Blogs

I was just working on a client site and had an epiphany as to why working with Drupal continues to be a frustrating experience for me.

As flexible and powerful as Drupal truly is, there is still an unacceptable level of non-determinism involved in working with Drupal whether it be in working with existing modules, theming or doing custom development.

When I'm away from home, I use my Windows laptop as a dev server. I use the factory distributions of MySQL, PHP, and Apache. They run surprisingly well on Windows.

I've very seldom had any serious problems running drupal under Windows. That is definitely not to say that I'd rely on Windows in a production environment. But it is suitable for a dev server.

I did just spend several hours, however, finding out that if you enable CSS or JS compression in this environment, it can cause Apache to die.

I just can't take it anymore. I'm turning off anonymous commenting completely.

I've tried Akisment, Captcha, Mollom, all of them. Nothing works.

I believe the only way a site can prevent spam altogether is by requiring accountability. 

I don't recall the name of it at the moment, but Google was working on some sort of verified web identity tool. Only if a user comes to a site with some sort of valid 'credentials' do I think he should be trusted.

Developers are all familiar with the default behavior of the drupal menu systems "local tasks" (aka tabs). These appear throughout most Drupal sites, primarily in the administration area, but also on other pages like the user profile.

Generally, developers are pretty good about creating logical local tasks, meaning only those menu items which logically live under another menu item (like view, edit, revisions, workflow, etc... live under the node/% menu item).