Evolving Web Blog

Evolving Web is Moving!
Posted June 24th, 2010 by Suzanne Kennedy

It's true, Evolving Web is moving to a new office. But luckily, it's only just downstairs from our current one. We're excited about our fancy new space. Hopefully it'll give us a chance to put some love into our work environment, and maybe even buy that foosball table we've all been wishing for.

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Apache Solr and Multilingual Theming at Drupal Design Camp
Posted June 19th, 2010 by Suzanne Kennedy

Evolving Web had an awesome time at Drupal Design Camp this weekend. It was a great success with hundreds of Drupal designers, themers, developers, and site builders in attendance from the northeastern states and beyond.

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Goodbye Webchick, We'll Miss You
Posted May 18th, 2010 by Alex Dergachev

The Montreal Drupal community got together last week for a special kind of meetup. We met on an outdoor terrace to say goodbye to Angie Byron. Angie (aka Webchick) is a rockstar Drupal developer and community builder who has been an integral part of the Drupal community in Montreal as long as there has been a Drupal community in Montreal.

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Creating Dynamic Tabbed Regions in Drupal
Posted May 18th, 2010 by Suzanne Kennedy

Building websites that are content-rich often means creating a user interface that displays lots of content on a single page. Sometimes it's hard to fit it all. Many designers turn to tabs to fit in all the content. In Drupal, there are several ways to implement tabs.

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McGill University Health Centre Case Study
Posted May 6th, 2010 by Suzanne Kennedy

The McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), is one of the most comprehensive university health centres in North America. It includes a network of five major hospitals and is both a patient and research-oriented organization.

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Controlling Your Cloud with Puppet
Posted April 28th, 2010 by Jeff Wallace

If you haven't noticed already, we are getting pretty excited about cloud computing at Evolving Web. Our latest deployment included 5 Rackspace Cloud servers being controlled by Puppet and provided the client with the ability to scale up and down easily depending on traffic. Scaling up involves spinning up a new server instance and configuring it for its role. But what is the best way to configure it? By hand? By scripts? By images? Well technically any of those methods will work, but I want to tell you about one you may not have heard of.

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Drupal in the Cloud: Deploying on Rackspace with Nginx and Boost
Posted April 26th, 2010 by Jonathan VK

Lately, we have been involved in a project where our clients needed a site capable of serving a large number of anonymous users and a reasonable number of concurrently logged in users. In order to reach these goals, we looked to the cloud. I'll give a quick overview of our configuration using nginx, boost, apc, cacherouter, memcached, and glusterfs. This has allowed us to scale up considerably.

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Apache Solr Mastery: Adding custom search paths with hook_menu
Posted April 20th, 2010 by James McKinney

Recently, I've been working on the search interface for McGill University's course catalog. The University wants to allow students to browse courses at friendly URLs like:

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Building Usable Solr Search Filters for Large Drupal Websites
Posted February 28th, 2010 by Suzanne Kennedy

Creating a search interface for a website with a lot of content requires providing a variety of filters. Sometimes those filters can take on a life of their own, providing hundreds of options for users to filter by. While building widgets for our Drupal/Solr projects, we looked at a couple non-Drupal examples of search interfaces for content-heavy websites.

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Using Real Content: Data Import
Posted January 11th, 2010 by Suzanne Kennedy

Sometimes, we find issues with content that are not anticipated by the planning process since they don't show up by looking at sample content or discussing the major use cases of the site. By looking at real content during the data import phase, these issues can be dealt with at an early stage in the development process.

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