The snow is thawing, March is doing its blustery thing, and we’re all buckling down for a busy spring season. It’s time to get down to brass tacks. Without mincing words or mixing metaphors (too much), this month’s newsletter geeks out on Drupal migrations, showcases a very handy WordPress feature, and more. Pull on your galoshes and let’s jump in!
As always, if you’d like to discuss a new web project, an upgrade, or learn more about our managed service offerings, please feel free to put time on our calendar to chat!
– Erin Rickard, Digital Services Manager
BLOG: Handling Drupal Migration Edge Cases, Part 1: ScaldA Drupal 7 media management module. https://www.drupal.org/project/scald to Media
As you may have seen us mention here (or here, or here – seriously, we can’t stress this enough) Drupal has two major upcoming end-of-life dates: November 2021 for Drupal 8 and November 2022 for Drupal 7. Moving from 7 to 8 (or jumping from 7 straight to 9) requires rebuilding the site and migrating over your content, which can be complex. In this blog post, senior developer Jesse Firestone delves into a particular migration challenge with the Scald media module and how he solved it to successfully migrate 15,000 media items.
TUTORIAL: WordPress Gutenberg Reusable Blocks
If your WordPress site uses the Gutenberg editor, check out this tutorial on reusable blocks. Reusable blocks make it easy to manage snippets of text that you want to appear on multiple pages or posts throughout your site – for example, a call to action, a testimonial, or a survey. Create the block, add it to your desired pages, and when you need to edit or update the text, you’ll do it once and it will automatically update everywhere it’s used. Magic! Visit ShareABlock.com to peruse block designs for inspiration. For more WordPress tutorials, take a look at the WordPress resource library as well.
TOOL: Make My Persona Tool from Hubspot
Creating personas – characters that represent typical members of the audience you want to reach – is a great way to focus your user-centered approach to design and content when planning a new website. Hubspot’s free Make My Persona tool prompts you to think through your target audiences’ demographics, goals, and challenges. Use it as a tool to pinpoint who you’re trying to reach, and revisit our Value-Based Digital Strategy webinar to learn how to apply a user-centered approach to your project to maximize return on investment.
WEBINAR: Content Governance: The Golden Rules You Need to Make Great Content at Scale
One day, prompted by the need for a site rebuild or an information architecture update, you realize your site has grown to 5000 pages and you have no idea how you got here, or how to figure out what content is truly worth keeping. Content governance – an established process for determining what goes on the website and who is responsible for those decisions along the way – is often an afterthought when it comes to website management, but a bit of time spent on it can save many hours of headaches down the road. GatherContent’s free March 17 webinar will guide you through the basics of setting up an effective content governance framework.