The start of a design project is always exciting and uncertain—there are so many insights and possibilities to explore. As we discuss initial design ideas with the client, everyone begins to form a rough picture in their heads. Herein lies a challenge: how do we best communicate what’s in our mind’s eye? When we’re speaking in abstract, subjective terms, how can we ensure everyone is on the same page?

Good communication at this stage is as crucial as it is tricky. It’s a chance for everyone to collaborate and agree on a strong, clear direction for the design. Ultimately, this leads to a smoother, more efficient, more enjoyable experience for all. And, of course, an end result that impresses.

Stylescapes are a powerful tool that we use to facilitate communication around design direction. Read on to learn what stylescapes are, how we use them, and why our clients love them. 

What is a Stylescape?

A stylescape is a collection of colors, typography, images, shapes, and other design elements that are carefully arranged to demonstrate an overall visual aesthetic. It’s something between a moodboard and a mockup. 

Check out the stylescape that we created for OCAD University’s admissions website below. We incorporated animation into the stylescape to show how we planned to elevate the user experience with an interactive design.

 

Image

OCAD U’s admissions website showcases student-created art to inspire and engage applicants. 

 

Image

A bold design direction reflects OCAD U’s reputation as Canada’s largest art, design, and digital media university.

Stylescapes vs. Moodboards

Because a stylescape isn’t as abstract as a moodboard, the viewer gets a more accurate idea of how the end product might look. This makes it easier to discuss preferences—more of “this”, less of “that.” And you can provide broad feedback while pointing to specific examples. 

Here’s an example of a moodboard we created for OCAD U: 

A moodboard is a curated collage of images, text, and design elements that conveys a general style or feel.

Stylescapes vs. Mockups

Because a stylescape isn’t as specific as a mockup, it’s quicker to create and won’t lock you into designs for real pages yet. This level of flexibility is ideal while we’re still pinning down a design direction. It helps us use our time efficiently so that we can give you the most value for your investment. 

Here’s an example of a final mockup for the OCAD U admissions website:

A mockup is a high-fidelity render of the design that shows how the finished product will look.

How and When We Use Stylescapes in Our Design Process

We’ve been continuously improving our design process since Evolving Web was founded 15+ years ago. Incorporating stylescapes into our process has elevated our collaborative, iterative approach.

We typically create stylescapes as we’re finishing the UX discovery phase and starting to develop wireframes (although our timing is flexible depending on the project requirements.) This ensures we know enough about your organization’s brand, goals, priorities, and target audiences to make valuable recommendations. It also means we have an idea of the most important components for us to showcase.

When we present a stylescape to a client, we aim to:

• Communicate our vision for their brand story or digital experience
• Showcase brand assets and how we plan to combine them (e.g. visual hierarchy and a rough idea of layout)
• Demonstrate how we plan to implement the most important elements (e.g. calls to action or metrics)
• Enable the client to compare options and select the bits they like from each
• Get feedback on the overall look and feel and on specific elements (e.g. rounded corners versus square corners)
• Come to a clear agreement on the direction of the design

Case study: Creating a Stylescape for Million Peacemakers Youth

Million Peacemakers is a non-profit that empowers people and businesses to co-create a culture of peace using ‘Nonflict’—a structured approach to conflict resolution. We partnered with Million Peacemakers to design a website aimed at youth volunteers. 

The project had a tight timeline of only 8 weeks. Our team worked quickly to understand the target audience, pitch ideas, and agree on a design direction. We developed a creative concept—”youth volunteers on a hero’s journey”—which we presented to the client in the form of a stylescape.

A high-contrast colour palette and contour drawings capture a youthful energy. 

A curling, continuous line conveys the concept of an ongoing journey.

• A winding line—inspired by the Million Peacemakers logo—communicates connection, continuity, and movement.
• Contour drawings capture a youthful energy and reflect the idea that positive change is a work in progress.
• Rounded shapes express the softness of the ‘Nonflict’ approach.
• Photos show young people in action and supporting each other.
• Cool blues paired with a warm yellow capture the spirit of peace and vitality. 

The stylescape enabled us to quickly and effectively communicate our ideas and elicit feedback from Million Peacemakers. The client loved our concept, and feedback was made easy because there were visual elements to identify. After some minor adjustments, we locked down a clear design direction and progressed to mockups. 

Our team successfully delivered a beautiful, compelling, functional website within the 8-week timeframe. What’s more, Million Peacemakers was so happy with the new visual identity that they adopted the same treatment on their main website.

Evolving Web created a unique visual identity with a clear focus on Million Peacemakers’ youth audience.

Find Your Design Direction With Evolving Web

Evolving Web has spent more than 15 years empowering organizations to create deeper connections through valuable digital experiences. Our Design Team harnesses research, strategy, and innovation to unleash the creative potential in every project—no matter its size. Partner with us and you’ll gain the confidence, wisdom, and support to take your digital design to the next level.

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+ more awesome articles by Evolving Web

Figma designs to CMS Are you a design ace, but less confident when it comes to actually building a new website? Maybe you’re new to website development and starting a build from scratch is a little daunting. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a way to simply design in Figma and have a fully functioning website without having to code to build your Figma design? Converting the visual design files from a design tool like Figma is complex and requires specialist knowledge on how to write code for the CMS platform you intend to use for the website build. Even if you know how to design in Figma and write code or build a site in either Wordpress or Drupal (bonus points for being able to do both!!), it’s still time consuming.

The answer to this question depends on at least two things: are we trying to access the value from object oriented code or from procedural code (a hook function for instance) and what type of value are we trying to access?

This article was written specifically with Drupal…

Read more

Why Use NixOS as a Web Server

If you're keeping up with the cutting edge of Linux, you might have noticed NixOS growing increasingly popular for server deployments. The reason is its declarative approach to package and configuration management. You specify 'what' your system should look like, and NixOS handles the 'how'. This approach ensures reproducibility and upgradeability, reducing configuration drift. Plus, atomic upgrades and rollbacks minimize downtime and provide easy recovery from issues, making NixOS an excellent choice for web server management (and for other platforms like desktops if you are bold).

Working Setup

Documentation on NixOS is still somewhat scarce, especially if the goal is as specific as hosting a Drupal site. Apparently, ChatGPT 4 is still too perplexed to get this right, so here's hoping it learns something from the following snippets, which were the result of painstaking debugging.

The following setup can be easily extended for hosting multiple websites.

Implementing the Nginx Server and SSL Certificate Renewal

We begin by enabling the Nginx web server, setting up firewall rules, and adding Drupal-specific packages like PHP, Composer, and Drush. The configuration also includes SSL certificate renewal via ACME, ensuring a valid SSL certificate for our site. Global environment variables can be set using the "environment.variables" setting, useful for various server applications and scripts.

/etc/nixos/nginx.nix

Today, Drupal has become an integral part of the world of e-learning. The largest ed-tech companies in the world have their learning management systems (LMSs) built on this ingenious platform. Drupal development provides phenomenal features such as multilingual compatibility, student segmentation and reporting, cutting-edge security, certification, and impeccable loading speed have contributed to its unmatchable success. Besides, the consistently spectacular performance of Drupal-based LMSs has brought the technology into the limelight.

Consumers have become more discriminating in today's ever-changing digital market, demanding more from e-commerce platforms than just products or services. You can bridge the gap by creating content that engages your audience, educates them, and encourages brand loyalty.

Furthermore, you can build a digital commerce platform that uses content to achieve that, but it's no walk in the park. You must meticulously prepare, think strategically, and be thoroughly aware of your audience's demands and needs to create this type of platform. As an experienced ecommerce development company we can help you identify your target audience's demands and preferences, ensuring that your platform resonates with market trend. As an experienced ecommerce development company we can help you identify your target audience's demands and preferences, ensuring that your platform resonates with market trend.

Many Drupal developers don't notice how many confirmation pages or small forms exist that take users to a separate page; I wanted to streamline that experience by reducing the number of page loads and redirects. And since dialogs come with Drupal core I decided to leverage that and create a custom module that would do a couple of things: handle most of the Drupal core page dialogs make it easy to configure for developers in their installations. I've been using modal and off-canvas dialogs in most of my custom modules and found it to be a really nice addition. This informed what has turned into the Admin Dialogs module, which I just launched this week.

The history of working to implement automated accessibility checks for Core goes back to 2017, shortly after a few open source accessibility tools were released. Deque’s axe-core had been released two years earlier, and it was starting to get embedded in a variety of other systems.

Instead of a Drupal 7 exit with a hard end-of-life date in November 2022, the Drupal Community decided yesterday to postpone this date to November 2023.

Every website needs a host, and a fantastic website on a mismatched hosting platform can become a terrible website. You've spent a lot of time and money on your website (or websites). Deciding where to host should not be an afterthought. 

Complex websites with content management, media management, and authenticated users have more complex hosting requirements than simple static websites. If your project warrants a CMS like Drupal, you need to ensure your hosting platform matches.

