Attackers are exploiting Drupalgeddon 2 critical vulnerability in Drupal to compromise systems & secretly turn them into malicious cryptocurrency mining machines like cryptojacking malware, mine for Monero.
The only side effects a victim might notice is that their system is running slower or doing more work than usual.

It is 2018 and we are still talking about digital transformation? Wasn’t that finished and done ten or fifteen years ago? Not completely. Based on the study from Grand View Research the global digital transformation market size was valued at $177.27 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $798.44 billion by 2025. It seems like we have just started and a business that does not join the movement will be left behind.

But what is digital transformation? We see it as the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, resulting in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers. This new approach to customer experience through digital experience is where a platform like Drupal fits in perfectly.

Digital transformation and Drupal

To build connected, omnichannel customer experiences, the technology must have a built in way to support communication between channels, such as physical locations, ecommerce, mobile applications, and social media. Drupal 8 provides APIs for creating solutions and is definitely not limited to being a website platform. With this approach, the ability to engage customers through multiple channels at the same time has become a reality. Enterprises like Bayer, who evaluated and chose Drupal as their preferred platform in November 2017, have embraced the idea of embarking on the digitalization journey with an open source software that has been around for almost two decades and has a clear vision to become the world’s leading omnichannel customer experience solution.

Europe’s biggest Drupal event in 2018

Drupal Europe will be the largest conference in Europe happening in 2018. Drupal Europe organizes the program and session selection process around industry verticals. These focus on usage of Drupal in real life scenarios, in specific target industries, alongside space to cover cutting edge technologies. Digital transformation has become an important movement and the Drupal community has recognized that and dedicated a track to it.

Join us on September 10–14, 2018 in Darmstadt, Germany to learn first hand how Drupal enables digital transformation. You can register for the event at https://drupaleurope.org/tickets.

Present your vision at Drupal Europe

Drupal Europe is organized for the community by the community. This means everyone is invited to participate in the program and share their ideas with us. We are currently looking for submissions for sessions, panels, and workshops. To create an excellent submission, you should write a good abstract that helps track chairs and conference visitors to understand how and why you approach your topic, what will be the benefits and learnings gained by attending your session, and what is the expected experience level of the audience.

Main topics we are looking for:

Digital transformation with Drupal (case studies)What was your process of digital transformation, what were the business goals, what part Drupal plays in the solution and how did you measure success?

Enterprise products made for or made with Drupal

What can enterprise use to complement Drupal to support their requirements? Are there reusable solutions out there that can serve as enterprise platform?

Technical solutions provided with DrupalHaving Drupal as the chosen technology for digitalization, what does Drupal offer out of the box or what did your organization develop on top of the framework?

You will speak in front of digital leaders like CTOs, CIOs and CMOs of businesses who will be there to evaluate Drupal on a strategic level. Sessions will attract people looking to gain tactical advice on how to tackle the challenges of digitalization of their organizations or their clients.

We are looking to provide value to our track’s attendees, to empower them with insights and give them information that will enable them to make better decisions when choosing Drupal as their platform of choice.

The Drupal community has done an amazing job organizing thousands of developers around the world. We've built collaboration tools and engineering processes to streamline how our community of developers work together to collectively build Drupal.

This collaboration has led to amazing results. Today, more than 1 in 40 of the top one million websites use Drupal. It's inspiring to see how many organizations depend on Drupal to deliver their missions. What is equally incredible is that historically, we haven't collaborated around the marketing of Drupal. Different organizations have marketed Drupal in their own way.

In my DrupalCon Nashville keynote, I shared that it's time to make a serious and focused effort to amplify Drupal success stories in the marketplace. Imagine what could happen if we enabled hundreds of marketers to collaborate on the promotion of Drupal, much like we have enabled thousands of developers to collaborate on the development of Drupal.

Accelerating Drupal adoption with business decision makers

To focus Drupal's marketing efforts, we launched the Promote Drupal Initiative. The goal of the Promote Drupal Initiative is to do what we do best: to work together to collectively grow Drupal. In this case, we want to collaborate to raise awareness with business and non-technical decision makers. We need to hone Drupal's strategic messaging, amplify success stories and public relation resources in the marketplace, provide agencies and community groups with sales and marketing tools, and improve the Drupal.org evaluator experience.

To make Promote Drupal sustainable, Rebecca Pilcher, Director of MarComm at the Drupal Association, will be leading the initiative. Rebecca will oversee volunteers with marketing and business skills that can help move these efforts forward.

