The Cloud
What does Metal Toad do?
Welcome to Metal Toad! So you’ve been hired at this cool tech company cal
TOPIC
Drupal
The Cloud
How to make a website
22 years ago, I worked at a company called LACityWeb.com. The company failed in the year 2000, but back in 1999 we were selling websites. The sales...
The Cloud
How to Host a Website on AWS in 5 Minutes
For most casual website owners, it’s often easy to simply use a hosting provider with built in support for their CMS and integrating analytics....
The Cloud
How often should I update my website?
The short answer the the question: how often should I update my website? is every 3 to 5 years. The much longer answer starts with: it depends.
The Cloud
The 5 Core Elements of Technical Advising
I recently had a conversation with someone who was looking for some advice on selecting a technical advisor for their team, and she had some great...
The Cloud
How Cloud became the most important buzzword in business
Cloud is not the first (and probably not the last) disruptor to business via software. Over the past 50 years or so there have been four major epochs...
The Cloud
Building a AWS Headless CMS
Over the past several years, Metal Toad has launched several successful cloud-first web and mobile applications, often with hardware components. With...
The Cloud
Saas vs. Cloud
Discover how the Cloud has disrupted the software industry, from the rise of Open Source to the emergence of SaaS applications. Learn why the Cloud...
The Cloud
Docker Containers & Clustering/Orchestration
The Big Picture The aim of this blog post isn’t to get into the nitty gritty how to build and run a containerized app on your favorite cloud provider...
The Cloud
Hackathon 2018: Kegerator 2—Revenge of the Flowmeter
If you’re going to spend two long days frying a Raspberry Pi and fiddling with (very) finicky electronics, is there any better way to do it than...
Drupal
Drupal 8: Consumption of a Third-Party API
For a recent project, we were tasked to consume the client's internal data from a custom API. Now, this scenario was lucky for us, the API provides a...
Business
Programmatically Importing Drupal 8 Field Configurations
Sometimes during development, a chicken and egg situation happens when business logic intersects with Drupal's mechanisms. For instance, a custom...
Artificial Intelligence
Sluggish Drupal 8 Adoption Lags Even D6
We're just past the second anniversary of 8.0.0. To see how D8 is doing compared to prior releases, we put together the chart above, based on...
AWS
Drupal 8 Entity API cheat sheet
Wait, is it "$node->title" or "$node->title->value"? How do I write an EntityQuery again? Yeah, I can never remember, either.
Drupal
Drupal 8: Migrating data from JSON files
The beauty of Drupal 8's built-in Migrate module is its flexibility. Lots of people will likely use it to migrate their Drupal 6 or 7 sites, but...
Artificial Intelligence
Comparing Drupal, Symfony, and Craft CMS Frameworks
With so many options available out there, it can be confusing to choose the right CMS for your business.
Artificial Intelligence
Secrets to Project Happiness Using Git
I have worked with dozens of projects over my career, on platforms ranging from Drupal to Yii to Django to AngularJS
Artificial Intelligence
How Much Does a Website Cost? 2 of 3: Rebuilding
In my last article, I addressed the age old question "how much does a website cost?" from the stand
Business
Extending Drupal 8 Fields That Contain Data
Data protection is one of the primary advantages of Drupal, but sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you might need to modify a field to...
Artificial Intelligence
Launching Meyer Memorial Trust in Drupal 8
We are proud to announce the launch of the new Meyer Memorial Trust site!
Artificial Intelligence
Visual Regression Testing with BackstopJS
Fun fact: The creator of BackstopJS has referenced this blog post as the recommended tutorial for BackstopJS v2!
Agile
Evolving With Our Clients: The Great Scrumban Experiment
Identifying the need for change In early 2016, Metal Toad fully adopted Agile Scrum methodology.
Interviews
Metal Toad’s Process to a Brand Refresh
Why a Brand Refresh? In early November 2015, Metal Toad began the wo
Business
Avoiding Drupal 7 #AJAX Pitfalls
Rather than provide a basic how-to tutorial on Drupal's form API #AJAX functionality, I decided to address a few pitfalls that often frustrate...
Artificial Intelligence
URL Routing for a Decoupled App, with Angular 2 and Django
Lately, I have worked on a few projects where a single-page Angular app is contained within a site built on a server-side framework like Django.