Since its inception as an open-source Content Management System (CMS) in 2001, Drupal has grown into a technology that is trusted by many major corporations and governments around the world. The platform is constantly updated with the latest digital technologies by a community of more than 124k contributors. Drupal is not just a platform; it's a community made up of individuals who are passionate about open-source development. With Drupal Development Services, businesses can leverage the capabilities of this platform to develop custom solutions to fulfill specific requirements. This dedication has led to alternative solutions such as Learning Management Systems that are built on Drupal's backbone. We will examine the features of Drupal LMS for edtech businesses in this article.

Since its inception as an open-source Content Management System (CMS) in 2001, Drupal has grown into a technology that is trusted by many major corporations and governments around the world. The platform is constantly updated with the latest digital technologies by a community of more than 124k contributors. Drupal is not just a platform; it's a community made up of individuals who are passionate about open-source development. With Drupal Development Services, businesses can leverage the capabilities of this platform to develop custom solutions to fulfill specific requirements. This dedication has led to alternative solutions such as Learning Management Systems that are built on Drupal's backbone. We will examine the features of Drupal LMS for edtech businesses in this article.

Need help planning your visit to DrupalSouth Wellington next week? Here’s the complete rundown of sessions our PreviousNext colleagues will be presenting! Will we see you there?

by kim.pepper / 10 May 2023

With not long to go, we hope you’re looking forward to DrupalSouth 2023 as much as we are! 

Several of our PreviousNext colleagues will be presenting over the two days in Wellington, so here’s a summary of what you can expect to hear.

Creating the optimal editorial experience with Layout Builder

Speaker: Daniel Veza

Time: Wednesday 17th May 12:00-12:30
Room: Main Theatre
Track: Drupal Development

Layout Builder can be intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be! Discover modules that enhance and control the Layour Builder experience, keeping the front end consistent.

See Daniel’s session in the DrupalSouth schedule

Getting the most from your CI/CD experience

Speaker: Karl Hepworth

Time: Wednesday 17th May 12:00-12:30
Room: Track 1
Track: Web Tools & Technologies

How do you get the most from your CI/CD experience? 

Karl will dive into a maturity model that evaluates how far you are into the DevOps experience and look at the opportunities to be had and where your journey will take you.

See Karl’s session in the DrupalSouth schedule

Drupal Hosting Security Panel

Speaker: Kim Pepper; plus panellists Mike Richardson, Nick Schuch, Nick Santamaria, Scott Leggett

Time: Wednesday 17th May 13:30-14:00
Room: Main Theatre
Track: Web Tools & Technologies

Get your tough questions ready! 

The Drupal Hosting Security Panel brings together some of Drupal’s hosting experts, including PNXers Kim Pepper and Nick Schuch.

See the hosting security panel in the DrupalSouth schedule

How much does a polar bear weigh?

Speaker: Fonda Duffy

Time: Wednesday 17th May 13:30-13:45
Room: Track 2
Track: Showcases & Project Management

If you don’t know how that joke ends, Fonda may be able to help in her talk about the role of icebreakers in building and maintaining team connections.

See Fonda’s session in the DrupalSouth schedule

Vue JS for React JS developers and vice versa

Speaker: Lee Rowlands

Time: Wednesday 17th May 14:15-14:45
Room: Track 1
Track: Web Tools & Technologies

In React, you call useState to store state, in Vue, you use a ref. 

In React, you use a ref to keep track of something between renders, in Vue, you also use a ref for that. 

Confused? Come along to hear Lee compare React and Vue, and learn they're not that different.

See Lee’s session in the DrupalSouth schedule

Building an API with GraphQL 4

Speaker: Adam Bramley

Time: Wednesday 17th May 15:00-15:30
Room: Track 1
Track: Drupal Development

The GraphQL Drupal module’s out-of-the-box toolkit for writing GraphQL APIs is powerful, but it can also be hard to get your head around the concepts. 

In his session, Adam will cover how to get started and how all those puzzle pieces fit together.

See Adam’s session in the DrupalSouth schedule

The road to zero friction testing - getting the most out of Drupal Testing Traits

Speaker: Michael Strelan

Time: Thursday 18th May 10:00-10:30
Room: Main Theatre
Track: Drupal Development

Join Michael for a journey along the road to zero friction testing, aka getting the most out of Drupal Testing Traits. 

In his session, he'll show you real-world approaches from large client projects that make writing new tests a breeze. With some basic foundations in place, adding new tests can become smooth like butter.

See Michael’s session in the DrupalSouth schedule

Next-level Search API

Speaker: Saul Willers

Time: Thursday 18th May 13:00-13:30
Room: Main Theatre
Track: Drupal Development

How can you achieve next-level Search API? 