Promote Drupal Fund: 75% to goal

At DrupalCon Nashville, we set a goal of fundraising $100,000 to support the Promote Drupal Initiative. These funds will help to secure staffing to backfill Rebecca's previous work (someone has to market DrupalCon!), produce critical marketing resources, and sponsor marketing sprints. The faster we reach this goal, the faster we can get to work.

I'm excited to announce that we have already reached 75% of our goal, thanks to many generous organizations and individuals around the world. I wanted to extend a big thank you to the following companies for contributing $1,000 or more to the Promote Drupal Initiative:

If you can, please help us reach our total goal of $100,000! By raising a final $25,000, we can build a program that will introduce Drupal to an emerging audience of business decision makers. Together, we can make a big impact on Drupal.

One of the big challenges with updating Drupal Code Builder for Drupal 8 has been the sheer variety of code to be output. On earlier versions of Drupal, it was just about hooks, and all that needed to be done was to take the API documentation code and replace 'hook_' with the module name. There were info files too, and Drupal 7 added the placing of hooks into different .inc files, but compared to this, Drupal 8 has things like plugin annotations, fluent method calls for content entity baseFieldDefinitions(), FormAPI arrays, not to mention PHP class methods, and more.

But one of the things I enjoy about working on DCB is that I am free to experiment with different ideas, much more so than with work on core or even contrib. It is its own system, without any need to work with what a framework supplies, and it has no need to be extensible. So I can try a new way of doing things as often as I want, and clean up when I've had time to figure out which way works best.

For example, up until recently, the code for a field definition in baseFieldDefinitions() was getting generated in three different ways.

First, the old-fashioned way of doing it line by line, then concatenating the array with a "\n" to make the final code. This is the way most of the old code in DCB was done, but with things that need handling of terminal commas or semicolons, and nesting indents and so on, it was starting to get really clunky.

So then I tried writing something loosely inspired by Drupal's RenderAPI. Because that's a nice big hammer that seems to fit a lot of nails: make a big array of data, chuck your stuff into it, then hand it over to something that makes the output. Except, not so good. Writing the code to make the right sort of array was fiddly. The array of data needed to combine actual data and metadata (such as the class of an annotation), which added levels to the nesting.

Then I hit on an idea: baseFieldDefinitions() fields are a fluent interface, like this:

$fields['changed'] = BaseFieldDefinition::create('changed')
->setLabel(t('Changed'))
->setDescription(t('The time that the node was last edited.'))
->setRevisionable(TRUE)
->setTranslatable(TRUE);

What if the code that builds this could be the same, to the point where you could just copy-paste code from, say, the node entity class, and make a few tweaks? Creating the code in DCB would be much simpler, and having the DCB code look like the output code would make debugging easier too.

Using a class with the magic __call() method lets us have just that: a renderer object that treats a method call as some information about code to render. Here's what the builder code for the base field definition code looks like now:

It's not yet perfect, as the first line isn't done by this, and the handling of the t() calls could do with some polish; probably by creating a separate class called something like FunctionCall, such that FunctionCall::somefunction() returns the code for a call to somefunction().

But the efficiency and elegance of this approach has led me to devise a new principle for DCB: builder code should look as much as possible like that code that it outputs.

So applying this approach to outputting annotations, the code now looks like this:

Magic methods used there as well, this time for static calls. The similarity to the output code isn't as good, as annotations aren't PHP code, but it's still close enough that you can copy the code you want to output, make a few simple changes, and you have the builder code.

This work has embodied another principle that I've come to follow: complexity and ugliness should be pushed down, hidden, and encapsulated. Here, the ClassAnnotation and FluentMethodCall have to do fiddly stuff like quoting string values, recurse into nested arrays. They have to handle special cases, like the last line of a fluent call has a semicolon and the last line of an annotation has no comma. All of that is hidden from the code that uses them. That can get on with doing the interesting bits.

There were a lot of amazing sessions at DrupalCon Nashville 2018, but one of the few sessions that sparked my interest was “PDFs in Drupal” presented by Dan Hansen. In this session, Dan goes through the importance of PDFs, gave a short introduction to some of the more popular PDF rendering libraries, and gave a demo on some tips and tricks that I found very useful for my future projects.

