Programming

One of the challenges of developing with Drupal is to understand Drupal’s structure. Until now, when working with the DOM structure, the DOM inspector has been the best tool for viewing the structure. A new tool has been created to make the visualization of the DOM structure much easier to interpret. It is a Firefox add-on and is called Tilt 3D. It creates 3 dimensional interactive representation of the DOM elements as a layered visual image.

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.

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).

Now this one is pretty annoying to.

I'm writing a module that imports data into nodes. Sometimes this data has already been imported, and I only want to update existing rows with changes, if any.

After pulling in a row of data from the import file, I see if it already exists as a node in my database. If it does, I grab the node ID and load the existing node:

I then do some magical stuff and save the node using the standard:

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...