CTI Digital blog

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: 29th May 2019

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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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The age parameters of ‘Generation Z’ vary by source, but they are widely considered to be born between 1995 and 2012. This points to anyone aged between 6 and 23, accounting for the majority of current university starters. Whilst many universities are still catering to Millennials, it’s time to update marketing tactics to target the most relevant demographic.

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Drupal 8.5 was released on the 7th of March 2018 with a host of new features, bug fixes, and improvements. There are plenty of exciting updates for developers in this blog. Or if you're a business owner, click here to find out what this means for you.

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Last week I was able to attend Drupalcamp London and present a session called “Drupal 101”. The session was about how everyone is welcome in the Drupal Community, irrespective of who you are.  At Drupalcamp London I met people from all walks of life whose lives had been changed by Drupal. I caught up with a friend called Ryan Szrama who is a perfect example of my message, he conducted a brilliant speech at Drupalcamp about “doing well by doing good” so I’d like to share his story with you.

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