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DrupalCon Boston 2008 - Session One: From Drupal Newbie to Drupal Ninja
Session: From Drupal Newbie to Drupal Ninja
Time: 9:00am (EST) 03/03/2008 Presenter: Chad Williams (hunmonk)
This presentation was targeted primarily at the Drupal newbie, and was mostly a “tips & tricks” session. Here are my notes from the session:
My First Doctrine Project Tutorial
Over at the Doctrine PHP ORM website they have just released a tutorial on how to get started using Doctrine in under 5 minutes!!!
“I have put together a short and sweet tutorial on how to get started using Doctrine in under 5 minutes. A few weeks ago, we announced the sandbox package which allows you to get started using Doctrine with a zero configuration sandbox environment. The tutorial is built using this sandbox package and shows you how Doctrine can be easily implemented and used in your web applications.”
The tutorial can be found here
Website Grabber | Offline Browser
Today, we had a client call us and ask if we can ’save’ their website from an aggressive website designer that is holding their site hostage. I told them yes and thought an easy solution would be to find a utility that allowed us to easily clone/grab their website. I must say, I was surprised at the difficulty in finding a free utility to do this.
Part of the problem came from the search terms I started with. I thought this would be called a ’site grabber’ - and many paid utilities thought the same :) I then switched to Website Clone, but to no avail. Finally, I that download.com called these utilities “Offline Browsers”. Doing a quick search for Offline Browser struck gold!
iPhone Development
I got a shiny new iPhone, and it is amazing. But you’ve already read that somewhere else.
Being a web developer, I immediately started looking for some best practices on how to write apps for this new tool of mine.
Google “iPhone development” and you get nothing but blog entries about people who don’t actually have much real concrete documentation, and a couple of development IDEs that give you preview for the frame and such. But no actual development guidelines. Shame on whoever does SEO for apple…
sfAmazonS3 - Symfony Plugin for Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3)
Today, CentreSource has released its first plug-in for Symfony. This plug-in allows you to interact with Amazon S3 directly from Symfony.
Check it out: http://www.symfony-project.com/trac/wiki/sfAmazonS3
Cross-Browser Normalization
If you work in a web design or development firm, then you are probably already very (if not too) familiar with the various idiosyncrancies across the major browsers. Even before you start to apply the stylesheets you can spot noticable differences in the way the browsers render the html. This is because the major browsers come with a default stylesheet they use to render html when nothing else is available. It is a very simple stylesheet, mainly affecting paragraphs, headings, links, and fonts. This is why, without any styling, unvisited links appear blue with an underline, among other things. While using links is a trivial example, small differences in font sizes and paragraph margins can become a headache and can cause you to start adding unnecessary fluff to your well crafted stylesheets. There are some techniques you can utilize to minimize the damage, or what we in the industry refer to as browser normalization.
Innovative Helpdesk/Ticketing System
A friend recently recommended: http://www.cerberusweb.com
It is a very popular (and affordable) email management solution for help desks & sales teams. It is a bit complex, so you’ll want to take a moment to review the features and consider ways to synthesize it for your business. It appears that everything is managed through email and you have certain email addresses that customers and prospects use (or that it recognizes).
There is workflow, tagging, team resolution, and an integrated knowledge base. Instead of typing an article into the knowledge base, simply answering a client’s problem would give you the ability to ‘Tag’ and file that email into the Knowledge base.
Web Based Time Tracking Nearing Launch - Dekko Time
Check out our latest product, Dekko Time. After 2 long years we have finally reached a beta stage in the development and we are working hard towards a full launch SOON!
All account types are being offered for free during this beta stage. Use the coupon code ‘free’ on the payment tab when signing up for single and multi-user premium account types. Using this coupon will allow you to bypass the payment step and get your premium account for FREE!
20 Things Gamers Want (circa 2006)
I’ll admit it… I am a big gamer. I, CEO/President of CentreSource, love to sit back and immerse myself in a great game (alone or with a friend). While I could wax about the therapeutic value of games & their overall role in our stress-laced work force, I’ll save that for another day :) Instead, I thought I’d give you one of the funniest & best written articles I’ve seen on the current state of the gaming industry. Most of his points show that the industry is developing software in a box (or a crate if you read the article!).
Agile Development Stumble
I am going through the Agile Web Development with Rails book, and in their tutorial, there’s a slight stumbling block I ran into. I figure if anyone else has this problem and is anything like me, they’ll google for it, so maybe this will help someone out there. A description of the issue and solution follows:
