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In today's world, it's more important than ever to create content that is inclusive and accessible to people with different disabilities, including vision, hearing, and motor impairments. That means ensuring your site and your content is compliant.

But let's be real – accessibility can be a daunting topic, especially if you're not sure where to start. But if you need a web accessibility consultant, we're here to help!

In a recent project we needed to make use of both public and private files in Drupal 9.  We want to make sure that anonymous visitors can't get access to the private files, even if they enter the URL for it directly into the browser (bypassing Drupal).

Of course, it's rare that someone might be able to guess a path/filename exactly, but what if someone with access to the file emails a link for that file to someone else?  How do we make sure only logged-in authorized users have access?

This is a follow-up post to my earlier article on theming D8 with Foundation 5.. a lot of the basics of Drupal theming are shown there.  Here I just want to document what I'm doing on a new project, where this time I'm using Foundation 6.  So I'll note the differences I see. 

These paintings of rivers and rocks were actually all painted by me (Tom Wheeler).  I have a sort-of dual personality going on, and try to spend some time every day drawing or painting.  

You can check out what I'm doing on the art side of things at http://art.wheelercreek.com.  

This example demonstrates how to use AJAX (jQuery flavor) with PHP.  We take a simple database "fakecompany" with a single table "people".  People have names and phone numbers.  The SQL export for this database is included in the .zip file (below). 

The HTML initially uses AJAX to load in all the people and their phone numbers, using jquery.load(). 

I've had some pretty good results in my SEO efforts with some of my domains.  SEO isn't my primary business, but I have some knowledge about basic good practices that can help.   For example, one of my sites: Foodhero.org web site (a recipe site) is currently at #3 for "fast fun recipes", and #4 for "fun recipes" on Google.  We're at #7 for "fast healthy recipes" -- not too bad.  I'm competing with larger sites like The Food Network, Rachel Ray, and allRecipes.com.  

A lot of students get stuck trying to figure out even just how to start with creating a custom theme for Drupal.  Totally understandable.. I started with Drupal many years ago but I remember being stuck a lot!  So here's my tips for you to get you started, based on my own experience with building tons of Drupal sites.. Hope this helps you!

Drupal ships with a user login block, but it's a little heavy for a lot of projects I work on.  It includes the login form itself, and that's kind of a pain to style and might not have been considered in the initial design phase of the project.  What I often need is just a more simple "Hello [user], Logout" link, or - in the case that user hasn't logged in yet, a simple "Login or Create Account" link.