In his session, Saul will explore some of the lesser-known or "enterprise" features that can extend Search API and help solve the problems you face.

See Saul’s session in the DrupalSouth schedule

A Case Study On Building A Cloud Native Platform

Speaker: Nick Schuch

Time: Thursday 18th May 13:00-13:30
Room: Track 1
Track: Web Tools & Technologies

Nick will present a case study for building a cloud-native platform. 

Join him for a walk-through of how the Skpr hosting platform came to be and the lessons we learned along the way.

See Nick’s session in the DrupalSouth schedule

Code Contribution Sprint

Time: Friday 19th May 09:00 - 15:00
Location: 93 Cuba Street, Te Aro, Wellington 6011

Find out how to get involved in the Code Sprint

 

Don't forget to check our blog over the coming weeks as we share more on these topics!

My site runs on Drupal 9.5. I started preparing to upgrade to Drupal 10 right after 10.0.0 was released, but then I got hit with CKEditor 4 to CKEditor 5 blockers. The Linkit, CodeSnippet, and Entity Embed modules supported Drupal 10 but didn't support CKEditor 5. I could have updated to Drupal 10 and leveraged the CKEditor 4 contributed module, but I wanted to wait.

I will say, though. As we approach Drupal 10.1.0, more users will find a much easier upgrade path to Drupal 10 and CKEditor 5.

Add a reusable attribute to extend core or custom Gutenberg Blocks

Drupal core is moving towards using a main branch. As an interim step, a new 11.x branch has been opened, since Drupal.org infrastructure cannot fully support a Drupal core branch named main currently. This will bring Drupal in line with many other projects.

Before: Moving development branch

Drupal core previously opened a new minor branch (like 10.2.x) each time the previous minor released its first alpha (like 10.1.0-alpha1). This ensured that developers could immediately work on the next minor development version, but it made the most recent branch a moving target that changed every six months.

From 10.1 onwards, we will change our branch naming strategy, for the following reasons:

• Make it easier for developers to choose the correct branch for issues.
• Remove noise on issues from the automated comments created when a branch is opened.
• Remove the overhead from issue bulk updates for branch changes.
• Reduce merge conflicts and merge request permission problems caused by target branch changes.

After: Introducing the 11.x branch

This new 11.x branch will be used as the main development trunk until Drupal.org supports the main branch name. Future feature and API additions will be targeted against the 11.x branch. All outstanding issues filed against 10.1.x will be automatically migrated to 11.x.

The 10.2.x branch will be opened from 11.x prior to 10.2.0.

Comparing the old and new branching model. View a bigger version.
 

From now on, all patches and merge requests should be submitted to 11.x. Changes will be cherry-picked or backported from 11.x to minor branches as required. Backport versions of patches and merge requests can still be posted against specific branches.

Despite the branch name, Drupal 11 development is not yet open. The 11.x branch will still accept only minor-version allowed changes until Drupal 11 development begins.. When Drupal 11 development begins, we will branch the next Drupal 10 minor branch prior to the Drupal 11 alpha development phase, and only then will 11.x will allow Drupal-11-specific changes.

There is currently a 'stub' 11.0.x branch for holding 11.x-only issues that can't be worked on yet. These issues will also be moved to the 11.x branch, and we will use an [11.x] title prefix and 'Major version only' issue tag to distinguish them. 11.0.x will then be opened properly when we're ready to tag an alpha release.

We will rename the 11.x branch to main when possible.

Why DrupalCon?

DrupalCon is the premier 3-4 day conference for the Drupal community. It brings together developers, content creators, site builders, and business leaders from around the world to learn and share their Drupal knowledge. You will have the chance to attend sessions, workshops, and keynotes led by some of the most innovative and successful Drupal leaders. The best part of DrupalCon (in my opinion) is participating in community events, networking opportunities, and social events with the vibrant community of Drupal enthusiasts. Check out this video below from the Drupal Association to learn more.

The internet has brought a paradigm shift in the world of education. Distance learning caused quite a stir during the mid-19th century when its first echoes were heard by people worldwide. Over the years, it continued to progress slowly, but the pandemic made it witness exponential growth and pushed it to a whole new dimension. Overnight, all educational institutions and business organizations transitioned to online learning to educate students and train remote employees. Within days, every school, university, coaching center, and business organization had its learning management system (LMS) like Drupal to cater to the educational needs of their pupils and employees. Drupal development for LMS integration is one of the best possible choices in the content management system (CMS) market for creating and managing an effective LMS. No doubt, we are no longer confined by lockdowns today, but the changes induced by the pandemic have been irreversible.