Drupal Commerce is the wrong answer for most online shops. That is not a criticism of the project, which is well engineered and has been for fifteen years. It is a statement about what most shops are: a few hundred SKUs, one currency, consumer customers, a card payment at the end. For that shape of business a hosted...
UK Business
Articles, guides and tutorials relevant to UK businesses, covering technology decisions, hiring, compliance and digital transformation in the UK market.
Drupal 12 is scheduled for the week of 7 December 2026, and Drupal 10 reaches end of life on 9 December 2026. Both dates sit on the same page of the Drupal core release schedule, two lines apart, and most people running a Drupal 10 site have noticed neither. The first alpha of the new major was tagged on 2 September...
Drupal hosting is where most of the “Drupal is slow” reputation comes from, and it is almost always a purchasing decision rather than a software problem. A site gets built properly, then goes live on a plan priced for a brochure site with a handful of PHP files. The result is a content management system with a serious...
Developer onboarding is usually measured in how long the induction takes, which is the wrong end of the problem. The number that matters is how long before a new engineer can change something and be confident they have not broken anything else, and in most teams that is measured in months rather than days. The delay is...
An uptime SLA looks like a promise and behaves like a refund policy. Suppliers know this. Customers frequently do not, and sign a service level agreement believing they have bought availability when what they have bought is a small discount in the event they do not get it. That is not necessarily a bad deal. It is a...
Software escrow exists to answer a reasonable fear: the supplier who built and runs your critical system goes out of business, and you are left with something you depend on and cannot maintain. An escrow agreement puts the source code with a third party who releases it to you if that happens. The fear is legitimate....
The choice between a fixed price contract and time and materials is usually framed as a choice about risk, which is correct, and then immediately mishandled, because both sides assume the risk goes away rather than moving. It does not go away. In a fixed price arrangement the supplier carries the risk of the estimate...
Disaster recovery in a small team is usually one line in a document nobody has opened: backups are enabled. That statement is true and it is not an answer, because it says nothing about how old the data would be, how long the restore takes, or whether anyone has ever performed one. The gap between having backups and...
A software RFP is supposed to make suppliers comparable. Most achieve the opposite, because they specify a solution in enough detail to constrain the answer while leaving out the information anybody would need to price it. The result is five quotes spanning an order of magnitude, all technically responsive, none of...
Software maintenance cost is the number that turns a successful project into a difficult conversation eighteen months later. The build was budgeted, approved and delivered. What happens after it goes live was described as “support” and given a figure somebody guessed at, and that figure was almost always too small. The...