Drupal 7 is a great improvement over 6, I can't wait for it to be released. However it's progress is eclipsing what could be an even greater improvement to the Drupal ecosystem and that is Views 3
Views is one of the most popular and most useful Drupal modules. Views 2 allows a huge amount of flexibility. Views 3 takes this to an almost unbelievable level.
However the documentation is still catching up. One of the features which has been added is support for SQL group by clauses.
I have been working on Drupal 7 sites for a while now, mostly on research projects. I like a lot of the D7 features, and think it is a big step forward over Drupal 6, which wasn't bad to begin with. Most of my work on D7 won’t have modules which will go on Drupal.org, being 'closed' or at least too specific. So I was pleasantly surprised when I was working on a side project to see an opportunity to give a little code back.
XML gets a bad rap from time to time, some criticisms against it are fair, most of the time it is people seem to complain about a bad application of XML and confuse that with the mark-up being bad.
I am used to working with semantic web technology, however often the decisions made in some of the ontologies I have seen baffle me. While they are technically correct, they sometimes seem a little strange.
What I realise is that I have not gone through the exercise myself yet. Over the next few months I intend to go through the process of building an ontology, so that I may better understand why things have been done in others that I read.
Some notes after creating a basic mobile tool using Drupal. Not exhaustive research but could be handy to someone trying to do the same.
Created a new theme got rid of all regions bar $content.
Also as we didn’t need them for the app, commented out tabs.
Even if you keep all content in a page small it looks like webkit will still zoom out by default. <meta name = "viewport" content = "initial-scale = 1.0"> sets the zoom level to 1.
Developers often get het up about their editor, as it has been and probably always will be. It is a very personal choice. As it is the system you will spend untold hours interacting with.
I am not going to say there is a right or wrong system. My preference is eclipse however my reason for linking it is not in any particular shortcut or way of working. My reason for liking it is that it is integrated
Finally I have decided to put my old theme to rest, it was a good exercise in learning how to put a theme together. But for now I think I will leave the design to the experts. I am trying on the Deco theme for size. I think I like it.
Over the weekend I learned that the XHTML2 working group was being disbanded. I am sure that it will not be mourned by many, but personally I think it is a big step in the wrong direction for the web.
Every now and then work lets us developers explore things that we think would be interesting and valuable to the company, in the same way that Google does.
Today I had a look at getting inline editing working in Drupal. The Drupal 7 usability team are keen on this but it is not easy.
