tips

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).

I just found this very cool screencast creation tool that is free. It's called Jing. Installation is quick and pretty easy (though it does require the .NET 3.0 libraries for the Windows version).

Here's a sample screencast, a quick demo of cscope as a development tool.

The importance of project management tools is almost never fully appreciated. I am shocked at how common it is for a group of developers to go working without version control, ticket tracking, development documentation and so on. The very first thing I do when working with a new client is to make sure that they get these tools in place if they haven't already.

Those who are used to working without a complete set of project management tools never fail to appreciate the benefits of them once they are introduced. I consider it next to impossible for a team to work together without managing code and tasks in an efficient and highly organized way.

Hopefully you do not need to be sold on this idea and are using CVS or SVN to manage your project already. You likely have some sort of ticket system. It is a little less likely that you have both of these components integrated with each other.

When it comes to choosing a solution for project management software, a die-hard Drupal user has a dilemna. On one hand, Drupal seems as though it should be the perfect solution. It's fully customizable, has lots of nifty project management related modules and, most importantly, it's Drupal! Why would you not use it? "Eating your own dogfood" is the way to go, right? Meh...

The very cool Komodo IDE has API support for Drupal. Very nice code completion/documentation for Drupal API functions.
This was apparently the result of a request from the Drupal community. Nice.
I recommend the Komodo IDE for all LAMP/Web development. It's by far the most mature of the IDEs available for PHP/Perl/HTML/Javascript/CSS work. The only drawback is that it's not free. It will run you about $300, but if you program for a living, it pays for itself very quickly.

I began the Devbee website back in March as a way to help others by way of documenting what I have learned about Drupal and also to drum up a little bit of business for myself. The content of this site is extremely targeted, and I don't ever expect to see more than a few hundred visits a day. This definitely does not reflect the expectations, or at least hopes, of most website owners. It's typically all about bringing in as many visitors as possible to generate money through advertising or purchases. Sites interested in bringing in large numbers of visitors typically do this by spending a lot of time focusing on "search engine optimization" (SEO). Absolutely nothing can drive traffic to a site like a top placement in the search results on one of the major search engines.

Back in the day (way back during the last millennium), all one needed to do was have a simple HTML page containing relevant words or phrases and he was fairly likely to make a decent showing in results pages. In fact, this is exactly how I shifted from studying literature to building websites. I built my first homepage (don't laugh!) for fun. It was found by an employer, and I got a cool job at a major search engine. Today, it is not so simple.

Fortunately for us, as Drupal users, we have a secret weapon, Drupal itself. Drupal SEO does not require any witchcraft or elaborate HTML trickery. It's simple, and in this article, I'm going to explain how I get consistent premium search placement with very little effort.

PHP is an interpreted language. This means that each time a PHP generated page is requested, the server must read in the various files needed and "compile" them into something the machine can understand (opcode). A typical Drupal page requires more than a dozen of these bits of code be compiled.

Opcode cache mechanisms preserve this generated code in cache so that it need only be generated a single time to server hundreds or millions of subsequent requests.

Enabling opcode cache will reduce the time it takes to generate a page by up to 90%.

PHP is known for its blazing speed. Why would you want to speed up your PHP applications even more? Well, first and foremost is the coolness factor. Next, you'll increase the capacity of your current server(s) many times over, thereby postponing the inevitable need to add new hardware as your site's popularity explodes. Lastly, high bandwidth, low latency visitors to your site who are currently seeing page load times in the 1-2 second range will be shocked to find your vamped up site serving up pages almost instantaneously. After enabling opcode cache on my own server, I saw page loads drop from about 1.5 seconds to as low as 300ms. Now that's good fun the whole family can enjoy.