If you have never been to a DrupalCon, make this year the one! This is a year of firsts for Electric Citizen.

• First year as a Supporting Partner of the Drupal Association
• First year as a sponsor and exhibitor at DrupalCon North America
• First year to be featuring 2 speakers at DrupalCon!

DrupalCon is the premier Drupal conference of the year in North America and the most widely attended Drupal event in the world. Six of our Citizens will be there, and we encourage you, colleagues, friends and client partners to join us. Look for us in our green EC workshirts!

Drupal 8 is the latest and greatest version of the popular content management system (CMS), powering everything from hobbyist websites of every stripe to Fashion, Finance, Sports and University sites like ralphlauren.com, mint.com, donor site for the University of Colorado and Sevilla Football Club

There are many reasons to upgrade to Drupal 8, both from earlier versions and sometimes from different content management systems altogether. The upgrade offers lots of benefits across the stakeholder universe. It’s quicker to set up for developers and site builders, vastly better for content editors for authoring, editing and management, and all improvements ultimately benefit site visitors who get a better user experience. 

Here is a short list of improvements and reasons why you might consider using Drupal 8 for your next web project, and you will discover many more as you delve deeper into this significant update:

Setting up a robust Drupal internal site search that searches all of the content that you add to a complex site can be a bit like finding your way through a maze. 

Drupal 8 core Search has been revamped and is much more powerful and accurate than in D7, but it still concentrates on text in nodes and not other entities those nodes might contain—like Paragraphs, Views, or custom blocks. Core Search also does not allow you to choose which fields you want to index, how important those fields are, or use any preprocessors to tailor your search. Search API gives you all this and more.

Search API is a Drupal contributed module that allows you create searches on any entity known to Drupal. You can use Views to create a custom search results page with specific filters. You can create different indexes tied to specific sections or content on your site. You can do just about anything to architect your search experience other than use the core Search block—which is really the only thing that makes core Search worth using. This post however, will show you how to take advantage of the power of Search API, and keep your site search box.

Drupal is well known for being a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly Content Management System (CMS) and Drupal 8, the latest version, is the best by far. Many of the essential requirements for SEO best practices are already baked into the core software architecture, and with a little knowledge and some basic configuration anyone can tune up their website to become faster, drive more traffic, and perform better in the search engine rankings.

In the recent post Twig for Drupal 8 Development: Twig Templating Part 1, we covered some Drupal Twig templating basics like debugging, custom templates, inheritance, variables, filters, attributes, and macros. This post will cover more advanced topics. You will learn about preprocessing variables, expanding the available templates with theme suggestion, Drupal 8 Views and Twig, and the Twig Tweak module.

Join us as we sit down with Joyce Peralta from McGill University to explore their world of "Web Standards."

We'll discuss how McGill's strategy for maintaining its impressive roster of 1,500 websites has grown to influence more than just the structure of the sites. These digital standards, developed, enforced, and cultivated by their web community, have become a cornerstone of the university’s technology framework.