Web Development

We recently had the pleasure of working with the awesome folks at GovLoop on an information architecture and design project. The purpose: to give GovLoop a quick facelift and use the Ning API to develop new “community pages” to make it easier for users to find content on key topics.

Here is a list of my favorite Drupal tools that aid in developing, managing, and maintaining a Drupal website.

Drush

Versions supported: All Drupal versions

To quote the module description for drush:

Most Drupal developers are familiar with the Nodequeue module.

It gives developers the ability to set up groups of nodes, called "queues". Clients can add nodes to these groups, and use the drag-n-drop interface to order the nodes as desired. It gives clients a lot more control over which items should appear on certain parts of the site.

If you're using Acquia Search or a self-hosted ApacheSolr search instance, you've already noticed that the default listing leaves a lot to be desired. Fortunately, it's not extremely difficult to make these results look exactly the way you want.

For starters, I'm assuming that Views 3 is already installed.

Create a new view

We recently rolled out a new version control process, which we feel will better support our increasing project complexity.

Previously, our live sites used trunk, and our work took place on a single dev branch. This was problematic because it was sometimes difficult to separate the tested-and-ready-for-live code from the code still in development.

There has been a lot of (virtual) ink spilled over HipHop, Facebook's new PHP-to-C compiler; but a similar approach has flown a little more under the radar.  I'm talking about Quercus, a PHP interpreter/compiler written in Java by Caucho, the makers of the Resin app server.

One frequent request we get from clients is to integrate their Drupal web site user profiles with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system so that their users' information can be used for email messaging and other purposes.

One of our goals at Forum One is to help our clients achieve a higher level of collaboration. The effective exchange of knowledge is one of the hurdles separating a good organization (or open-source project) from a great one.

After attending last week's PhoneGap training session in Washington, DC I have finally made that frightening step into mobile application development. Why was it frightening?