This listing combines the Drupal Planet and Drupal tags from this site. Items that are of possible interest to the broader Drupal community may be posted to Drupal Planet. Otherwise they will be posted to the Drupal tag here.

All I needed to learn in PHP I learned in Drupal

Last weekend I ventured to Bellingham Washington for a beautiful weekend at LinuxFest Northwest. All and all it was a great weekend. The weather cooperated and the meeting was wonderful.

Along the way I bought some tickets for the LinuxFest raffle. By chance one of those was a winning ticket and the prize included picking from some great titles. I'll write more about these great titles soon. First however, the title that wound up to be a disappointment. I picked up a copy of Wicked Cool PHP: Real-World Scripts That Solve Difficult Problems. From the title I was hoping to find some wicked cool stuff in it.

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Posted on May 3, 2009 - 01:34 by Joshua Brauer

Getting ready for Drupalchix

In the days and weeks before the arrival of our newest addition to the family we're getting ready to have folks come stay at the house. One of the things we've traditionally resisted is having a "Guest Room". Frankly paying rent on a room and keeping it up just for the few nights a year it would be used has never made much sense to me. When somebody drops by we have a very nice airbed that does a reasonable job.

This time, however, things are a little different. The folks will be in town and staying a little longer than normal so something a little better would be handy. We considered going out to find a futon mattress to make for a more regular bed.

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Posted on March 22, 2009 - 12:56 by Joshua Brauer

Kicking off Drupalcon with APIs

Drupalcon is off to a great start. Yesterday afternoon and this morning we met all kinds of great Drupal folks while passing out the free Acquia t-shirts and sharing the news about several recent releases. If you haven't had the chance to check out the new Acquia Drupal Stack Installers. The installers bring a Windows and Mac OS X installer to the desktop that install and setup all of the components necessary (Apache, MySQL, PHP and Acquia Drupal) to get started running a Drupal site.

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Posted on March 4, 2009 - 09:02 by Joshua Brauer

Getting to Drupalcon

On the trip to the airport I was reflecting on just where Drupal has taken me. On one hand having chosen nearer the beginning of the decade to use this open source PHP-based content management system was a short-term decision. I had websites and they needed to be done. The solution was easily Drupal. Sure there was the roll-your-own option. But I've been there and there is little way to get around the idea that proprietary website management is for the birds.

In a literal sense Drupal has powered travels across the country. The wonderful thing about Drupal travel is the community.

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Posted on February 28, 2009 - 07:19 by Joshua Brauer

Hard coded IDs in Comment Module

Starting the new year off with some Lullabot podcast listening while the little one naps. There are lots of blog posts to come from it on various topics. The latest podcast is a live show of a question and answer session from Do it With Drupal.

The first question that kicked off the session was about frustration in theming comments and the comment form in Drupal. As the answers say on the on the podcast this is slightly better in Drupal 6 than it is in Drupal 5. However there's a pretty serious bug that rapidly becomes a deal-stopper when trying to do much with comments. The problem lurks in comment_render(). And following that link you'll notice it's not fixed in Drupal 7 yet either.

Fortunately there is an issue on Drupal.org for working on it. However to date we haven't really solved the problem. On one level the current solution which basically moves the theming function basically makes overriding the theming of comment lists possible but a better way is needed. The problem with the current solution is it's too specific to comments. There are other places where it would be very handy to be able to pass a nested array and have that rendered either in a threaded or flat version for comments as well as any other place a module might want to generate a list items to be displayed in a similar way.

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Posted on January 1, 2009 - 15:33 by Joshua Brauer

Goodbye 2008, Hello 2009

Here we have the obligatory last post of 2008. The lists of things that changed this year could fill volumes. Waiting for the fireworks last year, in a house with no blinds on the windows, we were just getting started on the new adventure. Quite an adventure it has been too.

Starting a new Drupal consultancy at the beginning of the year. Getting more involved in the Drupal community and wrapping up the winter with a visit to Boston for my first Drupalcon. Even a few months in Drupalcon was a chance to renew friendships and make many new friends.

After a winter of travel and coming home to Idaho we came home and got down to work. Several projects cranked out and lots of Drupaling later it came time for a summer of travel. From Oregon to Maryland the trips were great. Once again it seemed everywhere I landed the topic of conversation was Drupal. One of the highlights was spending hours manning the Drupal booth at OSCON with Kieran, who would soon become a colleague at Acquia though that wasn't to come till a little later.

The week at OSCON happened to coincide with getting my first look at the Acquia Network. Sitting in the gazebo at the hotel on wireless and Skype I ran through the Acquia Network and definitely liked what I saw. What none of us knew at the time was a little over a month later I'd sign the offer letter joining the Acquia team. Joining a high functioning startup filled with bright folks is like jumping on a treadmill cranked up to full speed. From there the speed only increased.

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Posted on January 1, 2009 - 00:59 by Joshua Brauer