Drupal Planet Posts

BSU Appathon 2012 Postmortem - Learning Assistant

Submitted by cweagans on March 4, 2012 - 7:52pm

This weekend (March 2-4, 2012), I competed in the Boise State University Appathon. This is a 48 hour competitive coding contest, wherein teams are tasked to create either a web app or a mobile app that has some relation to student life. Our team chose to create an alternative to Blackboard (which is the LMS that is used by BSU). The general feeling that I've gathered from students on campus is that Blackboard is a horrible kludgy tool that has no business being deployed in any production environments. I tend to agree with that statement.

The Magic of `screen`

Submitted by cweagans on January 29, 2012 - 4:22pm

Screen is an awesome little utility that, in my opinion, doesn't get enough use by web developers.

Wikipedia tells us that "GNU Screen is a software application that can be used to multiplex several virtual consoles, allowing a user to access multiple separate terminal sessions inside a single terminal window or remote terminal session. It is useful for dealing with multiple programs from a command line interface, and for separating programs from the Unix shell that started the program".

BlogAPI: Request for Contributors

Submitted by cweagans on November 8, 2011 - 10:31pm

I've had a lot of difficulty finding time to work on BlogAPI, finding that I'm typically tied up with my day job or with paying client work. I know that there were a pretty fair number of people that used BlogAPI in Drupal 6 that would like to use it in Drupal 7.

I've been thinking a lot about how to build BlogAPI for Drupal 7 and I think using Services would be a good way to go. There's a few BlogAPIs that use XML-RPC, but there are a few that are moving to simple RESTful servies or JSON-RPC, so Services make sense to me.

A Drupal Hosting Adventure

Submitted by cweagans on October 26, 2011 - 10:21pm

I've been looking into hosting options for Drupal lately, and I really haven't found anything that looked amazing that was also in my price range. I know how to administer a server, but that doesn't mean I really want to. However, once I found that there were no suitable shared hosting services, I decided to explore other options.

My Drupal/Git Workflow

Submitted by cweagans on October 14, 2011 - 12:05pm

I've seen a few posts around Drupal.org from people trying to figure out a solid way to use Git to effectively manage their Drupal installation. This is the method that I've been using.

Initial repository setup

To start off, open a terminal and run these commands (you can copy/paste if you want):

Solarized Themes for PHPStorm

Submitted by cweagans on September 8, 2011 - 5:06am

I just ported the Solarized Light and Dark color schemes to work with PHPstorm.

You can get it from the Github page

I think it works with every language that PHPStorm supports. If not, please open an issue in the Github issue tracker.

My Ideal Code Editor

Submitted by cweagans on August 3, 2011 - 3:14pm

I'm a vim user.

I've been using vim for a few years now, and I'm very comfortable with it. I wish it were easier to do some things, but I can live with a little bit of difficulty, as long as it only happens one time (crafting the config file, mostly).

The problem is, I also sort of like Textmate.

I won't use Textmate though, because Macromates is probably the least transparent organization that I can think of; less so than Microsoft, in my opinion. They have been stringing people along for years now, saying that "Textmate 2 is on the way: just wait. Be patient."

Blackboard Color Scheme for PHPstorm

Submitted by cweagans on March 30, 2011 - 12:47pm

I just ported the Blackboard color scheme to work with PHPstorm.

You can get it from the Github page

Note that it doesn't work with languages other than the ones that I care about right now: XHTML, PHP, Javascript, CSS, Regex, and Smarty. Improvements are always welcome.

Feeds and APC

Submitted by cweagans on February 8, 2011 - 1:27pm

I was playing with Aegir and Open Atrium last night and was running into a weird error with Feeds. The error read:

Fatal error: Class 'FeedsConfigurable' not found in /var/aegir/platforms/openatrium-b9/sites/all/modules/feeds/includes/FeedsImporter.inc on line 31

Drupal Planet Feature

Submitted by cweagans on February 3, 2011 - 1:45am

I know that some people don't like using taxonomy.module for managing what posts actually go to Drupal Planet. To remedy that situation, I've created the Drupal Planet feature.

It uses Flag module with Views to create a page and a feed of posts for planet, which frees up your taxonomy terms to.....you know......categorize your content and stuff.

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