drupal

While contracting for the Tree House Agency last fall, I am very happy to have architected, project managed, and lead the development of the New House Democratic Website (http://dems.gov)

From: http://www.dems.gov/press/house-democratic-caucus-launches-new-website

The site features what Democrats are saying each day, by issue and about major legislation. For the first time, visitors will be able to easily find quotes from Members on the topics and legislation they care about most. The site also features major legislation passed by Democrats and summaries of upcoming bills. In addition, the public can find House Democrats’ official websites, YouTube channels, and Facebook pages using an interactive directory.

The new site allows the caucus to:

1. Aggregate content from congressional members (video, text, feeds, and other forms of media)

2. Share content with the public and reporters in a way that it easy to navigate

3. Provide multiple views for visitors to browse and search content by facets of interest

Of course we built it in Drupal for the public facing website because of its ability to present content to visitors in a variety of ways; with all the social networking tools of today’s websites and Drupal on the administrative end was the clear choice when it came to meeting the administrative and security needs of the Caucus.

Nice post on Smashing Magazine reminding us not to forget the small stuff in the new year: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/23/dont-forget-the-small-stuff-this-year/ .  For example, did you change the copyright date on all your clients’ sites?

Here are two interesting client issues I had in after the New Year.

Expired Security Credentials

A client called to ask for help getting access to an old Content Management System they had for about four years.  The site just stopped allowing them to log in. Turned out to be the site was on a Windows Server which authenticated via the Windows User Groups.  After four years, the server reset the user account privileges. 

The lesson: Watch server configs and security accounts in the new year.  They often (correctly) expire after a certain period and this often occurs at the start of a new year.

CCK Date Fields Stopped Working

Here’s one for us Drupal CCK Date field users.

One of my clients has a content type which includes a publication date using a CCK Date field.  Suddenly, they could no longer save changes to nodes in this content type. 

This was the error message:

An illegal choice has been detected. Please contact the site administrator.

Here’s what happened:

The CCK Date field has a setting called, “Years back and forward.” 

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I've been both developer and manager for years on both large and small projects with various sized teams. During the week to week management of these teams I tend to send little notes to help guide our work process. This week I have been breaking in a new team.

I thought it might be useful to other technical project managers and team leaders if I shared some of this week’s raw notes. I hope it’s useful for other managers to have a glimpse into the day to day notes of another in their same place.

Time Sheets

Please enter your time regularly into Fresh Books. Smaller more frequent time entries are preferred. Try to break them down by tickets and tasks in those tickets. Please always include the ticket number you were working on.

Please keep your entries up to date daily while on a project.

SVN

I believe in update and commit often.

Make sure you update and resolve conflicts before committing.

Enter in notes about what you are committing and when possible, enter the relevant ticket number.

Commits will auto deploy to the server within a few minutes. If you break something, you can roll it back but email the rest of the team to let us know so we can make sure to match our revision to the latest version on the dev server.

To roll back, log into [Spring Loops], choose the project, and then deploy the previous version number.

Remember that other devs are working in SVN too. So, update often, typically before starting a new change set. And commit often. I can help with any merging issues if you need it.

[Info here on how to contact me for an urgent need.]

Further Notes on SVN

The following is just a brief reminder about steps to take to not over write others work.

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With Drupal being an open source software and having such a great set of features right out-of-the-box, people may wonder what they pay for when going to an expert Drupal developer or shop for their Drupal install.

A good Drupal site may cost thousands of dollars. For an enterprise level site the budget may be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. What’s that all about? I thought Drupal was “free”. The following is a bit of explanation.

Most web site features are already built into Drupal and ready to be configured. With professional Drupal development you are not paying for features, but rather expertise. What expertise?

Professional Drupal developers and shops offer expertise in Drupal site:

1. branding and visual design
2. theming (to be defined below),
3. feature integration,
4. architecture,
5. scaling,
6. optimization,
7. and security.

What are professional Drupal development budgets based on?

Not Just Features

As Drupal’s base install already has a large feature set which will meet many site’s needs, it is important to note that there are actually very little features lost or gained at budget levels past a certain point (the cost of install, setup, and deployment).  What budget levels do affect, that is, what is lost or gained are levels of feature integration (interaction) and design implementation (theming).

Theming

To meet real business branding and marketing objectives, companies need their professional visual design developed into Drupal in a way that effectively and successfully communicates their brand.

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