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Mar 27 2024
Mar 27
Drupal 8 will be released on November 19 | Wunderkraut

Coincidence?

We're ready to celebrate and build (even more) amazing Drupal 8 websites. 
On November 19 we'll put our Drupal 8 websites in the spotlight...be sure to come back and check out our website.

By

Michèle Weisz

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or call us +32 (0)3 298 69 98

© 2015 Wunderkraut Benelux

Mar 27 2024
Mar 27
77 of us are going | Wunderkraut

Drupalcon 2015

People from across the globe who use, develop, design and support the Drupal platform will be brought together during a full week dedicated to networking, Drupal 8 and sharing and growing Drupal skills.

As we have active hiring plans we’ve decided that this year’s approach should have a focus on meeting people who might want to work for Wunderkraut and getting Drupal 8 out into the world.
As Signature Supporting Partner we wanted as much people as possible to attend the event. We managed to get 77 Wunderkrauts on the plane to Barcelona!  From Belgium alone we have an attendance of 17 people.
The majority of our developers will be participating in sprints (a get-together for focused development work on a Drupal project) giving all they got together with all other contributors at DrupalCon.

We look forward to an active DrupalCon week.  
If you're at DrupalCon and feel like talking to us. Just look for the folks with Wunderkraut carrot t-shirts or give Jo a call at his cell phone +32 476 945 176.

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© 2015 Wunderkraut Benelux

Mar 27 2024
Mar 27
Watch our epic Drupal 8 promo video | Wunderkraut

How Wunderkraut feels about Drupal 8

Drupal 8 is coming and everyone is sprinting hard to get it over the finish line. To boost contributor morale we’ve made a motivational Drupal 8 video that will get them into the zone and tackling those last critical issues in no time.

[embedded content]

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© 2015 Wunderkraut Benelux

Mar 27 2024
Mar 27

Once again Heritage day was a huge succes.

About 400 000 visitors visited Flanders monuments and heritage sites last Sunday.  The Open Monumentendag website received more than double the amount of last year's visitors.

Visitors to the website organised their day out by using the powerful search tool we built that allowed them to search for activities and sights at their desired location.  Not only could they search by location (province, zip code, city name, km range) but also by activity type, keywords, category and accessibility.  Each search request being added as a (removable) filter for finding the perfect activity.

By clicking on the heart icon, next to each activity, a favorite list was drawn up.  Ready for printing and taking along as route map.

Our support team monitored the website making sure visitors had a great digital experience for a good start to the day's activities.

Did you experience the ease of use of the Open Monumentendag website?  Are you curious about the know-how we applied for this project?  Read our Open Monumentendag case.

Mar 27 2024
Mar 27
Very proud to be a part of it | Wunderkraut

Breaking ground as Drupal's first Signature Supporting Partner

Drupal Association Executive Director Holly Ross is thrilled that Wunderkraut is joining as first and says: "Their support for the Association and the project is, and has always been, top-notch. This is another great expression of how much Wunderkraut believes in the incredible work our community does."

As Drupal Signature Supporting Partner we commit ourselves to advancing the Drupal project and empowering the Drupal community.  We're very proud to be a part of it as we enjoy contributing to the Drupal ecosystem (especially when we can be quircky and fun as CEO Vesa Palmu states).

Our contribution allowed the Drupal Association to:

  • Complete Drupal.org's D7 upgrade - now they can enhance new features
  • Hired a full engineering team committed to improving Drupal.org infrastructure
  • Set the roadmap for Drupal.org success.

First signaturepartner announcement in Drupal Newsletter

By

Michèle Weisz

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© 2015 Wunderkraut Benelux

Mar 27 2024
Mar 27

But in this post I'd like to talk about one of the disadvantages that here at Wunderkraut we pay close attention to.

A consequence of the ability to build features in more than one way is that it's difficult to predict how different people interact (or want to interact) with them. As a result, companies end up delivering solutions to their clients that although seem perfect, turn out, in time, to be less than ideal and sometimes outright counterproductive. 

Great communication with the client and interest in their problems goes a long way towards minimising this effect. But sometimes clients realise that certain implementations are not perfect and could be made better. And when that happens, we are there to listen, adapt and reshape future solutions by taking into account these experiences. 

