We all are aware of how dependent we have become on the likes of the internet. Though information is now available at your disposal, many seem to be still missing out on a lot of it due to the limitations of accessible content. Therefore, the next step towards inclusivity is making everything accessible. With laws and amendments adopted with the modern-day internet and government taking… Read more

Organizations are looking for enterprise-ready and fast sites rich in features that can be built with ease and minimum maintenance. If you are looking to elevate your content delivery across channels and want your site to fulfill the increasing demands, then look no further. Drupal, an open source CMS, is the one for you! In addition, Acquia Lightning is the latest endeavor launched to pace with… Read more

It’s the best time to be in open source and particularly to be associated with Drupal. The software development trends are sprouting out of the open source community and the tech world is experiencing all new things. In this respect, the Drupal community is eyeing on the launch of Drupal 9 scheduled for June 2020. This countdown made us think about all of you who are still on Drupal 7.  The jump… Read more

As an encoding scheme, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is designed to eliminate the need for an ad-hoc code that communicates with servers. It aims to improve the efficiency of the friction of requests that takes place between the clients and the servers.  “The recent JSON:API 2.0 stable release on January 7th, 2019 marked the start of the module's move to Drupal core.” How a client should… Read more

Drupal 8 is on the edge of transformation and it’s just a couple of months before Drupal 9 will take over. However, the version update will not eliminate the workings of Drupal 8 and instead deprecate gradually.  This brings a lot of new attention to the software and many look forward to being a part of the Drupal Community. In case you are one of them, then these are some advice for novices in… Read more

With a lot of marketing and customer satisfaction endeavors being made in the direction of improving the customer experience, technology has come to be of utmost aid. The data gathering innovations have led to a lot of revelations in the recent past. The availability of a huge amount of data has also led to remarkable improvements for the organizations optimizing it and has become an indicator of… Read more

From gated content to event enrollments, social logins and easy registration are the go-to for many sites now. The website captures data and permissions from your social accounts and gives you access to the content. There are modules primarily dedicated to integrate social accounts and run the process.  Drupal offers many modules for seamless integration of social logins for your website.  Let’… Read more

eMarketer forecasts that nearly 100 million smartphone users will be using voice assistants in 2020.  These statistics say nothing but hint towards a revolution that is underway. Customer experience for brands is being redefined with the voice interface. The targeted digital experience is increasing the usage of voice-activated technology which is leading to voice search and voice-related… Read more

Over the years, OpenSense Labs has attended many Drupal events. From Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, many new things have come and gone. But what remains constant is the love and kindness we receive every year from the community. Once again, this year’s DrupalCon Europe was the most awaited event organized in Amsterdam. The commitment and collaborative efforts of the community enthrall us with its… Read more

Analysis shows that 5% of branded content garners 90% of total consumer engagement. The Art of Content Marketing In the marketing business, everyone wants to future-proof their content and create high consumer satisfaction. The amount of significance content is getting, no wonder it has become the king of all strategies. However, it also puts a lot of pressure on the kind and format of content… Read more

Software application development is an arduous process involving a lot of forward and backward movements. When a website is built from scratch or is revamped after a long time, a process of strategies is put into play. From the new additions to the changes that are implemented on the website, the most crucial part is the deployment and release of those changes.  There are important decisions… Read more

Events like BADCamp and alike are staples for our team at OpenSense Labs. We thrive on the onsets of such camps and Drupal community affairs. Last week, our team attended the BADCamp 2019 from 2-5 October in Berkeley, California.    Engrossed in the activities from the planning and organizing of the camp to sponsoring and speaking at the sessions, we were thrilled to be a part of such an… Read more

The Drupal community is one of the largest open source communities in the world. Each year, we meet at Drupal Camps, meet-ups, and other events organized around the world.  But the biggest event, DrupalCon, happens twice every year. It is a platform where developers, designers, and marketers come together to explore the most ambitious and cutting edge case studies. It offers prospective users, a… Read more

Today, design is the USP of change. User experience has captured the market space by a greater margin. It demands and reeks of quality over quantity. A compelling and moving design can make a huge difference in the message a brand wants to convey.  However, this puts a lot of load and control on the designers of GenX. Apart from the upside that the career in UX is offering, there are some… Read more