Most, if not all of us, have opened a PDF recently. PDFs are popular because they are universal as a document format and can easily be sent to others without having to worry about whether their machine can open them. Despite this, Dan notes that it feels like PDFs are behind in support, and it would be nice to have better PDF handling in Drupal core - similar to images in media libraries.

PDF Rendering Libraries

This session introduced a handful of popular PDF rendering libraries:

Print-to-PDF

jsPDF

FPDF

mPDF

TCPDF

FPDI

DOMPDF

Wkhtmltopdf

PDFtk

PDFs in Drupal

In Drupal 7, the most popular module for generating PDFs is the Print module - but does not support Drupal 8. Fortunately, there are options available for Drupal 8:

Printable - based on the Print module to allow generation of PDFs. It relies on the PDF API, which is currently not stable.

Entity Print (recommended) - allows for printing any Drupal entity or View (D8 only) to PDF. This module provides flexibility with PDF rendering libraries and is more lightweight compared to the Print module and has a stable release for both D7 and D8.

FillPDF - allows for filling PDF with values. This module can be used with the PDFtk library or a paid third-party service, and can help in reducing overhead of rendering PDFs.

Tips and Tricks

I found Dan’s demos to be the most interesting - as he showed some code examples of various (and seemingly common tasks) related to PDFs. The following examples from Dan’s session shows how simple and straightforward it is to work with PDFs:

The Block field module lets you insert a Drupal block as a field on your content.

A Drupal theme is divided into regions and you can place blocks or your own custom blocks into these regions. You accomplish this task by dragging and ordering blocks in the "Block Layout" screen. That means you can append blocks before or after the main content of your content type. This "Block Layout" screen will soon be cluttered if you have multiple content types and/or multiple single nodes, each one with a different custom block.

However, there’s a way to insert a block (or many blocks) directly into your content as a field. Thus, you don’t have to place the block in the "Block Layout" screen, instead, you insert the block as a field on the node.

In this tutorial, we’re going to cover the usage of the Block field module. Let’s start!

Let's say you've built a custom form for your Drupal 8 site. It contains various elements for input (name, email address, a message, that kind of thing), and you want to send the submitted values in an email to someone (perhaps a site admin). That's a pretty common thing to need to do.

This could be done with Drupal's core contact forms, webforms, or similar -- but there are cases when a bespoke form is needed, for example, to allow some special business logic to be applied to its input or the form presentation. The drawback of a custom form is that you won't get nice submission emails for free, but they can be done quite easily, with the token module (you'll need that installed).

In your form's submission handler, send an email using the mail manager service (I'll assume you can already inject that into your form, read the documentation if you need help with that):

<?php
$params = [
'values' => $form_state->getValues(),
];
// The 'plugin.manager.mail' service is the one to use for $mailManager.
$mailManager->mail('mymodule', 'myform_submit', 'admin@example.com, 'en', $params);

Then create a hook_mail() in your .module file, with a matching key ('myform_submit' in my example):

Spot the [array:value:thing] tokens! Using these 'array' tokens makes it really easy to include the whatever input gets submitted by visitors to this custom form on your Drupal site. Note that there's no sanitization done - although if your email is just plain text, that's probably not a problem.

There are more array tokens you can use too, such as ones to return a comma-separated list of all items in an array, a count of items, or just the first/last item. See the original issue for examples. These tokens are available in Token's Drupal 7 version too!

Regardless of being a freelancer, a two person shop or a hundred plus agency, Drupal is vital to our success in growing and supporting our business.

The business ecosystem is changing rapidly, thereby making it a necessity for agency leaders, managers and advisors to focus on a multitude of challenges and opportunities.

Understanding how the marketplace is evolving, driving innovation, fostering the right company culture, and adopting efficient project management methodologies, are all challenges faced by businesses today.

We all want to transform our business by working with the smartest team, create and deliver amazing projects, and have ideal customers lining up to work with us.

Any Drupal conference cannot be complete without in-depth discussions and debates about these challenges and more.

What is this track about?

The Agency Business track will provide insight, support and real stories from people running businesses and managing projects. Learn about other people’s experiences, and get tips and ideas on how to tackle the challenges faced in your business or project.

Growing and scaling your business can be a tricky and daunting task. We need to consider strategies for how to grow our businesses, and how to do so sustainably.

With increased competition from both other agencies and other platforms, we need to look at not only how we generate new leads for our businesses, but how do we convince potential clients that Drupal is the best, that we are the best?

