Drupal

This page outlines what I’ve done to get a good Drupal dev environment – Apache, MySQL, PHP, Git, Drush and most Linux-style shell commands – running on Windows. There are other solutions out there and I’m always interested in hearing what others have done to optimize their setup. Please leave any suggestions is the comments.

The biggest change in Drupal over the past year is not the Git migration or the release of Drupal 7, both of which were fantastic steps forward for Drupal. It’s the more inclusive developer community.

See the cartoon after the jump...

I'm posting this so I won’t forget it the next time I need to do something similar.  This is by no means a complete explanation of the new plugin architecture, it’s more of a quick list of gotchas.

1. Building a skeleton example plugin

You will need a module to implement a Views plugin.  Within that module, there are three items needed to create a minimal plugin:

I’ve been tossing about the idea of moving some of the sites I host to Amazon Web Services, specifically EC2 (server), S3 and EBS (storage) and CloudFront (content delivery network).  Price was my excuse for not jumping (OK, the real reason is the inevitable pain that comes with moving hosting providers) but with today’s introduction of “Micro” instances, I no longer have that excuse.

AWS now can host my sites for roughly the same price I pay for shared hosting!

Finally, a much delayed “official” release of the Better Exposed Filters module has been posted on drupal.org.  Regardless of the beta/dev designation since it’s introduction six months ago, BEF is already in use on about 1200 Web sites.  I had hoped to get this release out before DrupalConSF, but kinda blew it…

Drupal’s Views module is hugely powerful, but not always pretty.  Exposed filters are no exception.  The Views Filter Pack claims to do this but has some serious problems, including a lack of activity in the issue queue for the past three months.  This article gives a quick look into a new module I built to help improve the user’s experience with exposed filters.

Chris Wilson at Slate Magazine recently wrote an article criticizing WhiteHouse.gov for its move from a proprietary content management system (CMS) to the open-source Drupal CMS.  Unfortunately, Mr. Wilson has his facts wrong.  Let’s go through his arguments one at a time.

Malcolm Hooper and I recently launched a new Web site for UTCS, the daycare our daughters attend.  The school’s board of directors wanted to foster community among the parents, move paper-based administrative tasks online while maintaining security and privacy of the information being published.  Since I was volunteering my development time, I wanted to make this as turn-key as possible and minimize any custom development.

Sounds like a job for Drupal!

In a perfect world, you want all your websites to rely on the same code base.  That way a fix for one site is reflected in all the sites you manage.  This holds doubly true when you use any sort of framework software, such as Drupal, as there's nothing worse than going through a dozen different installs and rolling out the same patch over and over again.  Fortunately it is very easy to configure Drupal to run many websites from the same install.