We’re heading to Berkeley, California for BADCamp 2019! BADCamp is an annual event that celebrates open-source software and brings together a worldwide community of Drupal users, developers, marketers and content specialists to the Bay Area. The brightest of minds share their expertise, level up their skills, and make new friends in the community every year.  This year, OpenSense Labs is the… Read more

Traditional measures of development and delivery of software are taking new shapes in terms of faster, easier and powerful alternatives. While the industry is still embracing DevOps, the failures on the way are inevitable. Only on the path of innovation can we emerge with better solutions like the cloud-native approach.  The way applications are built with these new propositions can lead to… Read more

As organizations are adopting cloud infrastructure, newer technologies and their practices came along to enable the code being written frequently. It added a layer of reliability and security in continuous integration rather than building an on-premise solution.  Traditionally, this wasn’t possible with no-access to the infrastructure and thus, no feedback was available on the security measures… Read more

The product quality is of the highest importance in a B2B industry. Organizations aim for a timely and cost-efficient delivery each time. In order to achieve both, quality and time management in a software development market, there are a set of steps that need to be followed. However, the most important step of the entire cycle is testing continuously and vigorously before and during the delivery… Read more

Serverless is said to improve the security and infrastructure of your applications with their stateless nature of operations. The application is structured into small functions that enable separate units to perform their respective tasks.  However, the security threat doesn’t eliminate completely but changes the attack surface.  Since your data resides in the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)… Read more

As enterprises, we have a tendency to plan long term missions and goals that we want to achieve. Most commonly we have 5-year plans of scaling the organization in two categories: business-centric and technology-centric.  Out of these two, technological changes are difficult to manage partly because of the software development process. The best of practices, approaches, and tools are rigid in… Read more

Change is inevitable while evolution is the most crucial reality of our existence.  The competitive age of technology has totally taken over our processes and administrative executions. For every function, there’s a tool at your disposal that can refine your current practices and improve the overall landscape of the enterprise. A successful digital ecosystem of the IT department and its… Read more

Some research forecasts that cloud services will contribute nearly $500 billion to global revenues. Software development projects are already adopting the microservices approach and changing the dynamics of development. Businesses are taking this plunge from a monolithic approach to cloud environments to have a futurist intent of growth.  However, the evolution of cloud-native involves a lot of… Read more

We were introduced to Agile in the early 2000s and it proved to be a huge success bringing a completely new perspective. But its 2019 and it’s unlikely for stand-alone Agile to deliver with the same precision. The methodologies of Agile have almost become obsolete to dispatch efficiencies to your processes. Therefore, the focus has shifted to DevOps, which is disintegrating the silos between… Read more

Technology is brisk walking towards serverless and is building better infrastructures for the platform that sustains us all. The integration of serverless environments has been equally welcomed by large enterprises. As an industry, we have witnessed a huge shift in how software production is perceived. However, it is not just the architecture and the team that is changing. An overall impact is… Read more

Great production is marked with precision, on-time delivery, and reliability whereas building a product includes modernizing the approach with automation.  The adoption of CI/CD pipelines within the DevOps practices has indicated a remarkable growth for many enterprises. Being at the core of DevOps, the production cycles of CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are both said… Read more

We have often talked about how DevOps brought about changes at the operational and functional level of software development. However, the emergence of cloud computing and now cloud-native has led to another marginal shift in the processes of development and deployment. With data playing a significant role in the mechanism of operations, the feedback loop is something to watch out for. … Read more

We have already discussed how cloud computing transformed into cloud-native and DevOps practices assimilated easily into its an ecosystem. However, this amalgamation highlighted another pain point for developers: how to manage the storage of mammoth amount of data that churns out with every cycle of feedback loop?  To be precise, there are two issues that can arise from storage problems:  Data… Read more

62% feel digital transformation is a management initiative while remaining consider it as a part of optimization, says a survey with financial executives conducted by Gartner.   Imbibing from other sectors, financial institutions have recognized the potential of digital developments, solutions, and strategies that are today changing the face of the economy. However, digital ecosystems require… Read more