Leadership and Culture

What is the right company culture for my business? How can I better lead my agency through the challenges ahead? How can I provide good leadership to my team? How can we grow and scale our business, without losing our company culture along the way? These are just some of the questions we will look to answer in the Agency Business track.

Operations

Project management is a bit of a juggling act, with many different needs and tasks that need to be taken care of simultaneously. We’re always on the look-out for ways to increase a project’s effectiveness and efficiency, while reducing the risk of it getting out of control. Let’s share our experiences and ideas on how we can improve project planning, better manage timelines & budgets, and keep staff motivated, while all the time keeping clients happy and engaged in the process.

Diversification

Markets change faster and faster, so does our market. We need to adapt our products and offering to stay competitive and minimize our business risks. Perhaps it means diversifying your service offerings, perhaps it means developing a product, perhaps it means extending into new markets or verticals. However, we also need to consider how to keep clients happy and how to continue to meet their changing needs through innovation and/or diversification.

How to get involved

At Drupal Europe, we want to ensure that attendees get the most from this track through highly valuable and insightful sessions. We are looking for speakers to openly and honestly share stories about their challenges and how they solved it. We want to hear about your experiments, successes and failures, process discoveries, strategies, and tactics. We want real-life learnings, supported by facts and figures — prove to us that your way is best.

Whatever your experience is, whether it be running a small 2 person operation or scaling to 30 and beyond, or managing projects and project teams, we want to hear from you. Your experience and insight is invaluable and we know others will think so too.

Do you know someone who could be a great speaker? Or perhaps you know someone who has an interesting story to share? If so, please get in touch with the program team at program@drupaleurope.org.

And don’t forget to help us to spread the word about this awesome conference. Our hashtag is #drupaleurope.

We look forward seeing you in Darmstadt!

About Drupal Europe Conference

Drupal is one of the leading open source technologies empowering digital solutions in the government space around the world.

Drupal Europe 2018 brings over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Location & Dates

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — with a direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 with Drupal contribution opportunities every day. Keynotes, sessions, workshops and BoFs will be from Tuesday to Thursday.

Google's AMP is the hottest thing on the internet. With over 25 million website domains that have published over 4 Billion AMP pages, it did not take long for the project to be a huge success. Comprising of two main features; Speed and Support to Monetization of Objects, AMPs implications are far-reaching for enterprise businesses, marketers, e-commerce and every other big and small organizations. With great features and the fact that its origin as a Google Initiative, it is no surprise that the AMP pages get featured in Google SERP more prominently.

Why AMP??

Impacting the technical architecture of digital assets, Google's open source initiative aims to provide streamlined web pages to mobile browsers and other apps.

It is Fast, like Really Fast

AMP loads about twice as fast as a normal comparable mobile page and the latency is as less as one-tenth. Intended to provide the fastest experience for mobile users, customers will be able to access content faster, and they are more likely to stay on the page to make a purchase or enquire about your service because they know it won't take long.

An Organic Boost

Eligibility for the AMP carousal that rests above the other search results on Google SERP, resulting in a substantial increase in organic result and traffic is a major boost for the visibilty of an organization. Though not responsible for increasing the page authority and domain authority, AMP plays a key role in sending far more traffic your way.

ROI

The fact that AMP leverages and not disrupts the existing web infrastructure of a website, makes the cost of adopting AMP quite lesses than the competing technologies. In return, AMP enables better user experience which translates to better conversion rates on mobile devices.

Drupal & AMP

With better user engagement, higher dwell time and its easy to navigate between content benefits, businesses are bound to drive more traffic with AMP-friendly pages and increase their revenue.

Before you begin with the integration of AMP module with Drupal, you need to have 3 things:

AMP Theme : I'm sure you have come across the AMP HTML and its standards. The one that are responsible for your content to look effective and perform well on mobile. The AMP theme produces the mark up required by these standards for websites looking to perform well in the mobile world. Also, AMP theme allows creation of custom-made AMP pages.

AMP PHP Library : Consisting of the AMP base theme and the ExAMPle sub-theme, the AMP PHP Library handles the final corrections. Users can also create their own AMP sub-theme from scratch, or modify the default ExAMPle sub-theme for their specific requirements.

How to setup AMP with Drupal?

Before you integrate AMP with Drupal, you need to understand that AMP does not replace your entire website. Instead, at its essence, the AMP module provides a view mode for content types, which is displayed when the browser asks for an AMP version.

