webschuur.com

So, there is a good thing you, as non-coder can do: clean up your mess :)

Submitting issues is a good thing. Without that, there is hardly a way to improve a piece of software; after all: the only relevant test is real use.

I have been maintaining many Drupal modules for years. And I tend to give out CVS access to other people I like, trust or think are good developers.

Still maintaining a module is hard work. Today, after nearly four weeks, I went trough a backlog of open issues on various of my Drupal modules. And here are some rather disturbing numbers:

update: after some stupid editing of mine, I brought the points down to six. thanks to Bert for telling me I am fool.

More and more often I have to cope with designers in the process of creating Drupal sites. That is a good sign: Drupal matures, so it gets used in more multitalented, professional environments. Not just a pimpled student in the attic who knows some Photoshop and some Javascript and learns some PHP, but project cycles with multidiscplinary teams involved.

The biggest bottleneck, in all this, however, I find, is the wrongly skilled designer.

Taxonomy and freetagging as the spine of the site

I just finished the first phase of Kaisu.org. A site alike Nowpublic, in the sense that it allows you to make the news. The main difference is the angle to look at the news. KaiSu looks at the news from a ‘regional’ angle; allowing to look for local news near you.

Main features the client asked for were:

• a clear mechanism to “write to places”. You write news, or upload photo’s ad add them to a region.
• a way to allow adoption of a region.

Huston, we have a problem.
It might be an attitude problem, maybe a communication problem, but certainly a problem.

Nearly weekly we get some question in the Drupal forums about integration of some of these Full featured Bulletin boards.

Longer term Drupal users and developers all know that it is a) not as easy as it sounds and b) not necessary in 90% of thee cases. So this is not about integrating those, because there really s no need for that. I am confident that Drupal can do at least 75% of what phpBB can. Plus so much more witch phpBB cannot. The need is not to integrate this, but to offer an easier way to this functionality that people obviously miss, or cannot get working in Drupal.

I am currently helping someone build a big community site, and day after day we run into problems that boil down to one problem. Modules hate eachother, do not integrate, and use completely different methods.

Let me take as example, the privatemessage module and the contact module. Both do something similar: allow users to contact eachother one of the most important parts of a social site. However, we all know the Drupal (core) contact tab. And privatemsg does not use a tab, but instead injects links ‘write to author’ and ‘write to User Name’. And when you also want to use “invitations for events (RSVP)” which has again a completely different experience, you will get to a point that you have to choose to either build your own All-in-one messaging module, or don’t do all the fancy messaging, and stick to one, probably privatemsg only. Modules often make it near impossible to install and use other modules.