webschuur.com

Nice tip for all the Drupal hackers out there: snipplr code snippets for Drupal. It also has an RSS feed. Obviously, as with any unknown source, one should never ever use these snippets (except when you know PHP well).

Oh, and there is a nice jQuery feed too.

I found a really nice tracking system, dedicated for feature request: FeVote.
Since I’d like to try if it actually works as one would expect, I removed the ability to request features, on Tagadelics issuetracker. openend a project for it on FeVote.

So: if you have requests for tagadelic, log in (openID) or register over there and add your request, or vote for existing ones.

If it works, then I think I will use it for more (Drupal related) projects.

The downside, I guess, is that people will start to expect a certain feature to appear, once it gains enough votes; which, obviously, may not happen. After all: development is not a democratic process.

A good practice. A notorious problem when working with Drupal. An impossibility when moulding Joomla! 1.x into your customers wishes: how to override defaults without forking off (within a tight planning and budget).

Every single CMS, Framework or development toolkit, in some way, allows you to start off, with what the makers think you need. And then allows you to change that into your own wishes. I have written before on this subject, and drew a CMS landscape. That landscape draws one thing: the flexibility. How far a tools can be stretched, so to say.

Ajax is no longer hot, its a commodity. Rich javascript is found all over the place. This is a bad thing. Or at least something we should be worried about. We, being people who care about usability.

Not because javascript is bad, not because of the fact that many javascript is written extremely bad. But because it gives developers an excuse not to work on usability.

Being a Javascript Lover

I am a javascript lover. Back in the days I put javascript in every site I built. You know, the stuff that would alert(‘Your browser is too old’). But ever since then I have held my sepsis for use of it too. Javascript is not evil, nor is it 42. It is merely a tool: use it right, and it is good. Use it wrong and it turns evil.

In many database driven applications (web-apps) you need some sort of user-system. A system to manage log-in facilities and rights management etceteras. A general “mistake” I see all over the place is that a user equals a person, in these systems. I decided to make a decent normalised concept for this and document it for once :).

The idea is that there are two separate entities: a user and a person. You may, or may not couple them, either now, or later. The benefit is that, using this concept, you have a choice:

Yesterday I received two cancellation for projects in the next months, good for a total of over 200 reserved hours. So I am free (as in beer). This leaves a fabulous chance for an experiment I have been wanting to do for a long while: Reverse Job Offers.

In short: I offer a job, as soon as it will get payed, i will finish it.

I am currently collecting Drupal tasks, all rather large tasks that no-one stood up for, because no ones itch was large enough to cover the costs of the scratching. But maybe a combined investment, will cover the costs. I am looking for sponsors to cover the costs of one or two tasks. Obviously all work will flow back into Drupal in one way or another.