There are many considerations for site owners on when to make the move to HTTPS. Google has just stepped up the pressure. Secure communication is especially important for Drupal site owners and the time to make the move to HTTPS is now.
Continue reading…

Drupal Europe is both a technology conference and a family reunion for the Drupal community. Bringing together 1600+ attendees, it is the largest community driven Drupal event taking place on the European continent this year. For anyone connected with Drupal this is a unique opportunity to share your experience, learn, discuss, connect and contribute back to the community.

Being a community driven conference, we wanted to focus on real life case studies and not the usual technology driven structure. So we’ve introduced industry tracks which focus on specific industry sectors.

The Higher Education track is for anyone using Drupal or thinking of migrating to Drupal at a college or university who is looking to connect with other Higher-Ed Drupal users.

If you have experience of delivering Drupal solutions in the higher education sector or are looking for inspiration on how you continue to develop your CMS further, this is the right track for you.

Be inspired

Drupal is a popular choice in higher education, and many of us are using it in creative and inventive ways. With Drupal 8, the opportunities for exploration and experimentation expand even further — from headless Drupal to top-tier configuration management. Let’s showcase our successes and best-practices with Drupal 8!

We know many universities are still on Drupal 7 and are keen to migrate to Drupal 8, so come to share what works for you and see wins from your peers.

Have you launched a Drupal 8 project recently that you are proud of? Started a campus Drupal users group and have tips for others looking to create their own? Developed a great user support model for your content editors? Conquered decoupled Drupal with your frontend stack? Share your awesome projects and lessons learned with your peers.

Drupal in a Day (how Global Training Days got to be a localized event)

From CMS to LMS

Web accessibility in higher education

GDPR and childrens information

Javascript for higher education

Migration from Drupal 7 to 8

How Drupal 8 API-first helps to integrate with existing IT-Infrastructure

Build your own Drupal Community

Session submission is open and we ask you to submit interesting session proposals to create an awesome conference. Session proposals are not limited to Drupal and all topics in relationship with Higher Education are welcome.

Please also help us to spread the word about this awesome conference. Our hashtag is #drupaleurope.

If you want to participate in the organisation or want to recommend speakers or topics please get in touch at program@drupaleurope.org.

About Drupal Europe Conference

Drupal is one of the leading open source technologies empowering digital solutions around the world.

Drupal Europe 2018 brings over 2,000 creators, innovators, and users of digital technologies from all over Europe and the rest of the world together for three days of intense and inspiring interaction.

Location & Dates

Drupal Europe will be held in Darmstadtium in Darmstadt, Germany — with a direct connection to Frankfurt International Airport. Drupal Europe will take place 10–14 September 2018 with Drupal contribution opportunities every day. Keynotes, sessions, workshops and BoFs will be from Tuesday to Thursday.

My Drupal Site Has Been Hacked: What Do I Do? How Do I Restore It? 10 Steps to Clean It Up
radu.simileanu
Mon, 06/25/2018 - 16:59

Oops! The worst has happened: your Drupal site has been hacked! Maybe it was precisely one of those critical vulnerabilities, that the Drupal security team has been drawing attention to these last months, that the attacker(s) exploited?

Flight Deck is a set of Docker containers for local Drupal development. Unlike other solutions, Flight Deck is not an application or command you need to install, but a library of containers that can support any Drupal 6, 7, or 8 project.

In 2017 alone, we saw the record-breaking attack of the WannaCry ransomware scandal bring plenty of businesses to their knees. In fact, the spread of the ransomware across 150 countries caused many professionals in the industry to call it the biggest offensive in cybercrime history.

As the digital world continues to evolve, it brings with it countless new opportunities for success, along with various vulnerabilities that modern entrepreneurs need to be aware of. If you're launching an eCommerce company in the current marketplace, you'll need more than just a solid USP and a great marketing strategy - you'll need a CMS (content management system) solution that keeps your online presence secure.

After all, if customers don't believe that your site is secure, then they're not going to buy your products. It doesn't matter if you sell the best products or services in the world, no-one's going to risk giving their details to an unsecured store.

Drupal Commerce is one of the most trusted and secure eCommerce solutions on the web today - used by organizations across the globe. To help boost your chances of a successful eCommerce venture, we're going to explore some of the ways you can develop a more secure site with Drupal Commerce.