When we moved from the monolithic structures to serverless, organizations took a giant leap of faith and a breath of relief. But technology enthusiasts didn’t. There were serverless challenges that needed to be addressed.  With the thought that there’s always room for more improvements, they further wanted to cater to complex services that required a premium level of serverless frameworks.  In… Read more

The three leading frameworks—  AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Functions have become the talk of the serverless town by offering abilities like faster development support and lower operational costs.  Organizations are adopting serverless and so are B2B opportunists coming up with best of tools in the market with attractive platforms for serverless management.  If you are an… Read more

Deploying an application requires performing a series of actions that makes it run on-demand as a Function as a Service(FaaS). As we know, a FaaS or a serverless framework is what is established to create stages for a project to be deployed. Since organizations are still on the learning curve of serverless, it is apt to take up the concerns surrounding serverless.  In this blog, we will discuss… Read more

We have often discussed how the monolithic structures are different from the microservices in terms of architectural functionalities and security integration. As major organizations are now adopting microservices, it is crucial that they are familiar with the know-how of the systems.  The primary step of installing microservices is monitoring. From predicting failure to reporting glitches,… Read more

In our previous blog, we tracked the history and trajectory of APIs and how they came into being.  APIs define the roadmap of an application and become direct contact for sharing data. The exposure to vulnerabilities via the grained access have multiplied with time with developers creating an open architecture for sharing the functionality to meet the need for scale. The increased dependencies… Read more

Segregating services into containers for the ease of processing systems is what microservices came to be known for. They emerged from the depths of technological advancements and made a niche for themselves in the business operations. However, the act of adding extra resiliency in non-critical services didn’t prove to be fruitful for many reasons like increased complexity and cost at unnecessary… Read more

Amid the tangles of innumerable codes, serverless dawned upon the IT cultures like a boon. The serverless based operations brought together agility and performance improvements in the software development processes. It allowed developers to work on the code and take care of other functionalities. However, in the process of making things easier, challenges were inevitable and quite expected. This… Read more

Microservices made a loud and clear entry into the world of IT a couple of years ago. They announced their ability to split the monolithic applications and transformed the system into independently managed components to claim the significance they enjoy today.    It didn’t take much time for organizations to jump the bandwagon of microservices with all their architectural needs.  However, this… Read more

The software development is adopting the formula of less coding which means consistent development velocity and successful maintenance.   With no server operations, serverless applications can leverage third-party services for as much back-end functionality as possible.   From owning personal data centers to containers and microservices, the software development processes have finally moved to… Read more

The Great Blackout of 2003 that occurred in Northeast US is considered to be the worst in history. The failure in the power system occurred due to the error in millions of lines of code and the total bugs cost incurred $10 billion.  Incidents like these have marked the importance of quality assurance (QA) more prominent than ever. In this blog, we will demystify the roles and responsibilities of… Read more

The first Application Programming Interface (API) is said to be backed in the 60s, even before the personal computers, in the non-web form of libraries in operating systems. They provided information exchange between programs. Cut short to this day, modern web-APIs offer full integration with DevOps, front-end and back-end development. They are divided into two parts of the meaning: web API or… Read more

The Analytical Research Cognizance says that the global DevSecOps market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 33.7% during the forecast period 2017-2023.  Security threats are a reality of today’s digital world thriving on everyday technology. Widespread rumors and viral content has blurred the security lines. However, it is still a big concern among IT leads and teams. Organizations cannot afford… Read more

The marketing landscape vastly offers opportunities to drive business strategies that in turn influences the decision-making boundaries of an organization. Major marketers in the industry understand the importance of ease and efficiency when it comes to implementing processes and enhancing user experience. To their advantage, Drupal offers this faculty and flexibility to integrate tools that… Read more

A lot of buzz around “Decoupled Drupal” is taking place and it has quickly become ubiquitous in the industry. Drupal has won hearts by embracing the newest of technology and presenting the best of possibilities. The full separation of the structure from the content has aided the content management systems with appropriate means to accelerate the pace of innovation.  In this blog, we will address… Read more

In the realm of technology, we are making progress towards a better tomorrow. As Machine Learning/artificial intelligence has taken us one step closer to the dreams of automation, the progress in the last decade has truly been phenomenal for the IT. Adopting measures has helped frameworks deploy processes, but the failure of systems has made a mark too. However, automation is still a boon for the… Read more

