development

I built my last website when Drupal 5 was still considered hot stuff and Drupal 6 was a mere dream – in other words, a long time ago. It did me very well, but I let it languish and age until it was unreasonable to work with any longer. This primarily occurred because I had not built it sustainably and it was much too cumbersome to make modifications. This time around I vowed to build in a sustainable fashion that would leave room for growth.

I am going to outline just how I did that! This post goes over my planning, how I broke up the functionality into discrete feature modules, and show you the code.

For the past year, all of my Drupal work has been devoted to building a product on top of Drupal. In the beginning of the year, I worked with the Science Collaboration Framework to create PD Online. For the past 7 months, I have been with   continue ...

I do web development locally. I have a rather powerful computer, dual core 2.5Ghz processor and 4GB of RAM. The problem is… my computer is a laptop. As such, it can suffer from overheating problems.

Last night, I decided I wanted to test to ensure a mass user mail feature worked as expected. The following exchange occurred on IRC:  continue ...

Staging and deployment is a vital part of any project, Drupal or not. As I’ve discussed previously, staging and deploying to production is particularly difficult for all the Content Management Systems out there that intermingle content and configuration settings within the database - and Drupal is definitely one of them.  continue ...

I finally decided that what I’ve been developing in the dbscripts module is stable and decent enough to deserve an official 1.0 release. I’ve written up the problem I was trying to solve with these scripts in another blog post.

So what are some improvements I’ve done since I first released it? Besides refactoring and cleaning up the code, I have added:  continue ...

So here’s my environment: I’m running Fedora on my laptop, with Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postgres and Ruby on Rails for my web development work. I then use VirtualBox to install a Windows XP virtual machine for browser compatibility testing.

Problem: How do I get my XP virtual machine (the guest) to see my Fedora’s localhost (the host)?  continue ...

Here’s a quick bash script for automatically adding and deleting files in subversion. Don’t you hate having to list each one individually? Or getting all those messages that say, “the file has already been added” when you just do svn add my/directory/*. Even more of a pain if you selectively delete a bunch of files.

I use this small little script. It’s a huge time saver.  continue ...

As I’ve mentioned before, version control with Drupal is tricky because a lot of configuration changes are stored in the database. Version control is vital because you should be maintaining multiple workspaces so you do not work on production. The last thing you want to do, then, is to make this worse by putting PHP in your nodes and blocks.  continue ...

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.  continue ...

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.  continue ...