Lev's blog

It's fall, the weather's turning colder, the leaves are changing and falling, my two year old has become a bundle of energy with strong opinions, and I'm feeling a bit sick from too much Halloween candy. In addition to all that, I have a few business related changes to report.

First, you may notice the refresh levelos.com received. I've been hacking away over the years at an initial design Annette Sabo created for me years ago, to the point that I had a bit of a Frankenstein on my hands. A favorite quote of mine is about how "... the cobblers kids have the worst shoes ...", and I think this is very analogous to the state of many web developers own sites. Well, I decided to do something about it. Annette again applied her amazing design skills, with the result being a huge improvement while retaining key aesthetic elements. I used this as a chance to try out the 960 grid system, which I found simple to use and very effective. Please let me know if you notice any problems or have some suggestions.

We all know Drupal can be a great out of the box content management solution, blogging platform, or social networking site. Especially when you take into account tools like CCK and Views. But what if you need to develop a more customized and focused application? Where does it make sense to use a more generalized and lower level framework like CakePHP or Rails? I don’t know if there’s a single answer to that question, certainly lots of opinions, including my own which I discussed at Open Source Bridge. Namely, the more singular the purpose of an application, the less it makes sense to use Drupal.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with One Economy the last couple years on several projects, including http://pic.tv, http://one-economy.com, and, most recently, the Make it Easy Toolbox. This last project fell under the gray area of being a good fit for Drupal, and, together with the One Economy team, we decided to give it a go. The application is still in active development, but so far so good.

Through the kind introductions of my good friend Aaron Teresteeg, who is the Community Manager for Parallel Programming and Multi-Core, I was brought on early during the project to help the internal Intel Software Network development team see some light in the Drupal thicket. They are an amazingly talented and dedicated group, but they didn't have extensive Drupal experience, so we sat down for a couple of brainstorming sessions where they peppered me with questions about best practices, module choices, architectural issues, and the like. I also did some minimal follow up prototyping. Matt Groener, the ISN Development Team Manager, very generously claimed,

You really put us on the firm path to a successful Drupal launch.

So we all have our favorite development tool or, as in my case, many. I'm currently infatuated with Textmate, as are many other Mac users, and use it as my primary development environment. It's merits are many, including the light footprint, responsiveness, elegance, and plugin/bundle architecture. I'm especially a sucker for the elegance, especially when used with the Twilight theme.

There are times, however, when I need to use a more robust IDE, particularly for step through debugging. As a side note, that happens to be a great way to learn what happens during a Drupal page load. Netbeans to the rescue. I used to be an Eclipse user, but made the jump to Netbeans, which is put out by Sun, after my first look. I find it much simpler to setup and maintain, there's a dedicated PHP distribution, it's very feature rich, and just flat out works. One area where it doesn't shine, however, is aesthetics, and if I'm spending a good part of the day looking at something, I want to it look nice. You could even argue that it would make you more efficient. In any case, as a partial remedy, I took a stab at porting the Twilight Textmate theme for Netbeans and thought I'd toss it out there.

Improvements welcome!

UPDATE: I figured I'd look around to see if something similar was out there, and found this one, which might be better.

When O'Reily decided to move OSCON, the famed annual open source conference, from Portland to San Jose this year, I was upset like many other folks and resigned myself to simply missing out on the chance to mingle with, and learn from, the best in the open source community. Others, however, decided to do something about the gap left in Portland's conference schedule and organized Open Source Bridge. According to the conference organizers,

Open Source Bridge is a completely volunteer-run conference for open source citizens held June 17-19 in Portland, Oregon. Focused on developers working with open source technologies, the event features five tracks connecting people across projects, languages, and backgrounds to explore how those developers approach their work, and why they participate in open source. The conference structure is designed to provide developers with an opportunity to learn from people they might not connect with at other events.

Hats off to the organizing team; they have worked tirelessly to put together the event, and by the looks of the schedule, the end result promises to be amazing. On a personal note, I decided this was a good opportunity to cut my conference presentation chops and submitted a session on Drupal. I realized I needed a specific angle, and settled on the topic Drupal, What is it Good For, and was honored to have the talk accepted. My experience in building a wide range of sites, along with the many hours I've spent evaluating requirements for projects, gives me a decent foundation for the topic, although I also plan on doing plenty of homework in preparing the talk. If anyone who stumbles across this has any suggestions, they are very welcome!