Rachel's blog

I am one of those people that gets really excited about something for a little while, then my passion slowly fades out (like getting all excited about scuba and ballroom dance classes, then realizing the time and money investment and losing interest). I seem not to have this problem with Drupal though, because the Drupal CMS is really that awesome. Heavenly even. Below are my reasons why.

Past CMS Nightmares

With the rise of Augmented Reality, Microsoft Surface, and iPhone/Android, I think there is a clue where the future of the web and technology is headed. Our physical realities are becoming one with the digital. We, as a society, are learning to truly integrate digital information into our every day lives.

Family and friends who know me the best, know that I have a really poor memory. My sister asked me awhile back, "Why don't you take gingko pills to help your memory?" and I replied, "Because I will forget to take them." It was very true. So then how am I able to function in my every day working and personal life? Well, over the years, I did build up a bag of tricks.

At LevelTen, many of us would prefer to banish WYSIWYG editors from our existence, as it's often hard to maintain clean page markup and doing everything in code ensures we have that control over what's being entered. In reality, we use a WYSIWYG for every one of our client websites, as it is a necessity for any content entry worker who is not familiar with HTML.

Drupal, by default, does not support automated logouts based on inactivity. Thankfully, there is the "Automated Logout" module, which allows granular control of automated logouts. And for browser exits, there is a value you can set in your settings.php file.

"When you fail, you've got to own it, feel the pain." In my personal life and relationships, I'm trying to become more aware of when I screw up and to be more capable of admitting when I am wrong. I think this is important in any personal relationship. So why would a business relationship be any different? The "We F*cked Up" panel at SXSW Interactive brought this point to light.

LevelTen has been practicing Scrum, mixed with other agile practices, for about a year and a half now. While we have solved plenty of challenges this past year on figuring out how to use the Scrum framework to fit our company, we still have a lot to learn on how to be truly agile. The challenges we face were really brought to light during Mike Cohn's ScrumMaster Certification course I took early this week.

There are a myriad of ways to improve Drupal site performance by tweaking your website's server settings, but what about websites hosted in a shared environment? The contributed module, named "Boost," may be the answer for performance improvements for Drupal websites hosted on shared servers.

Besides the obvious possibilities for a Drupal boom in 2010 (launch of Drupal 7), there are several other reasons that may spark an increase in popularity.

Government Interest

The fact that whitehouse.gov launched on Drupal was huge news in 2009, but with the recently published "Open Government Directive," the whitehouse site may be just the tip of the iceberg for Drupal.

One of our clients was looking for a solution for their user base to purchase yearly memberships with Drupal. Members would be able to access additional sections of the website. After searches on the Ubercart website and Drupal.org forums, I found a pretty good solution. Ubercart is an extremely powerful e-commerce system and their support for "buy a role" makes memberships a breeze (once you know how to set it up of course!). Here is the step-by-step solution I set up for our client: