Drupal Views are a fairly wonderful creation. They allow all kinds of usable, well….VIEWS, of your data in a Drupal site. They allow you to view your data either as a page or a block (or an RSS feed, etc), however one thing was was lacking was the ability to page content within a view block. The default view blocks provide you simply with a “more” link that will take you to the full blown page view. Thta was not working for us, or one of our clients and something has to give.
January 16, 2008
January 10, 2008
Drupal module…phone home!
At Phase2, as we develop more and more Drupal Platforms (more on this another time) we wind up with many custom modules that are not contributed back to drupal.org. They are either too tied to a specific client, or something that is not ready for general consumption, or frankly, the client might see as a strategic competitive advantage. Regardless of the reason, for modules not hosted on drupal.org you lose some ability to have the wonderful update_status module provide info to your site implementations when the custom modules are out of date….or so I thought.
December 28, 2007
Web Frameworks – PHP vs. Java
Having done most of my web development work with Java over the last several years, I am familiar with many of the open source Java frameworks such as Struts, WebWork (now Struts2) and Hibernate, as well as the features that are part of any servlet container such as JSPs and container managed security. These technologies have been around for several years now and I would consider all of them fairly mature. So, when I was recently faced with the challenge of developing a web application in PHP, I went surfing the web for PHP frameworks that would adhere to many of the design patterns and philosophies that are prevalent in these popular Java web frameworks. Little did I know that I was in for a wild ride through a sea of PHP frameworks that ranged from the extremely simple ones that only provide a few basic functions to the overly complex ones that attempt to provide anything and everything you’d ever need to build an application!
