centre{source}

I have been waiting on this for a while. Finally, someone has put together an article detailing how to use Doctrine with the Zend Framework. The article was linked from the Doctrine website, but you can also go directly to the original article here.

This has to be one of the coolest and simplest things in PHP.

http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/php-growl/

// Setup $growl = new Growl();
$growl->setAddress(’127.0.0.1′);
$growl->addNotification(”Test”);
$growl->register();
// Send Notification
$growl->notify(”Test”, “Test Alert”, “The body of the test alert!”);

This simple class allows you to send OS X growl notifications to any valid network address. Pretty cool. Within a few minutes, Jared and I were Growling at each other in PHP.

I ran across this new book from my friends over at 800ceoread.com: The Back of the Napkin. Being a visual learner*, I was inspired to see examples of great stories contained within. This book is ideal for those involved with strategy and project planning as people are wired with an innate ability to “look, see, imagine, and show.”

The folks at pingVision have posted their case study for the Popular Science Magazine website on drupal.org.

I attended this session and left it feeling very inspired. It was amazing to see what this small crew did with such a behemoth of a site. Just the thought of having to migrate a 1.66GB Oracle DB into a Drupal site makes me sweat. All things considered, I felt like this was probably the best session I attended at DrupalCon 2008. It wasn’t the nerdiest, or the geekiest, and it didn’t have lots of slides of code…but for our line of work, it was incredibly valuable. Not only did they go into the “nuts-n-bolts” of how they built the site, they also touched on the project management side, and also managing client expectations with such a large project.

Jeff Miccollis and Young Hahn with DevelopmentSeed gave an excellent presentation at DrupalCon 2008 titled: Creating Custom Workflows for Drupal Apps: taking advantage of core hooks and context. The primary focus of this session was explaining the various methods of maintaining “context” throughout a Drupal site. In layman’s terms, this simply means a method of determining what content to display, or what actions to take based on where the user is currently located on the site. A simple example given was multi-lingual sites. A site may be in English by default, but if the user switches the site’s language to Spanish, then the there has to be some method in place to remember that this is the language this user has chosen, and we can assume that the user wishes to view the rest of the site in whatever language they have chosen. The language the user selected has become the “context” for the site. Now, any page that the user navigates to will be in Spanish, because the site has been implemented in a such a way as to remember the user’s chosen language.

Addison Berry from Lullabot has posted the slides from his DrupalCon 2008 presentation: Contributing to Drupal: A guide for everyone.
Woot!

John VanDyk, author of Pro Drupal Development, and longtime Drupal developer/guru, has posted the slides and video of the presentation he gave at DrupalCon on triggers and actions. It was great presentation from one of Drupal’s founding fathers. Though centered around Drupal 6, many of the basic principals can be applied to Drupal 5’s Actions module. There is also word of backporting Triggers to Drupal 5!

If you missed the Boston DrupalCon 2008, don’t miss out on this wonderful session.
Files can be downloaded here…

Some of us at centre{source} have been running the latest version Firefox (version 3) which is currently in it’s beta stages. It’s VERY cool and VERY fast…Beta 3 Release 4 just came out today: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0b4&os=osx

After installing, we were extremely happy to notice that Flash is once again working as expected, and it’s all running a lot faster and more stable. It definitely is a huge improvement over Firefox 3 Beta 3 (which itself was light-years of improvement over Firefox 2!)

Try it out, and let us know what you think!

Chris Brogan, co-founder of PodCamp and Julien Smith, a podcaster in Canada write an interesting manifesto about a new kind of economics on the web: Trust.At the core of trust is building relationships. We encounter all types of relationships: fake, manipulative, or worse, toxic. These type of relationships are not profitable to maintain – certainly financially, and most importantly, worthy of our attention. The authors maintain that we are starved for time. “…attention is scare – more valuable than cash and rarer than gold… When you get some, embrace it and find out how to get more.”

While inhaling paint fumes from our next door tenants, I was intrigued about this article from Lifehacker: The Coolest Cubicle Contest. View the entries and enter; the winner will take home a $500 Amazon Gift Card.