• Read more about Mobomo Coming in Clutch

Clutch Announces Top DC Development Firms

This week Clutch released a new report highlighting the best development companies in the greater DC area, and Mobomo made their list! We were recognized for our ongoing expertise in web and mobile development across a variety of platforms, including iOS, Android, WordPress, and Drupal. We were also recognized for our noteworthy web designs and UX. The Clutch report looks at industry data as well as verified and up-to-date client reviews to rank the top companies in the area. We are thrilled to have been recognized as a Top Developer and Top Creative and Design Agency in the following categories:

Top Developer

• Mobile App Developers
• Android App Developers
• iPhone App Developers
• Web Developers
• Drupal Developers
• WordPress Developers

Top Creative and Design Agency

• Digital Design
• UX

The rankings were based on Clutch’s proprietary research methodology, which is based on references and reviews, clients and experiences, and market presence. Results are also based on how well companies demonstrate their expertise in the competitive D.C. area, and their success rate on completing high-quality projects. The report includes overviews of the winning companies and full profiles and client interviews are published with the research online.

Mobomo is proud to work with some of the best startups, most distinguished enterprises, and prominent federal agencies in the U.S. marketplace. Our notable web and mobile development work includes projects for NASA, the USO, RGS, Pulse, and NOAA Fisheries.

About Clutch

Clutch is a business to business research firm located in Washington, D.C. They are best known for connecting agencies and software solution companies in order to enhance business goals across businesses. Their methodology is unique in the sense that they connect businesses based on consumer reviews, the type of services offered and the quality of work.

• Read more about 8 Reasons to Migrate to Drupal 8

Drupal 6 is officially no longer supported by the Drupal community:

This was announced in 2015 and officially went into effect on February 24, 2016. It has been two years since Drupal 6 was supported and Drupal 7 may not be supported for much longer according to past release timelines.

Responsive layout is built-in.

It is very difficult to retrofit a responsive theme into Drupal 6. Drupal 8 is responsive out of the box and all community contributed themes have responsiveness built-in. On January 10, 2018, it became required by law for all federal sites to be mobile friendly and this is to be completed no later than 18 months after this was put in place (June 10, 2019).

Better performance.

Drupal 6 requires a lot of tweaking or external caching to achieve good performance. Many of these things are either built-in or easy to enable with Drupal 8. The latest version of Drupal has worked hard to improve the load time of pages, management of the content and many other aspects. Drupal 8 now works more efficiently, and hence it saves much time for the user in all circumstances.

Better security.

Drupal 6 no longer receives most security updates and it is not architected to handle modern security threats. Drupal 8 offers security best practices for writing code, generated PHP files, and configuration for site builders. Drupal also has a security team in place. If someone discovers vulnerabilities, patches can be quickly released. Stable modules that have a security review also have a shield icon to differentiate them from the rest.

Better customization: Mobile First

D8 has a much more robust plugin architecture that allows developers to customize almost anything. This even allows D8 to serve purely as a back-end CMS with a completely de-coupled front-end application which could include a mobile app. Drupal in and of itself is an open source content management system. This helps companies get faster with everything they do, execute at scale, and not be burdened by delays in bringing new ideas to market.

Better SEO

Drupal 6 is not optimized for modern search engines which can cause low page ranking. Drupal 8 is better out of the box and has a lot of community modules that can optimize it further. It’s increased site speed, responsive web design, mobile readiness, CAAS capabilities, etc. has made it better optimized overall.

Usability improvements.

Drupal 8 has significant usability improvements for managing content and users over Drupal 6. Throughout Drupal 8, the focus has been mobile-first and usability. All of Drupal 8’s built-in themes are responsive and built to be used wherever you may need to get work done, whether that be on your phone on the go or stationary on your computer of choice.

Enterprise application architecture.

Both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 have problems separating configuration and business logic from the actual content. This creates a lot of challenges when trying to deploy a large or complex site. Flexible APIs such as actions and triggers, Database API, caching, roles and permissions, Form API, REST API etc. make Drupal 8 an ideal web framework, while continuing to manage the content.