Are you playing safe with the “best practice rule book”? Expect 80% chance of failure.   In this digitally accelerating era, we are always on the outlook to create new opportunities that demand inclusive technologies and efficient platforms. Among Machine Learning and Big Data, Enterprise Software is also an entrant that aims to improve enterprise productivity and output through its functional… Read more

Serverless architecture is the inevitable future for IT leads. Major players in the technology sector are moving towards cloud platforms. Allowing the developers to skip writing for a particular OS platform or hardware infrastructure, the cloud vendor can provision and manage major computing resources. But there’s a catch: it comes with the risk called ‘vendor lock-in’. It is becoming a huge… Read more

Though a challenging and time-consuming undertaking, migration is yet an important part of Drupal and plays its crucial role whether updating from Drupal 6/7 or when switching and importing data from another content management system (CMS). As most of us have gone through the process of migration at least once in our experience with Drupal, we are well aware of the problems and unforeseen… Read more

With Drupal 9 on the verge of release in June 2020, the Drupal community has about 18 months to map out a transition plan. The latest versions of Drupal in recent times saw a major breakthrough from the past versions. As the philosophy of development has changed, Drupal 9 is said to be built in Drupal 8 and the migration will be super easy this time. Released in 2011, Dries announced the end-of-… Read more

Web design is a phenomenon that took years to evolve with a shifting paradigm of design systems. In order to create manifold digital products that can be brought under one single umbrella, component-based design systems were introduced in the recent past. Being much easier and efficient to maintain, components like cards (a combination of text and buttons) and forms (a combination of inputs and… Read more

In the previous article on the microservices architecture and its principles, we learned about the architectural style of a collection of loosely-coupled services structured to improve modularity. We scrutinized the key concern areas that affected the workings of a microservices and how your team can challenge those pit stops in the security of microservices.  Continuing with the microservices,… Read more

IT teams are always wanting to build new applications enabling specific functions for the ease of processes or customers. Sometimes, in order to balance projects, they allow distributed teams to work on focused targets using reusable assets, templates, and best practices. While decentralizing and democratizing application development helps, managing security can be a task for strategizing… Read more

An instrument for value-added benefits like increased agility, speed and reduced costs along with serverless computing and dynamic provisioning, DevOps practices have been found wanting in cases requiring a secure delivery of code. However, security is a double-edged sword. On the forefront, it eliminates unsolicited elements and on the other hand, it might act as a roadblock with an extra step… Read more

Want to launch a business website? Is it in the planning stage and the design team is in a dilemma about how to make it accessible and inclusive enough? ‘Personas’ is the keyword for you!  One of the most significant design strategies to emerge from the user-centered design movement in computing in the mid-80s was Personas. This UX Design methodology is the characterization of a user who… Read more

In the 18 years-long journey, Drupal has evolved in many aspects from responsive Bartik to decoupled Drupal. With every new release, the Drupal community comes up with impressive new modules and improvements in the existing ones. However, emails haven’t seen the light of the day in the last decade from Drupal. The emails that we send out are still the same via its robust system.  Being on the… Read more

Long-awaited and much needed in the pipeline, the Layout Builder was finally launched in May 2019. With an ambition to create a content tool that can provide more power and flexibility than comparable systems, the Drupal community had been working on a super progressive visual tool for more than a year. Earlier, digital marketers had restricted templates to work with and were not satisfied with… Read more

Management of an organization in this cloud-era is often a critical aspect and the new generation of technologies seems to promise a transformation in its infrastructure. Any large scale company like Amazon, Netflix, Google or Facebook have sensitive environments and practice no tolerance policy for downtime as their systems handle hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions every day. There’… Read more

If Spotify were a Singaporean radio station, it would be the 3rd largest by weekly reach. As TNS reports, at least 2 out of 5 Singaporeans with internet connection are streaming on Spotify which is more music streaming in this market than ever before. Recently, every global brand or business is looking to enter the Asian markets and gauging its potential for them.    As a business, you are… Read more