One such recent example involved the use of a certain WYSIWYG library from our toolkit on a client website. Content editors were initially happy with the implementation before they actually started using it to the full extent. Problems began to emerge, leading to editors spending way more time than they should have performing editing tasks. The client signalled this problem to us which we then proceed to correct by replacing said library. This resulted in our client becoming happier with the solution, much more productive and less frustrated with their experience on their site. 

We learned an important lesson in this process and we started using that new library on other sites as well. Polling our other clients on the performance of the new library revealed that indeed it was a good change to make. 

Mar 27 2024
Mar 27

A few years ago most of the requests started with : "Dear Wunderkraut, we want to build a new website and ... "  - nowadays we are addressed as "Dear Wunderkraut, we have x websites in Drupal and are very happy with that, but we are now looking for a reliable partner to support & host ... ".

By the year 2011 Drupal had been around for just about 10 years. It was growing and changing at a fast pace. More and more websites were being built with it. Increasing numbers of people were requesting help and support with their website. And though there were a number of companies flourishing in Drupal business, few considered specific Drupal support an interesting market segment. Throughout 2011 Wunderkraut Benelux (formerly known as Krimson) was tinkering with the idea of offering support, but it was only when Drupal newbie Jurgen Verhasselt arrived at the company in 2012 that the idea really took shape.

Before his arrival, six different people, all with different profiles, were handling customer support in a weekly rotation system. This worked poorly. A developer trying to get his own job done plus deal with a customer issue at the same time was getting neither job done properly. Tickets got lost or forgotten, customers felt frustrated and problems were not always fixed. We knew we could do better. The job required uninterrupted dedication and constant follow-up.

That’s where Jurgen came in the picture. After years of day job experience in the graphic sector and nights spent on Drupal he came to work at Wunderkraut and seized the opportunity to dedicate himself entirely to Drupal support. Within a couple of weeks his coworkers had handed over all their cases. They were relieved, he was excited! And most importantly, our customers were being assisted on a constant and reliable basis.

By the end of 2012 the first important change was brought about, i.e. to have Jurgen work closely with colleague Stijn Vanden Brande, our Sys Admin. This team of two ensured that many of the problems that arose could be solved extremely efficiently. Wunderkraut being the hosting party as well as the Drupal party means that no needless discussions with the hosting took place and moreover, the hosting environment was well-known. This meant we could find solutions with little loss of time, as we know that time is an important factor when a customer is under pressure to deliver.

In the course of 2013 our support system went from a well-meaning but improvised attempt to help customers in need to a fully qualified division within our company. What changed? We decided to classify customer support issues into: questions, incidents/problems and change requests and incorporated ITIL based best practices. In this way we created a dedicated Service Desk which acts as a Single Point of Contact after Warranty. This enabled us to offer clearly differing support models based on the diverse needs of our customers (more details about this here). In addition, we adopted customer support software and industry standard monitoring tools. We’ve been improving ever since, thanks to the large amount of input we receive from our trusted customers. Since 2013, Danny and Tim have joined our superb support squad and we’re looking to grow more in the months to come.

When customers call us for support we do quite a bit more than just fix the problem at hand. Foremostly, we listen carefully and double check everything to ensure that we understand him or her correctly. This helps to take the edge off the huge pressure our customer may be experiencing. After which, we have a list of do’s and don’t for valuable support.

  • Do a quick scan of possible causes by getting a clear understanding of the symptoms
  • Do look for the cause of course, but also assess possible quick-fixes and workarounds to give yourself time to solve the underlying issue
  • Do check if it’s a pebkac
  • and finally, do test everything within the realm of reason.

The most basic don’t that we swear by is:

  • never, ever apply changes to the foundation of a project.
  • Support never covers a problem that takes more than two days to fix. At that point we escalate to development.

We are so dedicated to offering superior support to customers that on explicit request, we cater to our customers’ customers. Needless to say, our commitment in support has yielded remarkable  results and plenty of customer satisfaction (which makes us happy, too)

Mar 27 2024
Mar 27

If your website is running Drupal 6, chances are it’s between 3 and 6 years old now, and once Drupal 8 comes out. Support for Drupal 6 will drop. Luckily the support window has recently been prolonged for another 3 months after Drupal 8 comes out. But still,  that leaves you only a small window of time to migrate to the latest and greatest. But why would you? 

