Christmas Newsletter

Main picture from Pixy.org.

It's been a little while since we've been in touch, so we have some catching up to do. But first and foremost, Season's Greetings to all of you, we hope you have a pleasant and relaxing festive period, and we wish you a prosperous 2025.

May The Presents Be With You

Last year we bought all our clients 100 mangrove trees in Madagascar for Christmas. We don't know if anyone went to check on their trees, if not that might be the perfect excuse to escape the European winter for a week or two! Although please do travel by bicycle and/or train. Anyway, that present was warmly received, so we have continued on that theme. Working with Earthly again, we've done something a little different this year. Instead of trees, we've bought some acres of peatland in Indonesia. As last year, clients will receive a gift card with your organisation's name on it which you can provide to the person responsible for your carbon offsetting, if applicable.

Why peatland? Protection of these peatlands is vital, without it they would be destroyed to create palm oil plantations. Peatlands are amazing carbon sinks, so this represents a double-whammy for our climate. When peatland is destroyed not only does it no longer absorb carbon, but the carbon it holds is released, so protecting them is really important!

In other climate news, we have doubled down on our commitments and are now corporate partners with Eden, who are based in the USA but operate carbon reduction and reforestation projects all over the world. We are deliberately over-investing for the size of our carbon footprint, to catch up and, eventually, become carbon negative.

Rates going DOWN!

Say what? Yes, you read that correctly. We have frozen our support and hosting rates for 2025 and we have actually reduced our development rates a little, to line up with the general trend in the web development industry. Our rate card for next year is available here. As usual, G-Cloud contract rates are fixed by the framework. New development rates will apply from January 2025.

New ticketing system

We're in the final stages of developing a replacement for the venerable Redmine ticketing system you all know and... well, tolerate? Joking aside, Redmine has been an amazing tool for over a decade, but it's time for something new. Because we're Drupal experts, we've built a solution in Drupal - which we fully intend to open source - making extensive use of the Group module. We're in testing now, you can expect to be seeing the great unveiling in Q1 of 2025.

Picture from Needpix.com.

Drupal's starshot is almost ready

If you haven't been following the Drupal product development news, Starshot is the codename given to the community driven effort to push Drupal to the forefront of CMS solutions. We at Code Enigma are proud to have played a tangible role in Starshot, we hired freelance Drupal expert Mark Conroy during the summer to work on the initiative on our behalf.

The best way to find out more is to watch Dries Buytaert's speech from DrupalCon in Barcelona this September. The TL;DR is Drupal CMS, the latest incarnation of Drupal, will be launched in alpha form in mid January. The goal is to make it easier to install and use for normal people, the main driver being the Experience Builder, allowing people to quickly develop their ideas into working web applications. Watch this space, we'll be providing demos as soon as we can!

Christmas service

A quick reminder, the systems and server support services will be unaffected by the festive period. However please note Drupal support will not be available on the 27th, 30th and 31st December. You can of course raise tickets, but they will not be processed until 2nd January.

Related, we will be pushing for an infrastructure change freeze on production systems this Christmas. We politely request that you put in any infrastructure changes required on or before 18th December, as we do not intend to make any changes to production systems between 20th December and 1st January. Thank you for understanding.

An eventful year...

As usual, we had our Code Enigma Away Week in the summer, this time back in Catalonia, Spain, up in the hills near Girona. But that's not all. We went to DrupalCon Barcelona, Phil went to DrupalCamp Scotland in Edinburgh and spoke about batch processing, Sunil and Phil went to the LocalGov Drupal Camp in Birmingham and Sunil went to the AWS EMEA Summit in London earlier in the year. Phil is busy as ever organising the North West Drupal User Group (NWDUG) on the second Tuesday of every month. (It's online, feel free to join from anywhere!)

We also did some training, Matt and Greg brushed up their ISO management skills and learned all about the requirements for ISO 27001:2022, which we will be rolling out next year. Several members of the systems team gained various levels of certification from AWS (well done Nick, Sunil and Matej) and Nick continues to work towards his British Computer Society Chartered IT Professional status.

Call us if you need anything!

Don't forget, if you need Drupal, Symfony or other PHP development, more support for your internal team, DevOps and Continuous Integration, systems management, design, accessibility testing, we've got you covered. We'd be delighted to quote for additional services, just drop us a line on sales@codeenigma.com

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