Insights

Configuration management tools for Drupal projects

        Filed under: Agile development, Drupal, Web Development

Configuration management is a systems engineering process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product’s performance, functional, and attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. The configuration management process is used to manage changes throughout the system lifecycle of complex systems, and it’s a requirement  for FISMA compliance. These are the … Continued

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How to migrate blogs between WordPress sites using WP-CLI

        Filed under: Agile development, WordPress

For several reasons, the need to migrate blog posts from one site to another may arise. Maybe you changed your domain as part of your marketing strategy or you have several sites and want to centralize the blog for all of them. Whatever the reason may be, the procedure is simple. First of all, we … Continued

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Humility Increases the Value of Agile Retrospectives

        Filed under: Agile development, Government websites

One of the most valuable rituals of agile develpment is the retrospective. The retrospective is an event that occurs after the release of completed work or between a set of work sprints where everybody stops, takes measure of what has been completed, celebrates what is working well with the team, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, identifies what … Continued

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User Stories: the importance of knowing the WHY

        Filed under: Agile development, How to, Project Management

In the last few days I’ve been reminded of the importance of writing user stories for requirements, and more importantly, on teaching our clients of their importance. In November of last year, the client started creating a list of requirements on a spreadsheet.  Since they are not completely trained in Agile, the list of requirements … Continued

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Drupal logo on blue background

Keeping configuration settings up to date in Drupal projects

        Filed under: Drupal, How to, Web Development

Managing configuration settings such as user permissions and system variables is very critical in any web application. In Drupal environments we use these two mechanisms to version those settings and replicate changes automatically across different environments: Drupal features Features is a Drupal module that offers the following benefits: Allow saving settings in code and keeping … Continued

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pruning clients

How to fire a client: Why pruning clients is a good thing

        Filed under: Startups

Perhaps “fire a client” were not the best choice of words for this headline. “How to end a business relationship with grace,” is probably the more tactful and preferred headline. Business relationships are intended to be mutually beneficial. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes, people find themselves in situations where it is not a win-win, … Continued

Agileana to Partner with Justworks

        Filed under: Human Resources

Agileana, LC recently partnered with Justworks, Inc. to provide our employees with employee benefits, payroll, compliance and HR tools. Justworks is an IRS-certified PEO (professional employer organization). Why a PEO? We were initially interested in a partnership with a PEO to help us offer competitive benefits to retain and recruit new team members. Because of … Continued

Blake Newman

10 year work anniversary: Blake Newman, inQbation

        Filed under: Startups

Ten years ago, I was living in Santa Monica, California and working 2 blocks from the beach. Every other person who came into my office seeking a website was either associated with Hollywood or was an aspiring entrepreneur wanting to start up a new tech company.  But, they only had a budget of $2,500.  Talk … Continued

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The Importance of Setting Client Expectations (in Agile)

        Filed under: Agile development, Project Management

You start your work day as usual. Pour yourself some freshly-brewed coffee, sit down at your computer, and check your emails. You see a new one from your most recent client, about the last sprint you just completed for them. You open it and your eyes are greeted by the following: “Great job on the … Continued

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How to hide Field Groups in Drupal 7, the right way

How to hide Field Groups in Drupal 7, the right way

        Filed under: Drupal, How to

There are times when you need to manipulate a form via hook_form_alter in Drupal, and you may need to hide/show fields depending on some criteria. You can hide a single field using something like $form[‘field_name’][‘#type’] = ‘hidden’;. But, what if you’re using the ‘field_group’ module and you want to hide a whole group? Well, you … Continued

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closeup of a drawn mockup

The actual cost of buying a commercial WordPress theme

        Filed under: Web Design, Web Development, WordPress

WordPress out of the box comes with a pretty decent theme from the security and technical standpoint, but it works for a blog site, not for a marketing site. There are many websites out there that sell WordPress themes with wonderful design and features. They promise custom home pages, product/service pages, integration with other services … Continued

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Luis Cuellar lucuella

Work Anniversary: Luis Cuellar, 10 years at inQbation, Agileana

        Filed under: Jobs, Startups

In November 2007, I was seeking a tech co-founder who was well-connected with web designers and developers, who could work as a project manager, and help me launch inQbation, which ultimately spawned Agileana – also a web design and development company in the DC metro area. I could not have picked a better co-founder. Particularly … Continued

How to setup billing threshold alerts on AWS?

        Filed under: Amazon Web Services(AWS)

A common concern for a lot of clients using AWS as their hosting solution provider, is the variable invoices they get each month. Most organization appropriate fixed budget for hosting and this may impact their planning adversely. Keeping an eye on the budget manually is both cumbersome and prone to human error. So is their … Continued