There are many great things about Drupal 8 that will have something for everyone to love, but that should not be the only reason why you would need an upgrade. It is not the tool itself that will magically improve the traffic to your site, neither convert its users to start buying more stuff, it’s how you use the tool.  

So if your site is running Drupal 6 and hasn’t had large improvements in the last years it might be time to investigate if it needs a major overhaul to be up to par with the competition. If that’s the case, think about brand, concept, design, UX and all of that first to understand how your site should work and what it should look like, only then we can understand if a choice needs to be made to go for Drupal 7 or Drupal 8.  

If your site is still running well you might not even need to upgrade! Although community support for Drupal 6 will end a few months after Drupal 8 release, we will continue to support Drupal 6 sites and work with you to fix any security issues we encounter and collaborate with the Drupal Security Team to provide patches.

My rule of thumb is that if your site uses only core Drupal and a small set of contributed modules, it’s ok to build a new website on Drupal 8 once it comes out. But if you have a complex website running on many contributed and custom modules it might be better to wait a few months maybe a year until all becomes stable. 

Mar 27 2024
Mar 27

So how does customer journey mapping work?

In this somewhat simplified example, we map the customer journey of somebody signing up for an online course. If you want to follow along with your own use case, pick an important target audience and a customer journey that you know is problematic for the customer.

1. Plot the customer steps in the journey

customer journey map 1

Write down the series of steps a client takes to complete this journey. For example “requests brochure”, “receives brochure”, “visits the website for more information”, etc. Put each step on a coloured sticky note.

2. Define the interactions with your organisation

customer journey map 2

Next, for each step, determine which people and groups the customer interacts with, like the marketing department, copywriter and designer, customer service agent, etc. Do the same for all objects and systems that the client encounters, like the brochure, website and email messages. You’ve now mapped out all people, groups, systems and objects that the customer interacts with during this particular journey.

3. Draw the line

customer journey map 3

Draw a line under the sticky notes. Everything above the line is “on stage”, visible to your customers.

4. Map what happens behind the curtains

customer journey map 4

Now we’ll plot the backstage parts. Use sticky notes of a different color and collect the persons, groups, actions, objects and systems that support the on stage part of the journey. In this example these would be the marketing team that produces the prod brochure, the printer, the mail delivery partner, web site content team, IT departments, etc. This backstage part is usually more complex than the on stage part.

5. How do people feel about this?

Customer journey map 5

Now we get to the crucial part. Mark the parts that work well from the perspective of the person interacting with it with green dots. Mark the parts where people start to feel unhappy with yellow dots. Mark the parts where people get really frustrated with red. What you’ll probably see now is that your client starts to feel unhappy much sooner than employees or partners. It could well be that on the inside people are perfectly happy with how things work while the customer gets frustrated.

What does this give you?

Through this process you can immediately start discovering and solving customer experience issues because you now have:

  • A user centred perspective on your entire service/product offering
  • A good view on opportunities for innovation and improvement
  • Clarity about which parts of the organisation can be made responsible to produce those improvements
  • In a shareable format that is easy to understand

Mapping your customer journey is an important first step towards customer centred thinking and acting. The challenge is learning to see things from your customers perspective and that's exactly what a customer journey map enables you to do. Based on the opportunities you identified from the customer journey map, you’ll want to start integrating the multitude of digital channels, tools and technology already in use into a cohesive platform. In short: A platform for digital experience management! That's our topic for our next post.

Mar 27 2024
Mar 27

In combination with the FacetAPI module, which allows you to easily configure a block or a pane with facet links, we created a page displaying search results containing contact type content and a facets block on the left hand side to narrow down those results.

One of the struggles with FacetAPI are the URLs of the individual facets. While Drupal turns the ugly GET 'q' parameter into a clean URLs, FacetAPI just concatenates any extra query parameters which leads to Real Ugly Paths. The FacetAPI Pretty Paths module tries to change that by rewriting those into human friendly URLs.

Our challenge involved altering the paths generated by the facets, but with a slight twist.

