drupal-planet

The Journey Gym is a exciting and innovative entry in the portable workout field just launched by Portland based startup Journey Fitness, LLC. It's been great working with their team launching the new site promoting and selling the gym. The site features:

• Shopping cart powered by Ubercart.
• Nutrition blog
• Custom theme development, done in part by Eternalistic Designs.
• Javascript rotating image galleries
• Intro video displayed via a lightbox, streamed from the site using Filefield.
• An FAQ section powered by the module of the same name.

Stay tuned for an online community and a system to put together your own workouts from a collection of exercise clips.

The Portland Parks Foundation

... engages the community in support of Portland's parks, recognizing that government agencies alone are not able to guarantee us the vibrant network of parks and park programs that are our rich heritage.

They are an amazing group of dedicated people who are working hard to ensure Portland's parks continue to serve as living rooms for our communities, playgrounds, sports fields, gardens, and lungs for our city. It's my pleasure to do a small part in helping them achieve their mission with this new website. It features another stellar design by Annette Brooks, and Views and CCK are put to use in showcasing the foundation's projects. Sprinkle in some custom image rotators and galleries, and you have a great new website.

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.