Blog

Want to know a little trick that will make you write better copy? And how you can apply it to your content marketing and strategy? My little trick does the job every time: the grandmother principle.

As a Drupal expert, Blue4You is well known to both Belgian government and European institutions and has built a strong reputation since more than 15 years.

It's not always easy leading a team without being bossy. Especially when you suddenly become your own coworkers' team lead. That's exactly what happened to Joeri, who learned 8 valuable lessons on leading a team over the last two years.

Despite being often skeptical about certification programs ourselves, we do see the value in some of them in some particular cases. This blogpost will focus on the Acquia Drupal certification programme.

Vue (pronounced ‘vju’, like view) is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. It has a lot of benefits for developers and businesses alike. Our expert Sead explains.

A user-friendly but solid extra layer of security to protect our business-critical tools: that's the challenge we took upon ourselves. Here's how we did it.

Mastering responsive font sizes for websites has never been easy. There was no automated way to control all your font sizes for all possible screen widths. That has now changed.

On the 15th and 16th of februari the good people of Amsterdam decided that Valentine's day alone wasn't enough to spread all the love and they decided to organise the Frontend Developer Love Conference. 

Strategy and design are more entwined than some people think. But what does a digital strategist take away from a design conference?

Critical CSS can mean the difference between seeing a page within 2 seconds or having to stare at a blank page for 10 seconds or more.

Welcome back to our 3-part blog post on how to build a new feature for your application. This step-by-step guide will help you with your development process.

This blog post will explain the main ideas behind machine learning and try to show you why you should care about any of them in the first place.

Welcome back to our 3-part blog post series on how to build a new feature for your application. This step-by-step guide will help you with your development process.

In this blog I'll be guiding you through the process of creating a new feature for an existing application. 

We've listed a few Drupal 8 modules along with our personal experience and the reason why you should avoid them. Of course, this information might become out of date in a while as modules get updated and bugs are fixed.

My team and I were a few days away from launching materialise.com, a brand new Drupal 8 website for a 3D printing company when we started noticing some strange behavior regarding the URL aliases of the nodes.

For a while now we've been looking for a competent alternative to compete with Drupal. When a client requests a Content Management System (CMS), our go-to-technology has always been Drupal. Lately, however, we've had a growing need for a custom CMS solution.

PHP 7.1.0 was released this month, so it's time for a roundup of the most important new features that were added in this release.

Web Summit is the largest technology conference on the planet. A great place to find out what the tech world is working on and what the next big thing will be. What is my key takeaway for companies that want to be future-proof? Storytelling.

For the last 3 days, me and my colleagues have been in Lisbon for Web Summit 2016. It's impossible to write about each and every talk we listened to, but here are our 5 takeaways from this conference so far:

After a huge recommendation of our colleague Herman, who went to BrightonSEO last year, my colleague Lien and I were eager to know what the fuss was all about.

While Google Classic Analytics reaches its end, still a lot of websites are using the ga.js trackingcode to send data to their Google Analytics account.

In addition to our Google Docs scraper tool (which checks a list of websites on the use of the ga.js code), we also talked at #GAUCBE about creating smarter segments in Google Analytics.

CSS specificity: a concept every front end developer has been struggling with at some point. It‘s usually the reason why your CSS rules don’t apply to some elements, although you explicitly defined it.

Many developers tend to learn CSS specificity by trial-and-error, which often results in the overuse of styling with id’s or with the well-known last resort !important. In most cases these issues can easily be solved by tweaking your selectors so that your code will remain clear.

So you came here to save a kitten? That's wonderful, but the real reason we're both here is to talk about clean code. In this blog post I'll be sharing some of my personal experiences and tips. But before we dive into the tips and tricks part, let's talk about what we, as developers, do and why we do it. 

Phaser.io is a HTML5 game framework that gives you all the necessary tools to create a game in JavaScript. It’s easy to setup and also easy to learn with a lot of quality documentation and example code snippets available online.

How can you get a legacy codebase under control and bring it to a new level of maturity? This post summarises my advice and lessons learned from years of working on a large legacy web application.

Sonata Project is a bundle collection for Symfony to basically make your day-to-day CRUD programming tasks easier. Hooking up your precious doctrine orm models with a backend interface has never been easier!

So let's get started! We are going to build a portfolio system with tags and clients ORM attached to it. First we set up our Symfony project from scratch by running composer:

This is more or less a how-to on installing and renewing an SSL (or better, TLS) certificate, on Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudFront (Dutch blogpost about Amazon AWS services). 

These instructions are targetted to do it unattended, so you can automate it, for example with Let's Encrypt certificates.

Front-end developers have a lot of influence on a website's performance. In this article, I will be covering some techniques that will help you optimise your next project.

Fervente aanhangers van open-sourcetechnologieën: da’s wel het minste wat je kan zeggen van de Intractoriaanse developers. Het is dus helemaal niet zo verbazend dat we ons steentje willen bijdragen aan de naderende release van Drupal 8. Dit doen we door middel van een Drupal code sprint, die op zaterdag 24 oktober zal plaatsvinden in ons kantoor.

Whether you are using MySQL, MongoDB or another data store, you will have some kind of paging mechanism to scroll through your data set.

While we were using RequireJS in a project we stumbled across a few problems. One of those problems was getting our assets loaded through a versioned path.

At Intracto we use Bamboo to automate building and deployment of our web projects. All our projects have a comparable directory structure with a Gruntfile in the same location.

On the 12th of June the Domain Driven Design eXchange took place in London. Intracto was there and we’d like to recap the points we found most interesting here. Should your interest be piqued while reading the following, be sure to check out our jobs.

Why we switched?

We run Apache with it's PHP module mod_php by default and it works fine. For some projects we prefer php-fpm to have more control and less overhead.

In a previous article (written in Dutch), I talked about our Vagrant setup and how we use shell provisioning to keep things simple.

For this follow-up article, I wrote a script that compiles PHP7 from source. This script was tested on Debian 8. It compiles PHP7 with all options Debian (and Dotdeb) usually do. You probably don't use many of these options, but now you can easily strip down your configure string and re-run the shell script. It activates opcache, has the MySQL extensions and compiles PHP CLI and PHP-FPM.

Last Sunday (Sept. 15) I took one of the many stages at Drupalcamp Leuven for my talk 'An Introduction to the Symfony Standard Edition'. I wanted to introduce Drupal developers to the basic workings of Symfony by way of a demo, as Drupal 8 and Symfony 2 are much more integrated. So a good understanding of Symfony would benefit Drupal devs as well.

If you build web applications, chances are that they will send e-mail. Think contact forms, order confirmations, etc. On a developer machine however, you usually don't want this e-mail to be delivered to a real mailbox. You could use MailCatcher to solve this problem, but there are also other solutions, like using your current MTA in a smart way.

Git is becoming more popular in favor of svn, as everyone knows. In this post, we'll show you how to easily migrate from svn to git. Make sure (on ubuntu for example) that you have the git-svn package installed. It should be available from your default repositories.

In this post, I will show you how to create a .deb package from some binary files.

To be able to use complex types with Soap requests, they need to be fully defined in the WSDL file. Zend_Soap can automate this process, if you know how to define those complex types.