television and twitter. Throughout the game my feed had no reprieve from hockey-related comments, trending hashtags, and play-by-play commentary from what seemed like every person in Chicago.

Twitter’s ability to connect people within a community, in this case Chicagoans losing their minds over a seemingly never-ending game, continues to illustrate our desire for connectivity as users. Give the people what they want and they will come.

What are you wrapping up this week? Let me know what I missed and have a great weekend!

Today’s business is about sharing. It’s about transparency. Enlightened employees, social business and the remote workplace are the new norms. Forbes Magazine called “creating a more transparent business model” the “most important job facing CMOs.”

There’s plenty you can do to inspire a more open business environment in your organization. Done right, the benefits of transparency are huge. For example:

• A more invested, motivated and loyal staff
• A level of brand trust with major implications for customer retention
• Rapid innovation for business processes and product development
• More dynamic technologies that’ll help you stay afloat as platforms evolve
• Major growth in your bottom line

Open business isn’t just a suggestion for today’s progressive organization—it’s a necessity. Getting onboard doesn’t require a huge investment. It does require a shift in perspective, though.

How can you create a more open business environment for your organization? We put together five business approaches that can help. All of these are tactics we practice at Duo Consulting. They’ve had huge implications for our business, forming a much tighter internal team and much happier clients as a result.

In this series of 5 blog post beginning with this one, we explore these business approaches and their suitability for your business. And, in the spirit of openness, we share Duo’s experience building its open and transparent culture. Let’s begin…

Develop an enterprise social network

Fact: “A business with 100 employees spends an average downtime of 17 hours a week clarifying communication. This translates to an annual cost of $528,443.” (360solutions white paper (PDF))

* * *

Duo Does It:

Built on the Drupal CMS platform and using the Drupal Commons distribution, “Blurt” is our internal social network, where we collaborate on social activities, share company news and develop new approaches to our internal processes. Collectively and non-intrusively we explore everything from what’s for lunch to trends in responsive design and Drupal enhancements. We just “Blurt” it out.

* * *

It’s a new era of socially enabled business. From small business to the enterprise, progressive organizations have begun to embrace internal social tools.

For larger organizations, Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) tools are among the top resources for open business that your organization can use.

The openness of ESN tools can result in better employee engagement, translating to higher productivity. It can be a channel for driving innovation and new ideas. ESNs are collaborative. Done well, they inspire loyalty among employees.

The driving factor in all of these benefits is transparency. What’s an internal communication network if not a way to give employees a way to shape the outcome of your business?

Here are three reasons why we think ESNs make the perfect tool for executives with open business in mind.

1. It’s easier for entry-level employees to communicate with executives.

It’s simply not physically or practically possible to have a direct relationship with each person in a large organization. Executives know their managers and managers know their team members. Still, there’s something to be said about the ability to connect directly through social media, especially around organization-specific topics.

Enterprise social networking tools serve as a bridge among all tiers within the organization chart by creating a forum for feedback and engagement. Pretend, for example, that you post a question or another piece of content, visible to the entire organization. The response is not driven by the heirarchy or organizational silo you are in. Rather the response can come from whoever knows the answer. Any staffer can interact with and comment on that content.

With an ESN, you can find other ways to engage across titles and experience levels that would never be possible through in-person interaction.

2. Staff can connect across departments.

An organization that works in silos presents unique communication challenges. In some ways, it can also stifle innovation and team building.

Enterprise social networking tools make for a more open business by encouraging employees to connect across the span of your organization.

• People make more connections internally.
• Project collaboration across departments is simple.
• Geographical constraints diminish
• New connections increase innovation potential.

In some ways, ESNs solidify interaction within teams. In other ways, they make it easier for staff to transcend organizational boundaries. It is the best of all worlds.

3. Ideas can be hashed out in a public forum.

Ever tried to plan a corporate event over email? Getting low engagement on company surveys? Like to crowdsource ideas from your organization?

