Best of July: Top 5 Drupal Blog Posts that We Have Bookmarked this Month

It's that time of the month again! The time when we express our thanks to those Drupal teams who've generously (and altruistically) shared valuable free content with us, the rest of the community. Content with an impact on our own workflow and our Drupal development process. In this respect, as usual, we've handpicked 5 Drupal blog posts, from all those that we've bookmarked this month, that we've found most “enlightening”.

From:
 

• Drupal 8 site-building best practices
• to valuable built-in tools for image optimization in Drupal
• to altruistically shared tips on how to enforce coding standards in Drupal
• to best modules for implementing social login functionality into one's Drupal website
• to... specific metrics that one should prioritize when evaluating his/her website's marketing efforts
   

… the July edition of our “OPTASY favorites” series is, again, packed with high quality, and (most of all) useful content.

But, let's get straight to our selection: here are the 5 blog posts that we've added to our list of resources this month.

Integrating social login functionality into Drupal websites must be one of the most common tasks that we deal with as a development team.

So, having a list of modules designed precisely for this is so reassuring:
 

• we save precious time
• we know that it's a Drupal solution (not a different, third-party software component) that we integrate into our projects
   

So, the InternetDevel have shared their list of Drupal 8 modules for social login just in time to... add to our bookmarks and resources & tools list.

Their blog post highlights 5 modules to evaluate first — to see if they fit a specific Drupal 8 web project's particularities — whenever we need to enable social login on the websites that we work on.

Our list of best practices for developing websites in Drupal 8 remains an open one. We keep on adding valuable suggestions on:
 

• life-saving modules that we should be using, that we might have overlooked or underated
• new approaches to Drupal development that help us save valuable time and avoid emberassing mistakes
   

That's why the ADCI Solution's team blog post on the best practices to adopt and to stick to when building a website in Drupal 8 couldn't have escaped our “radar”.

From:
 

• module recommendations for SEO, security, maintaince and performance issues
• to useful tips on how to address the editorial experience on the websites that we build
• to what modules we should remove once we move a website from the dev environment to live environment
   

.. we've found a whole bunch of reasons why this post deserves its place in our top 5 Drupal blog posts from July.
 

Another one of those articles that we've “bumped into” precisely when we were looking for the solution that it presents.

In this case here we were looking to set up, document and enforce coding policy and procedures to ensure that our developers comply with the Drupal coding standards.

In their “revelatory” blog post, the Lullabot team puts the spotlight on a tool  — GrumPHP — that checks your Drupal code, before commiting it. One that detects any violation of the well-known Drupal coding standards.

Then, they go on anticipating and detailing each possible challenge that you might face when using this tool and they even share their solutions for overcoming them.

Overall, GrumPHP makes such an interesting discovery that we can't wait to leverage it in our next Drupal project. 
 

Disclaimer: this is not a Drupal blog post, yet the tips included there are highly applicable to websites running on Drupal, as well.

For us, it's been more of a recap of all those key metrics to use for evaluating our marketing strategies.

And it's convenient to have all 6 of them listed in one post that we can keep at hand and use whenever we need to check whether our marketing efforts do have an impact.

From:
 

• time on site
• to number of pages visited
• to traffic sources
   

… plus 3 other crucial metrics for us to turn into the main criteria to use when assessing our marketing strategy's efficency, the article's such a welcomed “reminder”.

A handy resource that we've added to our list of 5 favorite Drupal blog posts from July.
 

Optimizing images is on top of our list of performance-boosting techniques. Therefore, the WishDesk's post on those Drupal 8 built-in tools designed precisely for this purpose came in more than handy.

And not only do they outline all the image optimization features that Drupal 8 provides us with, right out of the box, but they:
 

• go into details of the whole process and its particularities in this version of Drupal
• stress out the crucial importance of optimizing one's images for SEO and performance purposes
   

The END!

These are the 5 Drupal blog posts of the month which, in our opinion, shared the most useful and usable content.

Do you have your own list of favorites, too?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay