Recent Blog Posts

What Managers Need to Know About Security

By Mike Gifford

This is was originally titled What Communications Managers Should Know (and Do) About Web Security, but that was just way too long a title. Security is something that everyone needs to understand on a basic level in our modern society, but staff need to know more as their organizational mission can also be jepordized. For people in management it is especially important as they set the tone for everyone else. IT security simply cannot be left to the techies to take care of. The risks are huge, it’s complicated, and unfortunately if you ignore it, it won’t just go away.

By Mike Gifford

I first encountered @falcon03 in the Drupal 8 issue queue in September of 2012. At that point I didn't know why he was interested in accessibility issues or what, if anything, he had to contribute to the discussion. With the Drupal 7 Core issue queues, over 400 people have participated in the discussions, patches and tests. Most are active on just a couple issues out of the many that were tagged with accessibility. A few of the participants, like Jason Kiss, had extensive accessibility experience. However, it was always a challenge to know if an individual has a

By Mike Gifford

We really enjoyed the opportunity to be part of organizing Ottawa's first DrupalCamp. It was a great success, and as a platinum sponsor we were happy to see it take place. There were a lot of good presentations, but we'd like to highlight a few of them here on our site. The first is a great talk by Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia talking about Drupal & government around the world. As an Acquia Partner, OpenConcept was really happy that so many of their team was able to come in to participate in this event. It was also a pleasure to have Andrew

By Mike Kaulbars

Laura Scott posted an excellent article at Pingv that makes the case which OpenConcept hopes every Drupal 6 user will immediately take to heart; it's time to be actively working on your website upgrade. We excerpt and link Laura's article as she spells it out as well as anyone could, but we will underscore a couple of the main points: With the impending release of Drupal 8 people still running Drupal 6 have only three options, one of which isn't actually an option at all, and another isn't really an option for most users either. The three options are

By Dylan Shields

Jump to SVGs in Inkscape. Jump to Tables in Scribus. As a company that focuses most of our attention on developing websites, we haven't done a great job of keeping up with the desktop publishing side of computing. There can be a fair bit of crossover, as far as design approach and content structure, but there are also some major differences between preparing content for online consumption vs a nicely designed hard copy layout for any given document. I've spent the last little while brushing up my skills in some open source projects that will help develop nice-looking

By Mike Gifford

We were happy to see that at the end of 2012, the main website for the Government of Ontario(GoO) moved to Drupal 7. Their new site demonstrates that it is possible to have a visually interesting site that meets the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act(AODA). Many folks reading this blog post will know that the AODA requires a wide range of organizations within Ontario to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 AA). WCAG is an International standard organized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), they are responsible for a number of

By Dylan Shields

Check out Part 1 of my adventures in California. Or, I you have already heard about Day 1, check out Part 2 of the series. Day 3 at BADCamp started out very much the same as my first two mornings in the Bay Area. I headed out early, made my way East through the waking streets of San Francisco, and hopped aboard the BART Train to Berkely, muffin in hand. I arrived at the now familiar campus of UC Berkeley and made my way to the Pauley Ballroom with a bit of time to spare before the start of BADCamp's Keynote Address by Drupal Godfather, Dries Buytaert. While Dries was

By Mike Gifford

We've been strategizing, evaluating

By Dylan Shields

Check out Part 1 of my adventures in California.Apart from a simpler trip from San Francisco to Berkeley, day 2 of BADCamp started out much the same as day 1. The Mobile Summit was held in the same room as the UI/UX Summit. The morning's sessions were presented by John Albin Wilkins (of Zen fame) and Sam Richard, a front-end developer who currently works for NBC Universal. John's presentation was an update on the status of Drupal 8's Mobile Initiative and an overall perspective on the importance of developing for mobile. Sam's presentation (which he called

By Mike Gifford

Happy Holidays! The team at OpenConcept would like to wish our clients, our suppliers, our partners and contributors all the best in 2013. It's been another exciting year for us, as we've continued to engage with the Drupal community, welcomed aboard some new team members and contributed to some very exciting projects, including the Heritage Canada Foundation, Canadian Society of Customs Brokers, Cable Public Affairs Channel, and the City of Ottawa. This past year, we've worked extensively with Drupal 7 core and with some tailor-made distributions, such as the