In our last Drupal vs WordPress comparison blog post, we focused on the true cost of ownership for each open source CMS project. We spent some time in the analysis of the following diagram, depicting the incremental cost over time for a typical enterprise website project.

To summarize: our contention is that the significant hidden costs of an enterprise grade web development project are oftentimes found in the post launch customization and continuous development tasks over the total life of the project.

Symmetri Technology is the proud sponsor of the 2015 OSTraining Drupal 8 video training Kickstarter campaign. Among several other topics, one of the sponsored topics for Drupal 8 is search engine optimization. Read on and take advantage of this amazing free resources for the Drupal community.

Commercial Progression has been working with Hosco Fittings since 2013 to build an ERP integrated Drupal website platform for their modern manufacturing needs.

Initially, Hosco had met their limit with a WordPress website and needed a better platform to integrate with their inventory management systems.  The Hosco.net website was rebuilt in Drupal with a new design, Fishbowl inventory management integration, and a custom built distributor locator. View the technical case study brief in our online portfolio.

The great debates of all time; Coke vs Pepsi, Chevy vs Ford, Mac vs PC, and in the realm of Open Source content management systems it comes down to Drupal vs WordPress. The greatest debates of our time all have something in common: passionate supporters. In the world of Open Source CMS projects, Drupal vs WordPress is no less polarizing. In a sea of opinion, it can be hard to find the facts. Does it really come down to personal preference or are these CMS projects fundamentally different tools with best use scenarios unique to each?

DrupalCamp Michigan took place on Saturday July 16th, 2016 at the Michigan State University main library in Lansing Michigan. Michigan Drupal developers from across the state arrived bright and early for this day long camp of presentations and panel discussions. As a founding member of the Michigan Drupal User Group, it was Commercial Progression's distinct honor to once again sponsor this year's camp and participate in delivering session content.

Moving right along demonstrating the new Drupal 8 Object Oriented Programming structure, this next part of my blog series is going to focus on creating a custom field formatter. In part 1 of this series I demonstrated how to create a custom block in code, and in part 2 I showed how to create a custom admin form.

A quick browse around some of the manufacturing websites around the Internet reveals that few consider themselves to be digital marketers, though all of them actually are. Any business with a website is automatically entered into the ranks of digital marketers, and that should mean every business today!

This is part 2 of this blog series. Part 1 covers setting up Grunt and Browsersync, this part will focus on expanding what we created in part 1. It will focus on adding image compression to our Grunt setup. The methods used for image compression aren’t super important but setting up a watcher and using the newer Grunt plugin can be useful for many other things.

Nowhere is it more important to keep up with the latest technologies than in higher education. Today's students are internet savvy, heavy mobile users, and can spot sloppy design at 100 paces. Which schools are doing the best job on their web design? Here's a sample of the nation's best -- coast to coast.

I’m taking a break from my Drupal 8 OOP series to help further define something that has not been sufficiently spelled out in all of my D7 -> D8 research: when to use the CMI vs Features.

In part 2 of my Object Oriented Programming (OOP) for Drupal 8 series, we are going to create an administration form. If you missed part 1, I talked about how to make a simple custom block in D8, which is something we do here at Commercial Progression to brand our sites. I chose a custom block to show that the new changes in D8 aren’t so scary, and to introduce object oriented concepts and definitions with a real-world example.

As an upcoming junior at Northville High School, the idea of college admissions slowly becomes more important and frightening. Many high school students across the U.S. worry about what they need to achieve in order for a college to accept them. Some may apply for a part-time job or internship in their field of interest. These employment opportunities are an appealing opportunity to get on the job experience. Commercial Progression appealed to me as a website design company that could offer real marketing and business experience to ambitious, hard working people.

About a year ago, Chris pointed the dev team toward a cool new module called Paragraphs. Since then, we've played with it on test sites, rolled it for use on sites for clients (including some big ones!), and tried combinations of bundles and fields that push the limits.

