“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
― Peter F. Drucker 

Whether you love it, hate it, or feel nothing about it. Whether you use it every day or only sporadically, it’s become part of your work environment. Whatever your relationship to it is, you must surely feel something as it approaches the end of its life, and you need to decide what to do about it. It’s your Drupal 7 site, and it sunsets next year.

As someone who has worked professionally with WordPress websites for 15 or so years, the most common question I have heard from clients, coworkers, and even other colleagues in digital is some variant of: “Is WordPress secure?” 

Are we done yet?

2020 is a hard year to put behind us. Political division, a deadly global outbreak, economic roller coasters, and racial unrest remain top of mind as we round out January 2021. 

BADCamp 2020 gave me a virtual stage to share stories and insights from my life as an activist, along with insights I think could benefit anyone working in a team. I dedicated years of my life to causes that matter to me. When I transitioned into working for a Drupal web development agency as a project manager, I thought I would be starting from scratch. I was wrong. 

Occasionally, you meet people in life that you just can’t wait to show off to your friends.  Not to brag (too much), but that’s our team.  Work relationships can feel like a random puzzle of personalities locking away chemistry and collective intelligence. But when you have quality people,  the randomness is a feature not a bug. We’re privileged to share our work lives with folks so varied and inviting. We’re bonded by an expertise and love for our craft and by a desire for that craft to be in service to others.

Drupal is known for being secure and a good tool for building websites with high privacy standards. However, many websites load third party scripts, which can gather a lot of data about your website visitors with one or more third parties.

We review a browser plugin that disables third-party scripts in the following BADCamp presentation: 

Many people are newly working remotely during the pandemic and have had to drastically change how they work in the past several months. It has been stressful, but there are some silver linings in our current situation.

For instance, three years ago I made the transition to remote project management because I was drowning in a daily commute. It really changed my life to get nearly two hours a day back. Also, the flexibility was a real bonus for me, so I could walk my dog Max or take a yoga class.

Do you feel distracted by a suite of automated tools, pages of report data, and feedback on work that was designed and developed weeks and weeks ago? If your antidote achieves #WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, you may be leaving more people behind than you think.

Accessibility and digital inclusion can be easier.

Authentic digital inclusion means ensuring that every end-user can actually use a digital asset as designed and intended. Let’s start there. 

Flexbox, CSS grid, accessibility, device testing, and JavaScript performance metrics are just a few elements that are part of day-to-day front-end developer life. Front-end development is definitely more complex today than it was a few years ago. There are new frameworks, preprocessors and fast-pacing changes to the CSS specification. This means that it's harder for back-end developers to jump in and assist without knowing the tools of the trade.

For one of our wonderful clients transforming education, this moment was the stuff of nightmares. Gateway Public Schools scheduled their annual community-building family fundraiser for Saturday, March 14, two days before the Bay Area officially began sheltering in place due to the spread of COVID. So, theirs became one of the first of many nonprofit galas and fundraising events that would need to move online.