• Read more about Key Drupal Taxonomy: Part 3

Part 3: The Final Installment

This is the final installment of Drupal Taxonomy that we feel is important for one unfamiliar with Drupal to know! At this point, hopefully, you understand some of the key language that is regularly used in the Drupal Community.  For reference, our first two blogs, Part 1 and Part 2, should provide you any background you may not already have.  Mobomo is the team that is behind NASA, the solar eclipse with NASA, the USGS store, and NOAA Fisheries, all of which are Drupal sites.  Similar to these organizations, Drupal is the CMS system for you if your needs are more complex, you are developing an e-commerce portal, or if you have a large amount of content to maintain.  If you have a Drupal project in the works or are about to migrate versions or CMS systems, Mobomo has some of the best and brightest Drupal developers in the DC area.

Key Terms:

1. Permissions - This is a tool for controlling access to content creation, modification, and site administration at the application level.
2. Template - This refers to a file to express presentation
3. Theme Engine - This is a set of scripts that interprets code and makes theming a site easier. These scripts take the dynamically generated content and output it to HTML.
4. Theme Hook - This is an identifier used by the calls to the theme() function to delegate rendering to a theme function or theme template.  Modules which extend Drupal may declare their own theme hooks to allow editors to control the markup of that module in their theme.
5. Trigger - These typically result from a characteristic change in an entity maintained by a module.
6. Triage - A new issue is assigned a priority based on its severity, frequency, risk, and other predetermined factors.
7. Zebra Striping - This refers to the to the alternating colors between rows of data. It is most common for rows of data to alternate background colors between white and gray.
8. Testbot - A continuous integration service for testing patches submitted to project issues on Drupal.org.
9. Roles - A name for a group of users, to whom you can collectively assign permissions. There are two predetermined, locked roles for every new Drupal installation:
10. Path - This is the final portion of the URL that refers to a specific function or a piece of content.

Please reference Drupal.org for more information!

• Read more about First Buenos Aires Meetup!

Swift Community Meetup

Mobomo has had a large team based in Buenos Aires, Argentina for over 6 years and our team based there has grown to be nearly 30 people.  A large majority of our award-winning design and quality assurance teams are made up of Buenos Aires talent.  May 4th was our first Buenos Aires Meetup.  Pablo Villar, iOS developer of the Mobomo Team, lead his first event for the Swift Community. Pablo has over 5 years of experience coding on this platform.  With over 50 attendees at La Maquinta (a coworking space in Palermo Hollywood), the event was a huge success!

These are the 3 Topics That We Presented:

1. ReSwift by Francisco Reynolds
   • He showed us how to use ReSwift in order to create unidirectional data flows so your code ends up being clearer and more concise.
2. UITesting + FBSnapshotCase by Frederico Jordan
   • He showcased a practical example of this testing tool to show how useful this could be for your projects.
3. MVVM + ReactiveCocoa by Mariano Abdala
   • He told us about MVVM architechtural pattern advantages through the use of Reactive programming.

If you would like to see more, check out the full streaming at May 4th - Buenos Aires MeetUp

Special thanks to Alejandra Marquez, our People Operations Manager, who made this possible!

• Read more about Key Drupal Taxonomy: Part 2

Part 2:

In our previous blog post, we gave a brief intro to some terms that we believe are necessary to understand the basics of Drupal.   Here we have what we believe to be the next round of terms that we consider necessary to understanding those basics. Recently, we had the opportunity to assist Matrix AMC in migrating from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8.  They were unable to use their website because of the version of Drupal that their website was hosted on was out of date and no longer supported by the Drupal community. While these specific terms are consistent across Drupal versions, they are crucial to understanding the importance of being up to date in with your version of Drupal.

Key Terms:     

1. Block - the boxes visible in the regions of a Drupal website.
2. Region - defined areas of a page where content can be placed. Different themes can define different regions so the options are often different per-site. Basic regions include:
3. Roles - a name for a group of users, to whom you can collectively assign permissions. There are two predefined, locked roles for every new Drupal installation:
4. WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get; An acronym used in computing to describe a method in which content is edited and formatted by interacting with an interface that closely resembles the final product.
5. Book - a set of pages tied together in a hierarchical sequence, perhaps with chapters, sections, or subsections.  Books can be used for manuals, site resource guides, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), etc.
6. Breadcrumbs - the set of links, usually near the top of the page, that shows the path you followed to locate the current page.
7. Form mode - this is a way to customize the layout of an entity's edit form.
8. Multisite - a feature of Drupal that allows one to run multiple websites from the same Drupal codebase.
9. Patch - a small piece of software designed to update or fix problems with a computer program or its supporting data.
10. User - the user interacting with Drupal. This user is either anonymous or logged into Drupal through its account.

