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Jun 13 2018
Jun 13

Wilbur Ince presents his session on local dev environments

There are many components of a successful camp, but having good sessions is essential. Nearly 40 sessions were offered this year with true diversity of topics and delivery styles; ranging from introductory talks to more technical, and from entertaining and fun to inspiring and thought-provoking.

At Electric Citizen we were very pleased to have four sessions approved, and these were recorded for anyone to watch.

Tim Broeker: Configuration Management for Humans

Wilbur Ince: Lando Ddev Docksal - Battle Royale of Local Development

Adam Fuchs: Easy, Flexible and Accurate Drupal 8 Search with Dr. Seuss and Search API

Dan Moriarty: The Next Big Thing and Why Should I Care?

Apr 17 2018
Apr 17

Nashville Music City Center, a world-class venue

DrupalCon Nashville is in the history books and it was a doozy. The whole team was able to attend a stellar week of learning, sharing our hard-earned knowledge, and networking–interspersed with plenty of fun social events.

Seasoned Drupalers know that DrupalCon is a lot more than a tech conference. It is the community event of the year; a place to meet old friends and new, a celebration, and a barometer of the health of the Drupal platform itself–something we are collectively invested in. Attendees converged from far and wide to be part of it, to contribute, to engage, to learn and share, and to support our chosen technology.

As attendees, sponsors and presenters, Electric Citizen was fully in the mix this year. Read more in this blog post, or on our Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook channels.

Mar 23 2018
Mar 23

If you have never been to a DrupalCon, make this year the one! This is a year of firsts for Electric Citizen.

  • First year as a Supporting Partner of the Drupal Association
  • First year as a sponsor and exhibitor at DrupalCon North America
  • First year to be featuring 2 speakers at DrupalCon!

DrupalCon is the premier Drupal conference of the year in North America and the most widely attended Drupal event in the world. Six of our Citizens will be there, and we encourage you, colleagues, friends and client partners to join us. Look for us in our green EC workshirts!

Find us at DrupalCon booth #715

Mar 08 2018
Mar 08

Drupal 8 is the latest and greatest version of the popular content management system (CMS), powering everything from hobbyist websites of every stripe to Fashion, Finance, Sports and University sites like ralphlauren.com, mint.com, donor site for the University of Colorado and Sevilla Football Club

There are many reasons to upgrade to Drupal 8, both from earlier versions and sometimes from different content management systems altogether. The upgrade offers lots of benefits across the stakeholder universe. It’s quicker to set up for developers and site builders, vastly better for content editors for authoring, editing and management, and all improvements ultimately benefit site visitors who get a better user experience. 

Here is a short list of improvements and reasons why you might consider using Drupal 8 for your next web project, and you will discover many more as you delve deeper into this significant update:

Dec 22 2017
Dec 22

The core Drupal 8 software contains some SEO-friendly features ready to go, and some that require enabling and configuration. Additionally, there are other contributed modules that can be downloaded. The SEO Checklist module has a list of modules that it recommends. Together, these modules will address on-page SEO requirements involving data that search engines track on websites, including:

  • Title Tags
  • Meta-descriptions
  • Paths
  • proper use of subheads
  • keyword use
  • XML sitemaps

Sign up for Google Analytics, together with Google Search Console, and follow directions to connect them to your website. These are free tools provided by Google and work together to provide invaluable data on your website traffic, content, keyword usage, sales and conversion data, and much more; all with the ability to generate useful reports that you can share and use to make business decisions. Webmaster Tools are also available for BingYandex (Russia) and Baidu (China) depending on your need. Certain Drupal 8 modules will require you to have at least Google Analytics installed. This is a good primary step before installing modules.

The Metatag module is very important as it helps search engines find key info they are looking for on a page like the title tag and meta description for the page itself. By filling out meta tags as you go through your content creation workflow you allow the module to place this info in the header of the web page where it is expected to be.

One of the Drupal 8 modules that automates a very cumbersome task is the Redirect module, which create 301 redirects--essentially telling Google that your content has moved if you take existing content and place it in a new URL. That way you still retain any SEO juice that the content had already earned.

Redirect Module Configuration Page

The Pathauto module also add convenience, as it automatically creates SEO-friendly URLs when you create content. However, in my experience, you should take a look at each URL and, sometimes, you'll need to fine-tune them by hand to make them look better on search results, and make them more click-worthy.

Because websites typically evolve over time with changes to content, new pages, deletion of old pages and so on, it means that search engines are playing a constant game of catch-up, so in order to keep things current, the Simple XML Sitemap module ( This module aims to be a replacement for the XML Sitemap module for Drupal 8) updates itself as changes are made, so that search engines can always get the latest version of your website to index.

Additional Tips to Elevate Your SEO

Run some diagnostics to understand what visitors are searching for internally on your site This is a great tactic to discover what your users are searching for and give you an indication if there is a content gap between what they want and what they find. This can be a real opportunity to develop fresh content, optimized for those searchers. And, amazingly, you can use this principle to constantly revise and refine your content to climb up the search rankings. The take-a-way here is that once content is created on your website do not let it stagnate. Search engines will revisit and catalog your site periodically. You can speed up this process by making changes and then re-submitting the page individually to Google or Bing to re-index.

For those of you who wish to operate on the cutting edge, look to tools like the Google AMP module to convert pages to the AMP standard, which optimizes for mobile. Also, explore what Resource Description Framework RDF UI module does to integrate Schema.org and the effort to provide richer search results.

Finally, be aware that SEO is achieved by degrees, and that there is always room for improvement. If, as they claim, the underlying goal of search engines to find the best information and the best user experiences, we all need to look at our websites holistically, which also means looking at every factor that could impact the visitor, including the speed and performance of the site, security and how well the site plays for mobile devices.

Metatag Module Configuration Page

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web