August 1, 2016

Slack Chat: Chatting with Visitors on a Drupal Site

Since we switched to Slack as the primary means of communication at work, Slack has grown to be my favorite chat application. Not only does it have a very pleasant interface, but it also offers great ways to integrate it with your application. As a matter of fact, their API is among the least restrictive ones in my experience. As a result of the joy of working the Slack API, Slack chat module was born to serve as a proof of concept for embedded Drupal-to-Slack chat functionality.

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June 28, 2016

Extending Drupal's Node.js Integration

The Node.js integration Drupal module offers an API that allows developers to add real-time push notification functionality to their modules. Real-time communication could enable features like chat, pop-up notifications, or real-time content update. Chatroom is a great example of how a module can leverage Node.js. 

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June 15, 2016

Customer Chat: Live Customer Support for Drupal

E-commerce sites are more and more commonly offering live chat for their visitors as a way of customer support. There is a wide selection of modules for Drupal that can add this functionality. However, most, if not all, I found rely on third party chat services. A while ago, I decided to build a native live chat module in connection with a project of mine. The module has been released as Customer chat.

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February 9, 2016

Drupal 8 Cheatsheet for Developers

It has been a few months since Drupal 8 was released and sites built with it are starting to crop up. I myself have had the pleasure of working with it, and more Drupal 8 projects are certainly on the horizon. From a developer's perspective, this version is substantially different from the previous one, and we will need to learn a handful of new ways of doing things. To ease the process, I have put together this list of how-tos with tasks that I commonly encounter during development. I hope you will find it helpful.

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December 15, 2015

Encrypting Sensitive Data in Drupal Node Fields

Although not typical, it is an occasional necessity to store sensitive data in a website in such a way that it is reasonably well protected from prying eyes. On a recent project, we needed to implement a method for content editors to encrypt some parts of the nodes' content.

Read the article at Urban Insight...