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Anoop John

[Drupal] How long would it take to upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7?

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Drupal Solution | 5 min read
With Drupal 8 in the works a lot of Drupal 6 sites are currently upgrading to Drupal 7. We get quite a few queries on Drupal upgrades and almost everybody asks for a fixed price estimate for the process. In theory Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 upgrade process is an automated process (except for the upgrade of theme and custom modules) and all you have to do is to take the site through a set of standard steps for the upgrade. However upgrades don't always work like that.
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[drupal] How long would it take to run Drupal updates, contributed module updates and Drupal security updates?

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Drupal Technical | 4 min read
A lot of clients come to us asking for running Drupal updates on their sites. However almost everybody asks for a fixed price estimate for the process. There is however a challenge in this because updates would mostly run without problems but you might run into a problem or two once in a while. We have a standard and safe process of running Drupal updates but the safe practices followed in the process would take considerably longer time than blindly running updates on the live site.
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[Drupal] How do you know if your Drupal site is built right?

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Application Development | 3 min read
Drupal is a powerful portal framework and a content management system. However the power of the system can really be tapped into if the site is built right. Whether a Drupal site is built right or not is not something that may not be very obvious in all scenarios or for an untrained eye. There are definitely implications for not building Drupal right but the implications may not be very evident always. So how do you know if a Drupal site is built right?
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[Drupal] How do you find if a developer is a good Drupal developer?

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Application Development | 4 min read
Finding drupal developers in the market is rather easy but how do you know if the developer you are hiring is a good Drupal developer? Unless you are a good developer yourself it is going to be difficult to evaluate the development capabilities of a developer you are planning to hire. Unless you are a good drupal developer you will find it difficult to evaluate the knowledge of the Developer in Drupal. However this is not that bleak as it looks. There are some simple mechanisms you can use to find out how good a Developer you are dealing with is.
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[drupal] How do you evaluate the quality of build of your Drupal website?

Fix Certbot Auto-Renew Error in Ubuntu
Application Development | 5 min read
Quite often we get support requests from clients who believe that 95% of their site is working fine but for a few lingering issues which their previous developers could not fix / complete. In most cases the lingering issues are more symptoms of bad builds than pending issues. In such cases we usually insist on a full Drupal review and audit of the site before we work on the issues. The client would normally be shocked to know that there were a lot of things on the site that were not done right but it would be too late for any corrections by the original developers. So how do you know if your Drupal site is built right?
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How do you pronounce Zyxware?

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Zyxware | 1 min read
Zyxware is pronounced as "Sixware" In phonetic notation this is written as zikswe(ə)r The name was coined by using three common alphabets used for naming variables in mathematics - x, y and z - and merging them with the 'ware' in software or hardware creating a new word that rhymes with both software and hardware. The letters x, y and z are also important in mathematics as the names of the three axes used to define 3 dimensional space.
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[Drupal] Drupal 7 image field support for TIFF images

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Drupal Technical | 2 min read
In Drupal 7 Image module offers an image field which makes available an image widget for file fields that can be added to content types. This will allow for upload of images to the image field which can then later be processed by the image module and be presented using the different image styles as configured. This means that image module should have the ability to process files uploaded using this field.
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A free Google App for managing tasks among a group of closely coordinated individuals with email reminders

Patience, empathy, consistency, clear communication, adaptability, knowledge, and a strong work ethic are all qualities that your customer support person should possess.
Productivity Tools | 5 min read
Here is another Free Google App script from Zyxware. This is a simple Google Spreadsheet based Google App which we had developed in-house to manage tasks that are coordinated closely by our Project Management Office. We are releasing this utility as Free Software under a GPL license. We use Redmine as our project management system and manage all the project related tasks through redmine. However there would still have to have management / supervision effort put in to manage and review the execution of these tasks, groups of tasks and the project as a whole. This app helps us in taking care of that.
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