While attending DrupalCampNYC7 this past weekend at NYU Poly, one of the most eye-popping demos I saw was by Roger López, showing off some functionality hiding in the Chaos Tools Suite to empower you to create awesome AJAX functionality, including modal dialogs/forms, without writing a single line of javascript.
As a long-time Drupalist, I have to confess a wandering heart. Over the past couple years, I've grown more and more interested in other software and bigger-picture issues, branching out from the trials and triumphs of developing sites with my favorite CMS and looking increasingly at issues of integration and platforms. However, recent news has brought Drupal itself right back into the center of my thinking.
Chapter Three just launched a site for DML Central, a site dedicated to "promoting and networking collaborative efforts to understand and assess the participatory ways in which digital media are transforming youth learning practices and lifelong learning opportunities." Funded by the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, DML Central was the second of two projects we did with the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub team, the fi
It was a great time as always at BADCamp. Chapter Three brought in copious coffee from Ritual Roasters and supplied bagels for morning munchies and I was excited to give my "Drupal in the Cloud" talk, as well as a more in-depth presentation on making Drupal fast and scalable. Matt and Jon rocked worlds with their talks digging into what we're calling "The Panels Paradigm" around here, and Squiggy introduced a room full of folks to the nuts and bolts of theming in Views 2.0.
As we all know, Amazon's EC2 service is really beginning to mature as a web platform. Acquia is using it for their managed hosting, and many other companies have proven that with the right architecture and setup, "the Cloud" is more than just a buzzword.
It is a good Drupal development best practice to embed each of your views in code instead of storing them in the database. This technique will allow your views code to be managed by your version control system which makes pushing up changes to views from development to staging to live a much cleaner process. Additionally, since the views code is being loaded from disk instead of the the more expensive database you will see a modest performance improvement. All in all a pretty good thing.
Today we're proud to have our showcase case study of Chapter Three's work on Moblin.org posted to the Drupal.org frontpage!
This was one of the more interesting and fun projects we worked on in 2008, thanks in part to our excellent collaborators at Intel, the awesomeness that is Drupal 6, and the close-to-our-hearts use-case of helping an open-source developer community create its home on the web.
Just a little to the left please. Flip it around. Put that on top of this. Call it by a different name. It is the little changes, that seem trivial and small, that often end up being real headaches to make and support our clients in making. Do we really want to try to build capacity with clients by teaching them to adjust #weight in hook_form_alter?
Earlier this week I spent an afternoon setting up and configuring WYSIWYG editing for a client's website. Although at Chapter Three we are big fans of HTML Literacy, we realize that many users would feel more comfortable in a WYSIWYG environment. We did a little brainstorming and came up with some basic recommendations to make TinyMCE work better.
