Home » Insights » How to

Category: How to

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

Tagged: , ,
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

Tagged: , , , , ,
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

Tagged: ,
bootstrap columns grid

Creating Bootstrap columns in Drupal panels with mixins

        Filed under: Drupal, Front-End Development, How to

In terms of Front-End Drupal gives you several ways to achieve your goals, you can use Views, Panels, Display Suite, Templates overrides, Custom modules, etc., so sometimes it’s a bit difficult to define the best (or the worst) way to do something. A couple of years ago, we created a theme for a Drupal 7 … Continued

Tagged: , , , ,

How to Plan a Deployment to Production as a Project Manager

        Filed under: Agile development, How to, Project Management, Web Development

In the last month, I had to be on top of four different deployments, and after four smooth (but not issue-free) runs, I’ve decided to write down a list of things I keep in mind for future deployments. Maybe that way, the deployments will finally be issue-free. So here are a few things to keep … Continued

Tagged: ,

How to test email notifications in Drupal projects

        Filed under: Agile development, Drupal, How to

Testing email notifications is often challenging because we don’t want to send out testing emails from development and local environments and confuse users. In addition to that, you may want to test headers, subject, body and the overall formatting applied to the information in the message and ensure that it’s readable. There is an easy … Continued

Tagged: , , ,
scratch head confusion usability

Usability applies to everything we see, touch, or do

        Filed under: How to, Usability

In web design and development, we have this concept called, “Usability,” which means that we strive to make our websites and user experiences (UX) more intuitive and obvious to our intended target audiences.  Once you become cognizant of usability, you start noticing it everywhere. When I land in a new airport and rent an unfamiliar … Continued

Tagged: ,

Why Toggl time tracker is better than JIRA tempo tracker

        Filed under: How to, Internet trends, Project Management, Technology

On my last blog post, I wrote about Why I Stopped Using the JIRA Tempo Tracker and how I instead started using toggl. And as promised, here’s my review on toggl after using it for one month. As I mentioned before, I started using toggl after Tempo’s tracker was updated and no longer omnipresent. Toggl … Continued

Tagged: , ,

Why I Stopped Using the JIRA Tempo Tracker

        Filed under: How to, Internet trends, Project Management, Technology, Things That Suck

Recently JIRA has been making a lot of changes and improvements, and going through them has been a little hard (like getting kicked out of your account and being forced to create a new one). Eventually, I got used to the changes, until Tempo tracker got “upgraded”. Tempo tracker was never the prettiest or smartest … Continued

Tagged: , ,

Alternative notifications for Entityforms in Drupal 7

        Filed under: Agile development, Drupal, How to

Entityform already offers a way to send notifications: by integrating with Rules module you can configure your notifications for administrators or other recipients, some of those may be inputs in the form itself, so this is perfect for most of cases, ah and if you need to migrate the form from one environment to another … Continued

Tagged: , ,
drupal 7 logo

How to Get URL Parameters in Drupal 7

        Filed under: Agile development, Drupal, How to

I’ve seen the horror! (allow me some drama here) I’ve seen code in Drupal projects, trying to get parameters from URLs in this way: $params = $_GET; or $some_var = $_GET[‘some_var’] Drupal has some functions to deal with parameters coming from a URL. Now, let me be honest, it’s not more secure if you use … Continued

Tagged: , ,