webschuur.com

Drupal’s block system is far from ideal. It was designed back in the threecolumn-era, was improved to work beyond three-columns-content-in-middle layouts, but is still unsuited for more complex layouts.

If you want real complex layouts, you will have to turn to Panels, or Panels2. Or so they say.

A client of mine, a large Dutch media company uses Drupal for all its new sites -about four, five each month-, and untill today used panels in these sites.

So, there is a good thing you, as non-coder can do: clean up your mess :)

Submitting issues is a good thing. Without that, there is hardly a way to improve a piece of software; after all: the only relevant test is real use.

I have been maintaining many Drupal modules for years. And I tend to give out CVS access to other people I like, trust or think are good developers.

Still maintaining a module is hard work. Today, after nearly four weeks, I went trough a backlog of open issues on various of my Drupal modules. And here are some rather disturbing numbers:

Thought I should share this function I use all the time to debug and develop Drupal code. I very often need to quickly see the contents of a certain table.

Svn has a very useful concept, called externals.

The idea, in a nutshell, is that you include code from another subversion server (and repository) into your own subversioned project. Instead of simply copying the code into your project, you link to existing code. That way you simply update remote projects, when working from thirdparty development releases (that library the other team is developing on the sidetrack), and/or switch to new or stable versions when they are released.

De laatste maanden heeft zo ongeveer ieder Nederlands webdevelopmentbedrijf Drupal “in haar portfolio”. Dat staat tussen aanhalingstekens omdat het gros nog nooit iets concreets met Drupal deed, maar eenvoudigweg hoopt op kosten van de klant Drupal kennis op te gaan doen. Ze gaan er vanuit dat “het wel losloopt”. Ik heb argumenten gehoord uiteenlopend van “we hebben het handboek eens goed doorgenomen” tot “onze eigen documentatiesite draait ook al op Drupal”.

Because I decided to try Remember the milk again for my Getting Things Done thingies, I had to import all my stuff from vitalist.com.
In order to do so, I hacked together a dirty Ruby script.

It may help someone who is trying to achieve the same.