CTI Digital blog

After seeing a rise in search volume for ‘SEO’ itself, I had been planning to write a blog post that explains what SEO is and how it works. Aligning myself to the firm marketing adage of ‘giving your audience what they need’, I planned to create the content to answer the most common questions.

But a lot has changed since I undertook my initial planning of this post. Coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused upheaval, confusion and devastation for so many people, worldwide. But you don’t need me to tell you this. I decided that it would be most useful to respond to questions about SEO specifically during the coronavirus pandemic. 

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Drupal Camp London is a 3-day celebration of the users, designers, developers and advocates of Drupal and its community! Attracting 500 people from across Europe, after Drupalcon, it’s one of the biggest events in the Drupal Calendar. As such, we're pleased to sponsor such an event for the 6th time!

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From September 2019, all public sector websites in the UK will be legally obliged to comply with new accessibility standards.

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In a nutshell, Headless software refers to a set up where the back-end system can be separated from the front-end appearance of an application or website. There’s also such a thing as ‘de-coupled’ but we’ll come onto that later.

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University websites are complex beasts.

A university’s website should not only aid visitors in finding a course but also guide them through the unknown, giving prospective students all the information they need to make one of life's biggest decisions.

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Umbraco is known as the world's friendliest CMS. The software is subject to regular updates, which is great for the future of the platform, but can become confusing to new users.

To simplify matters, here are the major updates you need to know about:

Updated: 11th June 2020

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Today the release of Drupal 8.6.0 was announced by the Drupal Association! This release is set to be one of the biggest updates in the history of Drupal, signalling a shift towards a more comprehensive, marketing-centred stack. See the full statement at the end of this post.

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...And the story of how two unlikely organisations drove innovation in the Drupal Platform.

While delivering continual support for an energy clients Drupal website, we wanted to implement a Postcode Lookup feature, with auto-complete functionality. Existing solutions were either too basic or needlessly expensive, but we couldn’t justify building a new solution from scratch. As luck would have, I discovered at our weekly Drupal 8 meeting that my colleagues working on a Not-For-Profit site required autocomplete capabilities for the address lookup on the donations page.

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We’re back for Part 2 of this content and search sharing project, so let’s have a quick recap:

In Part 1, we set up migrations to pull in regional content to the national site and configured a Solr core to index them for location searches. Then we altered the Solr queries, so that the default behaviour only shows content from the current site.

The remaining step is to render the search results that come from other sites. The main problem here is that the default Drupal/Solr/Views integration uses Solr to find the content before rendering it through Drupal’s rendering engine. However, the regional sites are unable to render content from the national site... at least not through the usual process.

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CTI have recently been working with The Wildlife Trusts to create a platform that will be available to run all of their local trust websites. In addition to their UK-wide site, each regional Trust has their own website (e.g. Surrey Wildlife Trust and North Wales Wildlife Trust). Rather than the overarching case study, this blog post is a deeper technical dive into how we approached two of the key requirements: content sharing and cross-site searching.

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