Few people who read my occasional scribblings on here will know that for a brief but glorious period of time I played men's roller derby. In fact, during my tenure I was assistant captain for the local team, and through a series of unfortunate events blew out my knee during tryouts for the national men's team. Anyone who knew me growing up would have never thought I had any business even participating in national tryouts for an athletics team (except maybe bowling), but in a number of the tests I held my own, and it's a memory I will always cherish.
It's been a while since I shared an update on how Smart Date is evolving, so I thought I should do a rundown of some of the recent features and developments. Even people using the module every day may not be aware of all the changes, unless they've been combing through the release notes.
My work on the Smart Date module began with a simple idea: make managing dates and times in Drupal as easy as users have come to expect in using popular calendar applications. Many of the ideas for features and improvements built into the module have come from the community: recurring events, calendar integration, timezone handling, and many more.
It’s well understood that a robust, API-first Content Management System (CMS) is a crucial part of a Composable Enterprise. What’s discussed less often is the degree to which the implementation approach for the CMS can also contribute to the key ideals of a Composable Enterprise: being able to quickly innovate, evolve, and adapt to changing market conditions.
When we think about how to make a Drupal website load faster, we often focus on how to make Drupal render the pages faster: optimizing queries, caching entities, and so on. But out of the box Drupal has several layers of caching enabled by default, and many popular Drupal hosts have additional systems in place like memcached and Varnish to further enhance the overall page load. In practice, the load of the page itself is often a small fraction of the overall time and data needed for a visitor to view a page.
Something I've enjoyed since starting work on the Smart Date module has been seeing it grow and evolve in ways I wouldn't have expected, in response to the community. I had three specific goals in the beginning: a more "app-like" and intuitive widget, natural language, deduplicated date range output, and more efficient storage of dates and times. Soon after its release, requests started to come in for additional features: calendar integration, repeating events, support for timezones, and more.
[This content was originally published in the Digital Echidna Blog on Nov 20, 2019]
A slow site has negative impacts on search engine optimization, can increase bounce rate, and reduce site conversions. Taking a surgical approach and understanding the cause of the problems can help you effectively ‘treat’ the site and alleviate the symptoms.
[This content was originally published in the Digital Echidna Blog on October 31, 2019]
A slow site has negative impacts on search engine optimization, can increase bounce rate, and lower site conversions. Taking a surgical approach and understanding the cause of the problems can help you effectively ‘treat’ the site and alleviate the symptoms.
*This blog is part three in Martin Anderson-Clutz's ongoing series devoted to site speed performance issues.
[This content was originally published in the Digital Echidna Blog on August 6, 2019]
In the previous installment, I talked conceptually about how to approach testing and what we are trying to learn. This time we’re going to get our hands dirty and start collecting data.
[This content was originally published in the Digital Echidna Blog on July 8, 2019]
Just as with medicine, when you’re trying to fix site speed issues, you want to ensure that you’re curing the cause -- not just dealing with a symptom. An issue may present itself in one way, but the root cause can be something different, and a key component of taking a surgical approach to site speed issues is to make sure we take a moment to understand the challenge that’s before us.