Alexander on Web Development

After a more than a couple 24 hour coding marathons today I am very proud to announce that Dialogo Digital (http://dialogodigital.com, #EditoresDialogo) launched it's redesign to the public. The modern design was conceived and created by web designer Joel Martínez of String Puerto Rico (http://stringpr.com/) in late September 2009. It took me around 8 weeks to convert Joel's standards compliant XHTML into a full Drupal theme.

Three main templates were developed: one for the front page, one for the news sections, and one for the news articles.

I need to construct a newsticker for Diálogo Digital. We have been re-redesigning our news site for about 8 weeks now (except for the web designer that prepared the plain HTML/CSS files) I am alone. Initially I felt inclined to use a community provided (contrib) module, but here were my options:

• http://drupal.org/project/newsticker It is built for Drupal 6, uses JQuery's serialscroll plugin, outputs the newsticker into a block. Does not use Drupal's node system.

• http://drupal.org/project/views_ticker Built for Drupal 5 only, so it wasn't really an option.

So you are using the devel module to see what preprocessing and #theming functions are getting called in the page-taxonomy.tpl.php pages in your #Drupal installation (hereafter simply referred to as taxonomy pages). Are you wondering who is generating all that stuff inside the $content variable? Why can't you get an array of $node objects, just like when you get a single $node object when viewing each individual node page?

[inline:devel_page_taxonomy.PNG=page-taxonomy.tpl.php $content variable viewed with the devel module]

I want to convert Drupal into a web based project management software. The fact that Drupal comes already with templates, user administration and a whole lot of stuff I can hook into would make this endeavor easier that if I did it from scratch.

I decided to use Drupal because XPlanner, although looks promising, is written on Java. The problem with that is that 1) I'm a LAMP developer and 2) Dreamhost doesn't have Java.

After taking a look at XPlanner, I came up with this schema.

Dear Drupal,

I hate you so much. You’re cool, with tons of features, but geez, it’s so challenging to get to know you! Here I am @ my home @ 4:47AM, up since 11:00PM, trying to figure -just- how to modify a menu that I programmed on Monday.