Development

ZivTech is extremely excited to announce our participation in the Google Summer of Code 2008. Jody and I, along with Aaron Winborn and Roger Filomeno, are mentoring the project Views as Web Widget, which will be worked on by Utah State University student John Snow. At the end of this project you should be able to turn your Drupal Views output into java, opensocial, and facebook widgets, and your site should be able to serve them out as XML feeds. I believe that this project truly has the potential to push Drupal to another level, as it can allow people to publish from their Drupal site to any number of other sites with ease. As Aaron noted in his post Drupal will Explode your Site into a Million Pieces, and Why You Want That:

Views as a Web Widget has the potential to revolutionize the Internet, now that I think about it. Taking a hint from Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion in The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites, we are entering a time where creating an API for embedding content within another site is becoming a standard way of sharing information.

The leading players on the web all see the train coming. They are wisely creating APIs and turning themselves into plug-and-play services, not just big destinations. YouTube is just the latest to do so today. Amazon has S3. Google has OpenSocial and an extensive library of APIs. As does Microsoft. Facebook is allowing its applications to live outside the site. Twitter is an API first and (eventually) a business model second. Finally, the booming widget economy shows the promise of small content that can go anywhere.

Anyway, I'll be sure to write more about the project as the summer progresses, but for now I just wanted to end by saying congrats to John Snow, and THANK YOU to google for funding this initiative, and to all the hard working Drupalistas (most of all Webchick) who have helped Drupal to accept 21 awesome students, whose projects promise to bring an amazing amount of new features and functions to Drupal

There are lots of great Drupal productivity / development modules (e.g. drush, devel, coder) which due to their nature as modules need to be installed on each site you work on. If you work on a dizzying number of different Drupal sites, productivity improvements which are not site-specific are the most useful.
NB: this post is geared toward Mac users.

As Alex UA recently posted, we have recently partnered in Zivtech, a Drupal-only development business. I have been working freelance since coming to web development, and while it has been by far the best job I've ever had, I think that starting a business with a good partner with complementary strengths is going to be even better.

Alex and I are both Philly folks who are very passionate about Drupal. A key principle of Zivtech is to always work as part of the community, submitting patches as we fix bugs and add features for our projects, and taking the extra time to contribute to Drupal in many ways on a daily basis.

I look forward to working with everyone from this new role.

I'm extremely excited to announce a big step for this small firm: as of last week Jody Hamilton and I officially became business partners. I know what you're probably thinking, and no, I didn't partner with Jody Hamilton the wrestler (pictured - you'll have to google it, I don't want to help his search ranking), though Jody is one mean developer and I hear she occasionally does wear a mask. I met Jody at a Drupal meetup in Philly this past winter, started following her blog, and was immediately struck by how smart of a developer she is. Every time I would meet her in person and tell her about some problem I was having--almost always involving a module that wasn't behaving or a behavior that didn't have a good module--and she would offer me a simple and elegant solution on the spot. As we got to know each other better it became apparent that we both were in need of working with someone like each other, and during DrupalCon we formally decided to merge our efforts. Jody's main role will be something along the lines of Lead Developer, while I will take on a more business oriented role (though we will both remain developers for the foreseeable future).

As with many Drupal firms, one thing that we've decided from the getgo is that we will aim to use 20% of our time on projects that have a direct positive effect on the Drupal project, which will include developing modules, writing documentation, helping at the Dojo, and more. As we grow and bring on new people we will also encourage our employees to do the same.

Lately I've been doing a fair amount of Drupal training, and one question that repeatedly comes up is "what tools do I need to work with Drupal". The following is a list tools that I use (on my Windows XP machine) while developing Drupal sites. Most of these tools are open source, and all are free.