These are all strengths of the ESN as a public forum. The social element makes it simple to build ideas into concepts and concepts into projects.

An ESN also levels the playing field, making it simple for everyone to contribute, no matter what her role in the organization. Not every idea requires this kind of engagement—but the ones that do can be hashed out in much more effective ways.

ESNs are a technological element of an open business. They help employees feel that they have a stake in the company’s success. Here’s another approach for making sure your employees care.

Is your business open to progressive ways to communicate and collaborate? Does an Enterprise Social Network resonate with you? We’d welcome your thoughts.

My first experience with a content management system was Joomla! version 1.something.
After building one site on Joomla!, I moved over to WordPress. After building one site on WordPress, I moved over to Drupal. Drupal has been the only way ever since.

Ah, I remember it vividly. I was just a few months into my experience with Drupal when I realized I didn’t know what terms/keywords to search for find ‘that module’. Here are four modules that took me a little while to find that now serve as my go-to modules for almost every site that requires their functionality.

1. External Links

If your content has a lot of links to other websites, and you need those links to open in a new tab or window, then the External Links module may be what you’re looking for. This little module has many features that make dealing with external links a breeze. Using this module you can:

• place an icon next to external and email links,

• open external links in a new window,

• display a JavaScript pop-up warning users that they are about to go to an external site, and

• use regular expressions for advanced configuration of which links are considered external

Here are the configuration options for External Links:

2. Node Clone

The Node Clone module is a lifesaver when you need to make a copy of a piece of content and use it as a starting point for a new piece of content that you are creating. The module adds a handy link.
If you’ve been around the Drupal block once or twice you probably know about this module. What you may not know is that Node Clone works fantastically with Webforms.

We have a client that does an annual survey to specific users on its site. The client’s survey is about 20 questions long and has multiple pages to it. For the most part, the survey is basically the same from year to year with a few minor changes. The Node Clone module makes their life easier so that they don’t have to start from scratch each year when making this fairly complex form.

3. Terms of Use

A prevailing theme of DrupalCon 2013 was highlighting the importance of necessity, not desire. In particular, Karen McGrane’s keynote Thriving in a World of Change: Future-Friendly Content with Drupal focused on giving content creators what they need during their author experience.

Enter McGrane’s theory of Blobs vs. Chunks.

BLOBS: sloppy and confusing content with limitations
CHUNKS: clean, platform-independent content with flexibility

Typically, we give content authors and managers enormous buckets where they can place whatever content they want with the ability to style it “just like Microsoft Word.” Instead, we must create tools that allow content to be flexible and agile. Most importantly, you should be able to translate it to any device or platform.

Her solution? The content package.

We need to abandon the idea that content lives on a page. This concept suggests permanence and will get you and your client into a tough spot quickly.

Imagine the mad dash to update content across channels, being forced to select which content is valuable enough to stay as you transition between device at the eleventh hour.

Instead of manual selection, focus on creating a content package,where the content structure allows you to publish material dynamically in different places.

Karen pointed out the painful truth for some content creators when she dropped the hammer stating that WSIWYG is not the answer. It may be easy but it is no longer a reliable tool for content authors, creators, and editors.

Designing these packages allows us as producers and authors to use a singular interface to create and manage all content in addition to where it is placed. Although it may not seem as easy as in-place editing (is there anything as easy as this?), creating content that is targeted and controlled will give it a much longer and more reliable life span.

It’s time to give content authors what the need, not what they want.

Everyone’s talking about their $2.34B acquisition of ExactTarget this week. As investors focus on the rise (and I mean rise) of their shares in the aftermath of the purchase I’m honing in on the reactions from the other heavy hitters in the industry, in particular the response from Marketo.

“We believe that marketing is undergoing a deep transformation driven by large-scale trends such as the rise of self-directed consumers and broad and instant availability of information online.” - Phil Fernandez, President & CEO

If platform integration hasn’t been on your mind, it’s about to be. This announcement shines an enormous spotlight on the importance of marketing automation and the future of the industry. The main man behind Volacci and creator of Automatr, commented on the acquisition earlier this week.

“Less than 30% of the Fortune 500 are running any kind of Marketing Automation. Most small to medium-sized businesses have yet to realize the potential that more advanced digital marketing systems bring – much less how an integrated approach can add synergy and scale to their operations. That was yesterday.” - Ben Finklea, CEO

I’m analyzing my stock options in marketing automation…today.

#2: Oops they did it again.

As if Google needed to do anything else to solidify their spot as number one in my circle of companies to trust, they delivered me this. 

Out of left field here comes Google with the brilliant (and beautiful!) ad campaign of the week. While perusing the internet for future blog content I was caught off guard by the banner ad for the Zoho CRM. I, who considers myself to be impervious to digital advertising was stopped dead in my tracks by the building block logo.

Duo completed a full integration with Zoho, ending our previous relationship with Salesforce.com, last month. As a customer, this ad captures one of the many remarkable things about Zoho: that it is designed for companies of all sizes and all needs.
I’ll be discussing the many benefits of Zoho in detail in the near future but this ad arrested me and delighted me.

What else happened this week that was wrap worthy? Have a good weekend, everybody!

When I see an advertisement I like.

What is Symfony and how is it different from Drupal?

Like Drupal, Symfony is a popular, community-driven and open-source framework for building websites. They are both known as “web frameworks.” To use an analogy, the operating system of your machine is the framework for the various applications you use.
The difference between the Drupal and Symfony frameworks lies in Drupal’s focus on the Content Management System. A content management system (CMS) is an application that provides for an easy and organized way for site managers and authors to add, edit and update content on a website, without the need to know web programming languages.

Drupal is very much a CMS, and user interface in to the world of building the web applications that use that content.

The Drupal Framework is the glue that keeps each of its elements bound together. These elements include core and contributed modules such as block, view, panels and themes.These elements are created by a community of developers and contributors that are in a constant state of revision. When you view DrupalCMS as this ecosystem you can see that it is a collection of modules that run “on top of” the Drupal framework.

Why the need for Symfony?

In 2005 Steve Jobs announced that the company would make a transition from the use of it’s mostly PowerPC microprocessors to Intel processors. This event marked a turning point in which Apple decided that they weren’t in the business of processors.

This makes sense when you stop to consider what makes Apple Apple?

In the same way, with the Symfony2 announcement, Drupal derives the benefit of outsourcing the underlying web-related tasks to the Symfony Framework. As a PHP framework, Symfony has quickly established itself as a major player, and strictly as a Framework, it makes Drupal seem rather archaic. This certainly isn’t a knock on Drupal, which can’t possibly compete on that basis, and why would it want to?

To do so would mean deviating from what makes Drupal Drupal. Allowing Drupal to offload much of the framework means Drupal can focus more of its resources on it’s amazing community of module contributors and CMS builders.

 What improvements might we see?

At a “Drupal for Beginners” session I attended six years ago, someone explained the Drupal Module process to me like this: Think of all of the modules as train cars.

Each one is heavy and as more cars are added the train requires more energy and slows down. Imagine that half of the cars aren’t carrying necessary cargo; they’re attached just in case someone might need them at some point.

Now imagine a slicker and leaner train, carrying only the cars that are needed on every trip. This is an example of one of the promises that a more modern framework may potentially offer.

Faster page loading is the most obvious improvement we can expect.

The other primary, and possibly more drastic improvement is a more streamlined site Design and Theming process.

The result? Better designed sites done in less time.

One thing that makes Drupal Development so challenging is the reality that developers and themers (designers) have to wear various hats at all times. At present, the typical Drupal themer is going to have a very difficult time if he/she is not very comfortable with PHP. A common scene you might see at a Drupal shop could include a group of developers and themers hovered together around a single computer screen trying to solve a problem. The use of a more modern framework like Symfony2 brings with it many possibilities, like a more logical templating system.

