Technology

On June 11 and 12, Forum One joined Amazon in supporting a "Seattle Drupal Barn-raising" event. For the last few years, the Seattle Drupal community has picked a small, local nonprofit and come together to build/re-build its web presence. In addition to helping the nonprofit, these events also serve as opportunities for newer developers to receive mentoring on real projects from seasoned developers.

This Friday at 8:00 a.m. I will be chatting with Gary Vaughn on The Collaboration Tech Talk Show over on BlogTalkRadio.com.

Having attended the last few U.S.-based DrupalCons, the upcoming Chicago event is easily the most exciting. Why is that? In a word, Drupal 7. Okay, maybe that's two words. Architecturally, it's a huge shift involving a new database layer, a new rendering layer, better form handling...the list goes on. And we're also reaping the fruits of all the user experience testing. Lots of good things to come.

If you're using Acquia Search or a self-hosted ApacheSolr search instance, you've already noticed that the default listing leaves a lot to be desired. Fortunately, it's not extremely difficult to make these results look exactly the way you want.

For starters, I'm assuming that Views 3 is already installed.

Create a new view

One of Drupal's strengths is in the ability of the Taxonomy module to handle hierachical categories. It makes lists like this easy:

We recently rolled out a new version control process, which we feel will better support our increasing project complexity.

Previously, our live sites used trunk, and our work took place on a single dev branch. This was problematic because it was sometimes difficult to separate the tested-and-ready-for-live code from the code still in development.

So I created a poorly constructed 'SELECT' query in a stored procedure and I was up late last night trying to figure out how I could best optimize it. After sitting in my 94 degree basement for a few hours, I thought of using hashed values via CONCAT and MD5 functions to create an index of multiple columns to improve 'SELECT' queries using 'JOINS.' The performance increase was instant after I made the necessary adjustments. To save others the time and headache, I'm going to share with you my solution and the resulting performance improvements.

Several battles have been brewing from within the WordPress community.

It's WordPress, not Wordpress dangit!

A couple weeks ago, a snippet of code got sneaked into WordPress 3.0. The function, capital_P_dangit, is a filter that replaces "Wordpress" with "WordPress" throughout one's site.

There has been a lot of (virtual) ink spilled over HipHop, Facebook's new PHP-to-C compiler; but a similar approach has flown a little more under the radar.  I'm talking about Quercus, a PHP interpreter/compiler written in Java by Caucho, the makers of the Resin app server.

One frequent request we get from clients is to integrate their Drupal web site user profiles with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system so that their users' information can be used for email messaging and other purposes.