1. Commit to Regular Updates

Updates are key to any cyber-security strategy. When a company rolls out an update for a piece of software, they're not just giving you new features to play with, they're also delivering bug fixes and patches that can protect your system against vulnerabilities that exist within the network.

People often postpone updates because they get in the way of day-to-day tasks. However, this could mean that you're leaving entry windows open for people who want to worm their way into your files. The developers of Drupal and Drupal Commerce regularly release timely updates that fix the security issues in your CMS. You should be making sure that these updates are being applied when they become available, either by doing it yourself or by contracting a company to do them.

2. Use the Right Login and Password Security

The login page at the front of your eCommerce site acts as the door to your organization. The best way to protect your future is to fortify that door with the correct security measures. While a great password and username is a great way to get started, some statistics suggest that around 35% of users have weak passwords - and many of the remaining 65% can still be cracked.

With Drupal as your CMS, from the moment you first install the system, the passwords on your database get encrypted and "salted". This means that your password becomes almost impossible to hack. Additionally, Drupal offers a range of user-contributed modules thanks to its open-source framework, which support everything from SSL certificates to two-factor authentication.

3. Configure Your eCommerce Access Controls

When it comes to securing your eCommerce site, there's only so much any CMS can do to help you. At the end of the day, you'll need to make sure that you're making full use of the control systems that solutions like Drupal provide to give you absolute authority over the accounts that have access to your website. For instance, a blog account might have access to write content on your site, but not change the price of products.

Drupal and Drupal Commerce have a range of access controls that allow you to choose authority levels throughout your website. You can create categorized accounts for specific parts of your website, ensuring that each person gets only the permissions they need and no more. Essentially, this reduces the risk of human error as you add more people to your eCommerce team.

4. Stay Ahead of the Curve

One of the most important things you can do to protect your eCommerce site is make sure that you're always aware of the latest DDoS attacks, web issues, and attacks facing your industry. The more you know about the threats you're facing every day, the easier it will be to establish a strategy that helps you to fight back against them.

Drupal helps eCommerce site owners to stay ahead of the curve, with one of the largest communities in the world, packed full of more than 1 million strategists, developers, and designers. This kind of attention ensures that any time an issue or error in the code might be subject to a new attack, it's duly reported and dealt with.

Aside from the support of the community, Drupal users can also access the "Status Report" function on their UI, which keeps you updated on any problems with the code on the site, this is the easiest way to keep on top of your website management, and make sure you're not falling behind on security.

5. Enable the Right Security Modules

When you want to make your home more secure, you add new alarm systems, motion detectors, and even locks. On the other hand, when you want to keep your eCommerce site safe, Drupal offers modules to help you accomplish specific security measures. For instance, there's:

The password policy module: This allows you to establish a specific rule for passwords. You might demand that all passwords have one capital letter and special character for instance.

Username enumeration modules: This module ensures that hackers can't gain access to your site by constantly trying to guess usernames.

Automated logout: This module allows you to choose a time limit for user sessions. If someone remains inactive for too long, they'll be automatically logged out.

Honeypot: This module helps to eliminate spam-bots from using website forms and spamming your administrators and users.

6. Add HTTPS

Building a secure Drupal Commerce website doesn't just protect your business from attacks, it can also give you a better reputation in your chosen eCommerce industry. Adding the HTTPS certificate to your Drupal hosting set-up is a great way to deliver that peace of mind.

HTTP Secure is what you get when you install an SSL certificate onto your website server. It ensures that cybercriminals can't intercept and tamper with the information sent back and forth between you and a customer. Aside from the obvious protection they offer, SSL certificates give you those little green padlocks next to your URL that leaves your customers feeling confident and help you to achieve a better ranking in the search engines.

In fact, there's no reason not to include and SSL certificate now since you can do this for free through Let's Encrypt!

Secure eCommerce Starts with a Trusted CMS

In the ever-evolving world of website security, it's difficult to guarantee any company's security. One moment, it can seem as though everything is running smoothly, then the next, you're struggling to retrieve your details from a hacker. The only thing you can do is take every possible step to protect yourself from an intrusion.

Drupal, with its security modules, password protection, and state-of-the-art open-source software has earned the trust of everyone from industry giants to government agencies. The websites of UNESCO, the White House, Fox News, and Harvard University are all built on the Drupal framework. After all, just because it's open-source doesn't mean that Drupal isn't secure. Every module contributed by a user is thoroughly reviewed by the community. Drupal also has a dedicated security team that is always leading the security initiative.

