Blogs

The longer I have my mac the more things I find that drastically simplify my life as a Drupal developer. Now for fairness sake I should admit that there are still some things about mac that annoy me (namely Finder which is in many ways inferior to the windows explorer), but that is another story all together. Drush, the command line tool for Drupal is one of those many little things that make me very happy to have broken free from the slimy grasp of Bill Gates and his minions.

If you develop with Drupal chances are you spend a lot of time searching for information on Drupal.org, I know I do. With this in mind one day I decided to see what it would take to build a Drupal.org and an api.drupal.org search plugin for Firefox.

I have nothing against new Drupal users on Drupal.org, even the most advanced Drupal developers were new to Drupal at one point or another, but I have seen a pattern among certain new users that drives me crazy. In fact it drove me crazy back even when I was new to Drupal myself: the abuse of the term newbie.
Ok I admit that that sounds like a pretty weird thing to say, but I have a well formulated psychological analysis to back me up. Hear me out people.

It's kind of a love hate relationship I have with Adobe. They have the monopoly on the design world so I use their software daily, and for the most part it works, but there are some things that drive me batty. Each time there is a new version released I hold on to the faint hope that maybe this time they removed some of those glaring annoyances or put in the really obvious features that have been needed for years. Occasionally my disappointment is softened by some minor improvements, sometimes it's not.

Drupal hit it big when version 5 came out. Before this time it had a considerable user base, but it hadn't gone main stream yet. The transition from Drupal 4 to Drupal 5 was extremely quick. No one held on to Drupal 4 and all significant modules released 5x versions within a few months. When Drupal 6 came out last year I think many of us expected the same kind of quick upgrading and transitioning, but alas, and many important modules have taken their sweet time coming out with a 6x release.

The last time I visited the safari download page at apple.com I was shocked to see that they had posted a banner that read: Download Safari The world’s best browser. If you aren’t a web developer you might not understand why I would be shocked, if you are a web developer it shouldn’t be surprising at all.

Well it took me about 5 days to get it all together and test it, but finally the Advanced Book Block Module is finished!

This module went much more quickly than the Advanced Taxonomy Blocks module due to the fact that I had already worked out the kinks in the JQuery Menu Api by the time I started. Also I lost less time on stupid bugs since I knew what to expect.

After spending the last week and a half coding like a mad man and testing the thing to make sure there were no glaring bugs I am finally releasing the Advanced Taxonomy Blocks module. This module took a lot more time and effort than I had expected due to the fact that the Drupal api doesn’t provide a taxonomy tree array that gives all of the necessary information in order to integrate with the JQuery menu module and also due to the fact that I had to rewrite a couple of functions in the JQuery menu module in order to get it to open up for other modules to use.

Soon after building the Jquery menu module I started thinking of how to integrate it with other modules which provide hierarchical data such as the taxonomy module and the book module. Last Friday the itch finally got to be too much and on a whim I sat down and started writing a module for producing a Jquery menu interface for browsing through taxonomy terms.

Corporations usually choose image over truth, Adobe isn’t an exception in my book. In March of 2008 Adobe proudly (more like shamelessly) announced that they have joined the Linux foundation and intend to help in collaborating in the development of new web 2.0 technologies. All this with an emphasis on their support for open source.