Due to the projects architecture, we were forced to replace the full view mode of a node of the bundle type "contact" with a single search result based on the nid of the visited node. This was a cheap way to avoid duplicating functionality and wasting precious time. We used the CTools custom page manager to take over the node/% page and added a variant which is triggered by a selection rule based on the bundle type. The variant itself doesn't use the panels renderer but redirects the visitor to the Solr page passing the nid as an extra argument with the URL. This resulted in a path like this: /contacts?contact=1234.

With this snippet, the contact query parameter is passed to Solr which yields the exact result we need.

/**
 * Implements hook_apachesolr_query_alter().
 */
function myproject_apachesolr_query_alter($query) {
  if (!empty($_GET['contact'])) {
    $query->addFilter('entity_id', $_GET['contact']);
  }
}

The result page with our single search result still contains facets in a sidebar. Moreover, the URLs of those facets looked like this: /contacts?contact=1234&f[0]=im_field_myfield..... Now we faced a new problem. The ?contact=1234 part was conflicting with the rest of the search query. This resulted in an empty result page, whenever our single search result, node 1234, didn't match with the rest of the search query! So, we had to alter the paths of the individual facets, to make them look like this: /contacts?f[0]=im_field_myfield.

This is how I approached the problem.

If you look carefully in the API documentation, you won't find any hooks that allow you to directly alter the URLs of the facets. Gutting the FacetAPI module is quite daunting. I started looking for undocumented hooks, but quickly abandoned that approach. Then, I realised that FacetAPI Pretty Paths actually does what we wanted: alter the paths of the facets to make them look, well, pretty! I just had to figure out how it worked and emulate its behaviour in our own module.

Turns out that most of the facet generating functionality is contained in a set of adaptable, loosely coupled, extensible classes registered as CTools plugin handlers. Great! This means that I just had to find the relevant class and override those methods with our custom logic while extending.

Facet URLs are generated by classes extending the abstract FacetapiUrlProcessor class. The FacetapiUrlProcessorStandard extends and implements the base class and already does all of the heavy lifting, so I decided to take it from there. I just had to create a new class, implement the right methods and register it as a plugin. In the folder of my custom module, I created a new folder plugins/facetapi containing a new file called url_processor_myproject.inc. This is my class:

/**
 * @file
 * A custom URL processor for cancer.
 */

/**
 * Extension of FacetapiUrlProcessor.
 */
class FacetapiUrlProcessorMyProject extends FacetapiUrlProcessorStandard {

  /**
   * Overrides FacetapiUrlProcessorStandard::normalizeParams().
   *
   * Strips the "q" and "page" variables from the params array.
   * Custom: Strips the 'contact' variable from the params array too
   */
  public function normalizeParams(array $params, $filter_key = 'f') {
    return drupal_get_query_parameters($params, array('q', 'page', 'contact'));
  }

}

I registered my new URL Processor by implementing hook_facetapi_url_processors in the myproject.module file.

**
 * Implements hook_facetapi_url_processors().
 */
function myproject_facetapi_url_processors() {
  return array(
    'myproject' => array(
      'handler' => array(
        'label' => t('MyProject'),
        'class' => 'FacetapiUrlProcessorMyProject',
      ),
    ),
  );
}

I also included the .inc file in the myproject.info file:

files[] = plugins/facetapi/url_processor_myproject.inc

Now I had a new registered URL Processor handler. But I still needed to hook it up with the correct Solr searcher on which the FacetAPI relies to generate facets. hook_facetapi_searcher_info_alter allows you to override the searcher definition and tell the searcher to use your new custom URL processor rather than the standard URL processor. This is the implementation in myproject.module:

/**
 * Implements hook_facetapi_search_info().
 */
function myproject_facetapi_searcher_info_alter(array &$searcher_info) {
  foreach ($searcher_info as &$info) {
    $info['url processor'] = 'myproject';
  }
}

After clearing the cache, the correct path was generated per facet. Great! Of course, the paths still don't look pretty and contain those way too visible and way too ugly query parameters. We could enable the FacetAPI Pretty Path module, but by implementing our own URL processor, FacetAPI Pretty Paths will cause a conflict since the searcher uses either one or the other class. Not both. One way to solve this problem would be to extend the FacetapiUrlProcessorPrettyPaths class, since it is derived from the same FacetapiUrlProcessorStandard base class, and override its normalizeParams() method.

But that's another story.

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