The drupal.org web site, nice as it is after the redesign, is not a pleasure to access on a mobile device like the iPhone. In issue #951114: Mobile phone support (iPhone / Android) there are some discussions and suggestions how to improve this.
I wrote the original Bazaar workflow for developing Drupal based web sites in 2009. I still use basically the same workflow and it serves me well. In this post I include the improvements and changes I have made. They include use of Bazaar shared repository, Bazaar smart server and Git since drupal.
When I got my first iPhone two years back I adapted the theme here on xdeb.org to work better with it. I documented it in my post Make a Drupal theme look better on the iPhone. During the holidays I got to try out the iPad for a few days and found ways to make the xdeb.
The same customer that featured in my last blog wanted a aggregator block turned in to a vertical news ticker/scroller. The block contained a total of 20 items of which three should show. I wanted something lightweight and simpel that I could add to the theme.
Here follows a solution for a convenient and secure way of allowing other machines to connect to the Bazaar repository on my server via SSH and key authentication. I only want to allow Bazaar commands and not any other. This setup should be easy to adapt for Git and Mercurial (hg) or any other application that sends command via SSH.
This post assumes that you are familiar with the unix command line. If you are not then I recommend the video from Addison Berry session “The command line is your friend” from DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010. I have something of a passion/obsession with removing annoying obstacles in my every day tasks.
The search field is an important part of almost any web site today and it deserve some attention. Especially if you have implemented some really good search like Apache Solr (see How to set up Apache Solr search for Drupal 6 on a Debian GNU/Linux server).
A common thing you do in Drupal web site development is to take a database dump from production/staging/testing and use it to update your local development environment. In your local development environment you want other settings for things like error reporting and cache, enable/disable modules etc.
At BarCamp Kerala 7 in Kottayam I gave a Drupal session about how to build complex web sites the Drupal way. Below you find the slides as a PDF file and the blog system “feature” I demonstrated. It was real pleasure to be a part of this BarCamp Kerala!
In Drupal 7 InnoDB will replace MyISAM as the default storage engine for increased scalability and data integrity. Most big sites are already using InnoDB, drupal.org does since some time. InnoDB is generally a better choice for Drupal so why wait for Drupal 7.