CivicActions

I recently suggested that the way we approach new development is the most important factor in determining the long term value of our work. But just how can developers using Drupal make the most of open source by ensuring that participating and contributing is an essential part of our daily workflow?

Here are some practical tips that come out of our experience at CivicActions and that can guide you in deciding how to approach new development to get the full benefit of open source. Read on as well for a discussion of patching vs. hacking vs. forking and of how to get attention for your patches.

When developing in Drupal, should we hack something together that's specific to a site? Or should we instead take the time to do things "right" by improving existing modules or writing our own new modules to contribute to the community? When is one of these options better than the other? How do we decide?

It's a key set of questions. All but the most basic projects will require some level of new development. The way we approach this new development is probably the most important factor in determining the long term value of our work, both for us and for our clients.

It's a specter ghastly enough to make the most seasoned Drupal developer quiver with fear.

Yes, it's the dreaded Haunted Drupal Site!

Oh, it may appear innocent enough on the surface. Just a typical business or organizational website that perhaps you've been asked to upgrade or enhance. But don't be fooled--lurking beneath the surface is a host of nasty surprises just waiting for the developer naive or foolish enough to venture in.

One of the many great things about working at CivicActions is that we get a stipend for work we do for the community. This month I decided to use some of my stipend time to code up a proposed solution for Drupal core for dynamically loading paged content.

Why should paged content be loaded through AJAX? Well, take the example of comments. You're viewing a page with lots of comments. You click a link to bring up the next 30 comments. You wait while the whole page refreshes.

This morning my Drupal development environment came miraculously to life. I used the opportunity to learn more about how the machines view us as humans and what their terms are for communicating with us. Here's a transcript of our conversation.

So I've been dying to know, machine, what do you think of us humans?

Um, come again? I'm not quite sure I get what you're saying.