With this safety-first approach, Drupal ensures that every eCommerce site you build has the best chance of standing strong against attackers and delighting your customers in the process.

Raj Jana is the CEO and founder of the JavaPresse Coffee Company. As an eCommerce entrepreneur, Raj knows a thing or two about running a secure website, and he's always looking for new ways to keep his customers safe.

Drupal meetups are all about gathering up the Drupal-ers around the local community and helping the community grow at large. AddWeb Solution Pvt. Ltd. recently took up this initiative and organised a Drupal Meetup in Ahmedabad - India’s first heritage city declared by UNESCO.

A little about AddWeb and its association with Drupal

AddWeb is an outsourcing agency, based out of Ahmedabad with its clientele spread across the globe. Being an active member and contributor of Drupal community, AddWeb has been doing its bit for Drupal community from time to time. The recent one, being this Drupal Meetup held on 9th June 2018 at AddWeb premises.

,
,

About of the Meetup

The meetup was organised with the primary goal of elevating the local Drupal community and the secondary goal of promoting new ideas to strengthen Drupal in our area. The meetup was designed and divided under 3 different sessions, each session meant to bring us closer to our goals. Below is the brief hint on what each of these sessions was about:

An open discussion about the most talked about thing coming from the house of Drupal. In the meetup, several aspects of Decoupled Drupal were discussed.

,
,

2) Component-Driven Front-end Development

Drupal is bringing in some major changes and innovation to its existing format. Component driven front-end development is one such innovation that needs your attention.

,
,

3) Decoupled React Editorial Experiences

A remotely setup session that was supposed to be taken by Ruben Teijeiro from 1XInternet, did not happen due to last minute urgency of the speaker.

Though the third session couldn’t be conducted, AddWeb has promised to incorporate it in the next meetup that we organise. All in all 50+ Drupal-ers joined us in the meetup and shared their insights on both the conducted sessions. Overwhelmed by their active participation and enthusiasm for the event, we’re motivated to plan more such Drupal Meetups in future. Let’s unite and keep on making efforts to build the Drupal scenario is our respective geographical setups. Because Drupal-ing is fun!

Putting together my presentation about Webform Accessibility for Design4Drupal proved to be more challenging than I anticipated. I proposed this session to force myself to begin to address accessibility in the Webform module for Drupal 8. I mistakenly thought that I could do some research and become an accessibility expert. I assumed learning about accessibility was the same as learning a new programming language - you read a book, review the docs, write some code, throw out some code, refactor other code, learn about design patterns and - voila! - you now know a new programming language. I was wrong - getting up to speed on accessibility is very challenging.

Learning about accessibility can be overwhelming

Between screen readers barking text at you and massive well-thought-out guidelines, I discovered that understanding accessibility could be overwhelming. I thought I could enable VoiceOver, the screen reader built into OSX, and start using it. Instead, I was only able to digest VoiceOver in small five minute bites, trying to reckon one of the most challenging pieces of software I have ever used. I found myself empathizing with anyone with a disability attempting to navigate a website. Frankly, many people with disabilities are likely forced to give up trying to browse websites that don't care about accessibility.

Why do I care about accessibility?

My difficulty loomed large enough that I considered coping out and seeing if I could just do a general Webform presentation at Design4Drupal. There are three other accessibility related sessions scheduled, and I am willing to assume that these presentations are going to be more thorough...Read More

Happy Friday everyone! This episode Front End Developer, Grayson Hicks joins the show to answer some questions about Gatsby.js, an up and coming static site generated that you can use with Drupal or any other data source.

One of the many things Drupal excels at is integrating with other services. Some popular integrations are made even easier by the existence of contributed Drupal modules (such as the one for Google Analytics). But, many times, there isn't a ready-built solution, or the one that's available doesn't quite suit your needs. At Ashday, we've built many integrations between Drupal and other systems, and although every integration is different, there are some things we've learned that are good to consider when writing most any integration.

On Friday, June 15th, Christopher Gervais and I presented at DrupalCamp Montreal 2018. That’s the annual gathering of the Drupal community in Montreal, Canada.
Session information:
Do you need a self-hosted solution for hosting and managing Drupal sites? Would you like be able able to upgrade all of your sites at once with a single button click? Are you tired of dealing with all of the proprietary Drupal hosting providers that won’t let you customize your set-up?

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