‘75% of the world’s population doesn’t speak English!’ Every local company aims to become international and spread its wings to fly over a bigger skyline. After reaching the highest threshold in the homeland, the business can only expand by entering a bigger pool of market. And Asia is the best bet when it comes to establishing your product/service in a booming marketplace. However, going… Read more

Thanks to the new range of technologies, the working culture across platforms and boundaries has evolved and lead to the fourth industrial revolution. Fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the advancements have impacted all disciplines, economies, and industries along with the cognitive abilities of our minds.  How humans collect, organize, maintain, and process information has… Read more

Studies suggest that 90% of user abandonment of an app, website or online shopping cart can be attributed to visual bugs. This churns out from a simple fact that visual deformities are the first thing your user sees when they land on your website or app.  What affects the look of the site is the testing of your site for the introduction of bugs(regressions). When you make additions or tweak… Read more

Welcome to the world of web components. Adhering with existing web standards, web components are nothing but a collection of technologies combined to allow developers to create reusable components(bundles of HTML, CSS, JavaScript). They let us effectively describe the implementation of HTML elements that already exist for the web. The technologies are said to be the shadow DOM, <template>… Read more

DevOps is one of those concepts that everyone talks about but very few understand completely or are able to implement it. As opposed to a tool or methodology, it is more of a culture that organizations can imbibe and incorporate between development and operations within a team. It involves a high degree of collaboration across roles focusing on the business than on departmental objectives.  Few… Read more

As a company working in the B2C module where every view or like can be of potential conversion, it is essential to consider optimizing marketing tactics. The widely scattered process of marketing involves a lot of tasks that get monotonous and hinder the productivity of the marketing team. Instead of focusing on the enhancement and growth, the trivial actions consume the limited time at hand.… Read more

“The wealth of business depends on the health of workers.” Dr Maria Neira, Director, Department of Public Health and Environment, World Health Organisation Officially, we work for only 8 hours a day. But I’d believe that when you love your work, you are always working or thinking about it. And even if it’s true otherwise, I would like to ensure my health and productivity are in perfect… Read more

As diversity and inclusion goes hand-in-hand, they have become popular buzzwords among the modern companies that are trying to embrace the ever-changing and growing team culture. According to Simma Lieberman, an inclusion expert and author of 110 Ways to Champion Diversity and Build Inclusion, “In an inclusive culture, everyone has the opportunity to do their best work no matter who they are,… Read more

Accessibility as a means is a way to ensure equal access for people with disabilities(physical and virtual) as others. Non-disabled people do not face the same hurdles and challenges that a disabled person does in day-to-day life and thus, many ignore the trivial needs when addressing or working in public sector development. From the construction of ramps at sidewalk crossings to adding raised… Read more

The Internet is an infinity pool of content and your organization wants to draw only the most useful and relevant information.  With Artificial Intelligence (AI), users expect to gain access to a one-stop library where search functionality is one of the most important implementations on the website. Yet often we fail to obtain the needed information on many engines including the best of search… Read more

A recent survey by Synopsys reveals that almost 70% of corporate organizations are either contributing to or participating in open-source projects. Gaining attention in the web development industry, open source is more about proactively engaging and promoting communities around shared challenges. More than being just about publishing codes, it’s about supporting the abilities of developers to… Read more

Consistency is a key element in two things, success and web development and both go hand in hand when working on developing a website, either from scratch or revamping an existing one. What aids this consistency is the ability to recognize a pattern that is often repeated in the process and then followed for achieving a common result. Ensuring a consistent and easy to maintain a website is one… Read more

Who doesn't want their site to be a success? But are you prepared for that success? And how can you be 100% prepared for it? What all measures are to be taken to ensure it? One of the most important measures is load testing. It helps expose and identify potential performance killers and provide insight into how a site will perform in the wild under peak traffic spikes. What is Load Testing?… Read more

Change is the only constant. That’s the lesson we need to adopt when it comes to embracing Drupal 8 and migrating from Drupal 7. Since the launch of Drupal 8 in 2015, many new challenges have emerged among developers and one of them includes forking Drupal. Quoting Dries' opinion on embracing change: “The reason Drupal has been successful is because we always made big, forward-looking changes… Read more