Thinking in Drupal Mike Minton

Our Drupal portfolio is growing rapidly and we have three very interesting sites in progress currently. One integrates video content using Amazon S3 as the storage engine and another is a significantly complex portal site in which integrated search across tens of thousands of content nodes will be the major technical challenge. In May we also built out the Denver Botanic Gardens site in Drupal.

My travels back to Michigan this weekend provided a nice opportunity to catch up on my Drupal reading and podcasts. I recently ordered a great book, “Learning Drupal 6 Module Development“, written by Matt Butcher. It was one of the rare technical books that I actually read chapter to chapter as opposed to skimming and keeping nearby for reference. Some things I took away from the book:

• A solid understanding and example of how to use jQuery and AJAX/JSON to retrieve and present additional content.
• How to wire in custom Administration Pages and functionality through the hook_menu function().
• A nice overview of how we can use custom installation profiles to automate the initial configuration and setup of Drupal sites that our customers will host.

I also listened to over 12 hours of Drupal Podcasts from Lullabot. Lullabot provides consulting and training for Drupal. Many members of the team have also contributed to both the core implementation as well as several contributed modules. The real strength of many Open Source projects is the community that develops around the various projects. Listening to the podcasts provided some nice insight into who these people are and just how brilliant they are.

My favorite Podcast was No. 58, Earl Miles Interview. Earl Miles is the author of arguably two of the three most important Drupal contributed modules – Views and Panels. CCK being the third. He also wrote Node Queue. After listening the podcast, I can see many potential implementations for Node Queue.

Podcasts are not great for learning how to do things but they can do a great job of providing insight into the fundamentals and the “why”. I have a much deeper appreciation for the importance of CCK and Views in addition to a deeper understanding of the overall Drupal architecture, framework strengths, and limitations.

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