Refer to Drupal.org for any other questions!

• Read more about Mobomo Gets AWS TCO Certified

What Was Our Goal?

At Mobomo, we have pushed our employees to educate themselves on a variety of certifications in order to further their own professional growth, as well as team growth. The team was so excited about the Amazon Web Services Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Cloud Economics course that we had everyone from the Founder to our sales team complete it.  The reason behind this was to continue to work towards becoming an advanced partner with AWS. Mobomo was not always a cloud service provider, but we were backed into becoming one based on all of the other projects that we do and the cloud requirements for many of these projects. AWS has truly helped this portion of our business take off in 2018.

The Basics

This course specifically covers everything you might need to know about AWS TCO, from basics to an in-depth cost analysis. TCO is the total cost of ownership, which is defined as the initial purchase price of an asset plus it’s operating cost. If any item has a low TCO, this means it will be valued higher over time.  The most common comparison used to better understand TCO is a car. The common costs that are involved in purchasing a car are MSRP, registration and insurance, fuel, maintenance, and breakdowns. The TCO of a car is the initial purchase price PLUS all these costs that may be incurred throughout its lifetime.  This is the best way for a TCO newbie to understand the basic concept of TCO and this is a comparison that we continue to use throughout the Mobomo office.

Pricing Benefits of AWS You Should Know:

Mobomo has been working with AWS for an extended period of time and also partnered with Amazon to help created their tool, Mechanical Turk.  It was important for our team to have a solid understanding of the TCO concepts and the benefits of using AWS in regards to TCO in order to further our knowledge as well as continue our ongoing relationship with AWS.  All of the tools that AWS has provided and that we have had the benefit of using have been very valuable to the Mobomo team as a whole.

• Read more about GDPR Deadline is Nearing!

How Long Do You Have?

The GDPR is becoming law on May 25, 2018, and is fast approaching. The GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, is a new EU Regulation that is replacing the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive (DPR) to significantly enhance the protection of the personal data of EU citizens. This is also meant to increase the obligations put on organizations that are collecting and processing personal data. The GDPR is improving on a significant number of the 1995 Data Protection Directive’s requirements for data privacy and security. It also includes several new requirements to strengthen the rights of data subjects and add harsher penalties for violators.

Important Things to Know:

1. The GDPR only builds and enhances principles that were already established by the EU Data Protection Directive.
2. The territorial scope of GDPR is much wider-- it will also apply to a non-EU business that:
   1. Market their products to people in the EU
   2. Monitor the behavior of people in the EU
3. The standard for disclosures when obtaining consent now states that it needs to be “freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous” and requires that controllers use “clear and plain” legal language that is “clearly distinguishable.”
4. A customer cannot be forced into consent and they must be aware that they are consenting to have their personal data processed.
5. Two new rights that are built in:
   1. “Right to be Forgotten”- this requires that controllers alert downstream recipients of deletion requests.
   2. “Right to Data Portability”- this allows data subjects to demand a copy of their data in a common format.
6. Unless the cost is excessive, one will not be allowed to charge for processing a request to access.

Mobomo’s development team is incredibly knowledgeable in converting a website to be compliant with a variety of ever-changing regulations, including the new GDPR. Please reach out to us if you are in need of our assistance in getting your website up to speed with current regulations! Time is running out!

To check if you are already compliant, see this article for 5 final checks!

• Read more about Mobomo Presents Drupal Con Summit on NASA Eclipse Partnership

[pdfviewer beta="true"]https://mobomo.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2018/04/2017-total-solar-eclipse.pdf[/pdfviewer]

• Read more about Mobomo Presents Drupal Con Session: (In)organic Groups

[pdfviewer beta="true"]https://mobomo.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2018/04/in-organic-groups.pdf[/pdfviewer]

• Read more about Drupal Con Government Summit Session in support of USGS Mission

[pdfviewer beta="true"]https://mobomo.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2018/04/usgs_drupal_presentation-1.pdf[/pdfviewer]