From Styleguide to Final Product In the first article in our series we talked about how styleguide-driven development (SDD) and decoupling both serve many of the same goals, and SDD can do so in a way that avoids the many challenges of decoupling. Now we’ll get deeper into the details of SDD and how we …
Read more »Dave Hansen-Lange
Dave joined Advomatic in 2007 and has been developing websites since 2003. He is passionate about improving Drupal's performance, maintainability, and security. As Advomatic’s Director of Technical Strategy he works to improve quality and process on all projects. He's been the Technical Strategist on many projects, including websites for The U.S. Department of State, Columbia University, The Clinton Foundation, the ACLU, and Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. Dave has lived in places far and wide and has been very active with Drupal communities around the world.
Posts by Dave
Decoupling Drupal Without Losing Your Head — Part 1
What exactly are we trying to do here? And is there another way to do it? Headless/decoupled Drupal has received a lot of buzz in the last year. But the rise of decoupled Drupal has also been met with due skepticism, as there are significant challenges. We’re not here to further that flame war; you can find …
Read more »Have an Advomatic Maintenance Plan? Your site is safe.
On Friday, Oct 10th, the Drupal Security Team notified the community to be on the lookout for a security release the following Wednesday. While that was already the standard monthly “window” for a potential security release, the team had never given this kind of additional warning before. We took it as a hint that this …
Read more »Responsive Iframes — yes it is possible
The Web has always had a love-hate relationship with 3rd-party content. Whether that external content is self-contained functionality brought into a website via SaaS, or to add a donation form to your website in a way that reduces your PCI Requirements, or to possibly connect your disparate web properties together. Back in the prehistoric days …
Read more »Automating new dev sites for new branches
Over the past few years we've moved away from using Subversion (SVN) for version control and we're now using Git for all of our projects. Git brings us a lot more power, but because of its different approach there are some challenges as well. Git has powerful branching and this opens up new opportunities to …
Read more »Removing fields from CiviCRM
Sometimes after launching a new site our clients find that there are fields and features in CiviCRM that they don’t use. We are working with a client that wants to remove all fields and features that aren’t useful in order to simplify their user interface and make it easier to use. This includes things like …
Read more »The dreaded “MySQL has gone away” error
In environments where there are many databases running on the same machine (ex. shared hosting), or in high traffic environments (ex. enterprise sites) it is a common problem that unterminated connections to the database linger around indefinitely until MySQL starts spitting out the “Too many connections” error. The fix for this is decrease the wait_timeout …
Read more »Quick and easy Congressional District lookups for your CiviCRM contacts
By definition CiviCRM is used by many organizations in the political sphere. For those organizations working in the US one useful metric to have on your contacts is their congressional district. Up until now this has usually been accomplished with either custom code, or exporting your contacts, sending them through a bulk lookup tool, and …
Read more »Drupal Maintainability III – Self Documentation
It’s been a while since I’ve done an article in the Maintainability series, but that’s how the web business goes – alternating between insane activity and manageable momentum. This time we’re talking about writing self-documenting code. For those of you who write code, be it theming, CSS, module development, or anything else I think self-documenting …
Read more »Drupal Maintainability II – Separation of Church and State
This week’s blog post on Drupal maintainability is about keeping things separated (You can take a look at the other posts in the series). Drupal is really powerful. One of the core assumptions is that every site will be different and so everything can be manipulated and extended to your heart’s content. And for any …
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