Tagged Development

How to use Hooks for building Drupal 8 themes

For this article, we enlisted front end developer, Abby Milberg, to give us a little inspiration for Drupal 8 theme building. Abby is the expert here, so I'll let her take it away.

What is a preprocess function?

A preprocess function creates or modifies variables and render arrays (arrays of data structured in specific ways that Drupal knows how to render as HTML) before they’re rendered and/or passed to a template.

Hook42 Team
woman typing on laptop viewing drupal 8 screen

The Twelve Days of AWS: Aurora

We've made it to the final day, the 12th day of AWS!

Talking of RDBMSs, with all of the Data Lakes, Data Warehousing, NoSQL solutions available on AWS, it is nice to still have access to a good old RDBM, which Aurora provides, with both MySQL and PostgreSQL flavors.

12 Days of AWS Day 12 written around snowflakes with a penguin ice fishing

The Twelve Days of AWS: EC2

Despite being what most people think about when mentioning AWS, I left their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) until now, mostly because personally I don’t use it all that much.

With the advent of Lambda, EC2 can feel a bit more laborious as there is a lot more set up involved than with serverless solutions.

12 Days of AWS Day 9 written around snowflakes with a penguin opening a gift

The Twelve Days of AWS: Serverless

While this is not an actual AWS tool, it is something so useful for setting up Lambdas that it deserves a day to itself.

When looking for how to get started with Lambdas I ran into Serverless pretty quickly. It’s a framework that does a lot of the nitty-gritty and heavy lifting involved with configuring the elements that surround the code written inside the Lambdas.

12 Days of AWS Day 3 written around snowflakes with a penguin wearing a winter sweater

The Twelve Days of AWS: Lambda

When I needed to perform small operations on files stored in S3, I turned to this next tool in the AWS arsenal, Lambda. Lambda is effectively a ‘serverless’ script running platform, whereas of the time of writing, code in Node.js, Python, Java, Ruby, Go, C# or PowerShell will be run whenever triggered by specific events. A few examples of these events are: S3 Object uploaded, Amazon Alexa, and Manual trigger via the Lambda UI.

12 Days of AWS Day 2 written around snowflakes with a penguin wearing earmuffs dancing

Hook 42 Earns Five Stars in First Review on Clutch

If you run a business or other organization with any online presence at all, you’ve probably hit a point where you wondered why Drupal and WordPress are so important. Building a CMS-based website isn’t as simple as download-and-play. Savvy site owners know that it’s best to rely on the expertise of experienced web developers to implement the appropriate solutions. Hook 42 offers developers versed in Drupal 7, Drupal 8, WordPress, Gatsby and more.

Hook42 Team
clutch 5 stars

Web Accessibility

At Hook 42 we value inclusivity in all aspects of our business. From the people we hire to the products we build, creating a space that is accessible to everyone is important to us.

Web accessibility, or a11y for short, is becoming a bigger and bigger priority for many organizations. And that's where we come in. With a team of experts working by your side, we can be your on-call a11y specialists, helping you achieve your digital accessibility goals.

Accessibility at Hook 42

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to web accessibility. We carefully review and analyze each area of your website to set you up for success. Since there are a number of ways to be compliant, we've got you covered from beginning to end. No matter what stage of a project you're in, we can help you create a path forward.

Hook 42 provides the following accessibility services:

  • Automated Site Scans
  • Manual Site Scans
  • Accessible Content Strategy
  • Accessible Design
  • Accessible Development
  • Accessible Planning & Remediation
  • Accessibility Training

From start to finish, we implement accessible best practices throughout our projects. This means in content strategy phases, design phases and development phases, we're looking for ways to improve accessibility. Each project is carefully tested and spot-checked throughout the course of the build to ensure accessible implementation.

Beyond Building Accessible Websites

If you plan from the start to build an accessible product, web accessibility becomes much more manageable. However, not always is there a case for starting fresh. Hook 42 also tackles web accessibility by itself. We have consulted with numerous clients to help develop an accessibility plan and remediation schedule, working as an extension of your team. 

Hook 42 can work with you in the following ways to improve the accessibility of your existing website:

  • Perform Site Audits
  • Perform Accessibility Testing
  • Create a Remediation Plan and Schedule
  • Train Your Team for Accessibility Best Practices

Certified Accessibility Professionals

Our accessibility specialists are certified from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) in Core Competencies (Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies or CPACC), Technical Competencies (Web Accessibility Specialist or WAS), and Web Accessibility (Certified Professional in Web Accessibility or CPWA). We're proud to be advocates for progress within web accessibility and are continuously providing our clients with a better understanding of how to do the same. 

Ready to Enhance Your Web Accessibility?

Whether you're looking for a consultant, a designer, or a developer, our team builds accessibility into their process to ensure the most inclusive results. At Hook 42, we're always looking for ways to make the web more accessible to everyone and we'd love to help you achieve your accessibility goals. Together we can create a space that everyone can access.

Contact Us Today

Getting Started With Developer Environments

Getting started in Drupal, WordPress, or Backdrop website development can have a steep learning curve involving a lot of different parts of the system. Not only do we need to learn how to edit the code for the website, but we need a place where we can safely practice and make mistakes. We need to be able to run websites on our own computers, and we need good tools (applications) that can help us learn. That collection of tools is commonly called a “local development environment”, and this blog post is meant to provide an overview of some tools we like to use here at Hook 42.

developer setting up work environment on three screens