In simpler terms, the designers design and the programmers program, eliminating the reliance on one another while simultaneously giving sore toes and dirty looks. Hard to beat better designs and office harmony.

For those worried about the switch, we can relax for now. Given the complexities involved with the Symfony integration, it probably won’t be another few years until we start seeing our first Drupal 8 sites rolled out, and likely a few more after that until it starts becoming widely adopted as a platform.

The theme of DrupalCon 2013, Building Bridges, Connecting Communities, did far more than serve as ­alliterative bullet points for Dries Buyteart’s keynote. It captured the essence of the entire conference.
Focusing on the user’s experience permits the building of bridges between internal cross-disciplinary specialties to create the best final product while connecting communities of teams and clients during the working process.

­­

Each session I (or a fellow Duo employee) attended in some way referenced the importance of the user and in particular the richness of their experience. Track and topic specificity always related back to the theme as designers, developers, and content specialists placed the emphasis on creating engaging user experiences in every service you provide for your client. Doing this revolves largely around asking the right questions and focusing on finding the right answers.

THE POWER OF THE RIGHT QUESTION 

Jared Ponchot of Lullabot gave a riveting session on User Experience, Designing on Purpose: Design Process and Deliverables in the Responsive Age. He kept the crowd laughing with analogies when discussing timelines for projects (“9 women can’t make a baby in 1 month”), but he focused on the power of asking the right question.
In particular, Jared’s emphasis on asking “why?” resonated deeply. Too often, we get wrapped up in the “how” when we should really be focusing our attention on “why”. In conversations with clients, we must remove statements like, “How can we integrate x and y? How can we get this page to link here? How can we get this project through design and to development faster?”
Try substitutions like: “Why should we integrate x and y? Why should the site path lead here? Why are we rushing deliverables?” Asking a client why in each of these situations allows for a much clearer understanding and vision for development for all parties involved.

ARE YOU COMMITTED?

We work in an industry that celebrates agility and flexibility. With the plethora of tools at our disposal it is vital that we remain committed to creating the best experience for users in the face of constant change.
In Dries’ keynote he shared that the prevailing complaint of site use dissatisfaction was in not having a great experience. Our clients are growing increasingly savvy. It is no longer sufficient to simply provide users with content. You must delight them in the process.

In addition to asking the right question of our clients we must continue to ask the right questions of ourselves: Are we committed to creating the best experience for our users?

ASSEMBLING THE ANSWERS

The practice of asking the right question should become so normative it evolves into a habit. Next, analyze and act on the answers. The priority of your solutions should focus on purpose, not on preference. Not on your client’s preference, not on your designer’s preference, not on the peanut gallery’s preference that bubbles up in Q&A.
Operating on preference will throw your process into a whirlwind of edits and mockups, ultimately wasting time, money, and patience. The purpose of what you are doing and what you are trying to accomplish needs to be the focus of your efforts in order to deliver the most complete and effective final product.

Sometimes there is an edge case where module A needs to run before module B on a particular hook. Enter hook_module_implements_alter. It’s a really big name for a hook. When a hook is called (like hook_form_alter) to gather together the overrides for the form, hook_module_implements_alter gets called to put together a list of the hook_form_alter functions that need to be run. The case in which the rare change to the order has to be made can be done using the following:

/**
* Implements hook_module_implements_alter().
*/
function mymodule_module_implements_alter(&$implementations, $hook) {
if (isset($implementations['mymodule’'])){
switch ($hook) {
case ‘tokens_alter’:
case ‘form_alter’:
case ‘user_view_alter’:
$group = $implementations['mymodule'];
unset($implementations['mymodule']);
$implementations['mymodule'] = $group;
break;

default:
break;
}
}
}

As you can see, all we are doing is removing our module from the array and putting it at the end, thus ensuring it runs after the other modules’ hooks.