Object Oriented Programming (or OOP for short) organizes code into objects with properties and behaviors. Drupal developers are comfortable with the paradigm of procedural programming, which uses functions to pass in data, manipulate it, and return something. In the following post, I will help explain to tech-savvy developers how OOP will look and feel in Drupal 8.

By now you have probably seen the news on the latest “geddon” to strike technology.  The changes starting on April 21st to Google’s ranking algorithm have already been given the moniker by some, “Mobilegeddon”.  

Efficiency feels good.

To some extent, the joy of efficiency (or at least de-cluttering) is illusory. The pursuit of efficiencies may only make sense over long time scales. Making a decision whether to optimize is fraught.

Commercial Progression was a proud sponsor of the 2015 DrupalCamp Michigan. With over 100 in attendance, 11 formal presentations, and 1 excellent after party... the survey results are in and the community agreed that this was the best DrupalCamp Michigan to date. In addition to our general sponsorship, the Commercial Progresssion team represented well with 3 presentations covering all Drupal skill levels. This year's media package also included a complete video capture of each session, which you can find on our youtube channel.

As responsive design becomes more important with each passing day; it becomes essential to find an efficient way to test your site on as many screen sizes as possible. In the past, responsive design testing meant running around the office and borrowing as many devices as you could. Loading up the site on each and testing individually.

Commercial Progression has a long history of supporting the Michigan Drupal development community.  We believe it is important to have regular opportunities for our community to come together, share information, and encourage the open source Drupal project.

Nothing is worse than having your website black flagged or blocked by Google. Businesses of all sizes rely on Google search traffic to acquire new leads, offer products and services, and generate sales or donations.hLet’s consider the statistics-- almost 64% of internet search traffic is fueled by organic search and current search rankings give Google a market share of close to 68% (upwards of 80% for mobile search). This is effectively a search monopoly. Follow these 10 steps to ensure your website is not reported as "hacked" in Google search results.

At Commercial Progression we take a proactive stance in the evaluation and adoptions of new web design standards.  Responsive web design has arrived.  The conversation has shifted.  We no longer question if a site should be designed responsively; responsive design is the new standard.  Technically this translates to a host of best practices for Drupal theming, user experience, and information architecture.

In a previous blog post, I went over how to track on-page events using Google Analytics. That post included a helper function called ga_event() that wrapped Google Analytics' method:

Whether seeking to increase enrollment of prospective students, improve efficiency for current students, and/or communicate effectively and generate development funds from alumni, Higher Education organizations must have a strong, well-organized website and online presence to meet the growing demands of the next generation of students, parents, alumni and faculty.

I recently took the Acquia Certified Developer exam and I’m proud to say that I passed by a significant margin. While it was by no means easy, it shouldn’t be insanely difficult for anyone who is a competent, experienced Drupal developer to get a passing score.

If you have a whole bunch of tabs open, it's often difficult to tell which tabs are which. You might have three different versions of the same site open, and the only way to tell the difference is to click into the tab and look at the address bar.

Well that simply won't do! There's got to be a better way. Preferably an automated system built on an open source foundation. That's where Development Favicon comes in.

Late last year I got an interesting email. It was an invitation to speak at the online precursor to the American Library Association's midwinter conference, predicated on my status as the first person to implement responsive design for a library website. This wasn't something I had really thought about, but I suppose it's true.

hook_menu is the most-used Drupal core hook; it's well-documented, and manytutorialsareavailable.

This isn't documentation or a tutorial. What I wanted to know was: how much are each of the plentiful [Drupal 7] API options used? So I set about to collect data, using core implementations of hook_menu(), as well as those from the contrib modules tracked by DrupalContrib.

Whenever we get a project that requires creating some sort of visual map I raise my hand and yell “Pick me, pick me!”. There is something about a map that makes me feel all warm and cozy. Some maps remind us of how big the world is. Some maps are just fun to pan and zoom. Other maps represent our data far better than plain text could do alone.

Jacob Corvidae and the team at EcoWorks had a vision: design a system to help people achieve their green goals for their home and community in a simple, fun way.  We worked with them to help realize that vision.