Drupal

Blog Post
Skills: Drupal
Tags: GIT

Last night the Portland Drupal User Group had a coordinated series of lightning talks about the migration of Drupal and its contributed modules and themes from CVS version control to GIT version control. It is pretty amazing how many star Drupalists are located right here in Portland and making such a major community contribution. A few things are particularly exciting about this change:

  1. I get the impression that with GIT's handling of branching and merging/rebasing, if I start using it I might actually use branching. With Subversion, I don't really create code branches at all...but I have always had the impression that branching is part of how version control ought to be used.
  2. Everyone with a drupal.org account will get a sandbox on drupal.org for committing code without making it an official contributed module. Thus, it gives people a place to play with code ideas. It also reduces the barrier to entry to contributing your own module: once you have a project in the sandbox, you can apply to get it promoted to contributed module.
  3. Eliza411 has pushed to get excellent documentation for using GIT with Drupal on the web site...this will further reduce the barriers to entry. Yay!
Resource (external link)

This article file permissions settings for a Drupal site on Linux or Windows. Very useful for getting started with basic Linux file security.

Resource (external link)
Skills: Drupal, Linux, MySQL
Tags: backup, drupal

Overview of the methods for backing up a Drupal site. Official Drupal.org handbook.

Blog Post

This site, like many personal projects, is a work in progress. I created this site as a long-overdue replacement for my first portfolio site, which lived at danobrienmuzyka.com (domain now redirects here). I built this site in Drupal 6 because Drupal is now my favorite content management system / development framework. I came up with an elaborate scheme for organizing the data in this site, which includes not only blog posts, portfolio pieces, and annotated links to recommended external resources, but also a resume in which each bullet point is a separate content item (node), put together to form job descriptions, which are in turn put together to form the resume itself. I broke down the data to such a granular level in order to expose specific pieces of the resume to the searching and browsing functionality.

Speaking of search, I also used this site rebuild as an opportunity to experiment with Drupal's Search Lucene API module, which uses the PHP port of the Lucene search engine. The faceted browsing capability provided by Lucene particularly interested me, and I tried to take advantage of it by setting up facets for browsing by tag, skills used/required/taught, and content type (blog post, portfolio piece, external resource, etc.).

Portfolio Piece
  • Liased with stakeholders to determine needs and managed expectations.
  • Managed development to staging to production workflow for feature enhancements on existing site.
  • Cleaned up and optimized CSS stylesheets written by previous developers.
  • Customized existing Drupal theme.
  • Maintained site with Drupal update releases.
  • Converted and moved existing Wordpress blog into Drupal site, maintaining existing post styles and YouTube video embed filters, while converting comments to Disqus comment tool.
  • Wrote Apache rewrite rules, resulting in URL sh