June 2008 Blog Entries

As most Drupalers have realized, iCal support for Drupal is in its infancy. The first successful implementation of it was only realized at the beginning of 2007 in the calendar module. It still has a lot of limitations - there are issues with time zones, and a complete lack of customization that CCK offers.

There are virtually an unlimited amount of ways to set up a development environment, and it all depends upon your project's individual needs and your preferred workflow. Sometimes, though, it just takes experience and exposure to other ideas to figure out what would be best. So, here is a description of my development environment.

The websites Today at Brown and Media Relations, developed in Drupal, have been released and live for a few months now. Media Relations was released at the beginning of this last semester, while Today at Brown was released within the past month.

Migrating changes from development to production is particularly tricky in Drupal due to a large amount of configuration settings being stored within the database. Attendees of Drupalcon 2008 made it clear that this is a particularly annoying problem. I attended the Development / Test / Production Environments panel to learn about how the big guys (including Drupal.org itself) manage deploying their sites from one working space to the next. We were disappointed to discover that even the big guys are currently writing down all the steps to upgrade and simply performing them on the production server.

This method poses several problems due to the Human Element being involved in the entire process.

I was tasked with maintaining a Drupal website that had 44 views. The template.php file for the theme was unwieldy. I spun off all the views template code into another file for ease of maintenance, but it was still 1333 lines¹ weighing in at 36.5kb! ^{[1] Just four more lines and it could have been elite!}

The quantity of views certainly wasn't pretty, and when I had to add in another view, I decided that enough was enough. It was time to clean it up and develop a system to help keep the views under control.

Recently, I had to make mass changes to nodes while adding a new feature to a live website.

In one case, I wanted to add a date field to a content type with hundreds of existing nodes. For the sake of simplicity, best date that could be used for this field was the created date of the node. With that information, I was able to write the following script to replace any empty date fields with the created date.