Blog

Last week the Annertech team headed to Vienna for a week of Drupal learning and sharing.

With only 5 critical issues marked as "needs work", Drupal 8 - the most brilliantly amazing responsive accessible version of Drupal to be released so far - is just around the corner (we're so excited, we forgot to put commas in that list of adjectives). Last week Acquia announced they now have Drupal 8 available on their platform for clients to start building their D8 sites on.

As Ireland's leading Drupal devlopment agency, we were thrilled that DrupalCon was coming to Dublin. So much so, we were the first Irish agency to add our name to the sponsorhip list (not to mention being the only Irish agency with people giving presenations at it). For the week of DrupalCon we'll be manning Booth 901.

At DrupalconLA, I had the opportunity to go to an Open Front End Forum, wherein people chatted about the state of the front end.

As part of our efforts to enhance our Drupal 8 knowledge, we have been running an internal competition called #D8in8 (don't worry, you didn't miss it on Twitter; it wasn't trending). Basically, each Annertechie had eight weeks to “do something” with Drupal 8 – port a module, build a theme, migrate a database, anything. After 4 weeks we all previewed our work in an internal Q&A session and tried to help break any blockers anyone had. Then, on Monday (23rd June) we premiered our “finished” products.

Annertech will be descending upon DrupalCon with (nearly) our full team of "Annertechies". So much so that there will be more Annertechies in attendance than all other people from Irish agencies combined. With that kind of showing, we thought we'd introduce ourselves and let you get to know us.

It is hard to describe my excitement at DrupalCon Dublin, my first DrupalCon indeed.

Previously we wrote about connecting your website with external systems, and specifically, the benefits of connecting your site with your CRM . As with many problems, there are many ways to approach this.

Recently, I wrote a blog post on the benefits of integrating your website and CRM, and Anthony followed up with another on the typical integration patterns you commonly see. Annertech have a lot of experience integrating Drupal websites with various CRMs, so this is the start of a new series on CRM integration where we will go into more detail on some of the more popular CRMs we’ve worked with.

During the Christmas break, I decided to give myself a challenge: increase my knowledge of app building, AngularJS, and Ionic Framework. Since I didn't know very much about any of them, that was the easy part. I then gave myself a second task - build a hybrid app for my local town that would give us home, current weather, and news tabs, with all content being derived from online data sources.