created on Sun, 2009-05-10 18:09

It's been our pleasure to work with two amazing mothers, Pixie and Gail of Thirty Years Multimedia. The pair have been friends for over thirty years and since meeting for the first time in an 8th grade art class, have seen each other through the highs and lows of motherhood. After witnessing how often their friendship had saved them and realizing how fortunate they were to have that support, the pair set about creating a place where mothers from around the world could connect and find that same support from each other. After a lot of hard work, we were very happy to see the pair recently announce the launch of their new community site, MyNameIsMom.com.

As Pixie explains, "The site was really born out of our friendship! We truly believe that Moms don't get enough support and the most media makes things a lot hard harder than they have to be." While Martha Stewart can create unrealistic expectations and the depictions of Mothers in film and on television don't seem to reflect the real experiences of the Moms watching them, Pixie and Gail wanted to create a space where real Mothers themselves could be known, supported and have the chance to really share what motherhood is really all about.

created on Tue, 2009-04-07 16:37

In November of 2007, Raincity Studios struck a deal to acquire, Bryght, the pioneering Drupal hosting solutions company. By combining the Raincity Studios development and design team with the hosting expertise of the folks at Bryght, we hoped to provide comprehensive online solutions to a range of clients. The last year and half has been a great learning experience, however it is with regret that today we must announce that effective April 30th, 2009 Bryght hosted services will be phased out with a plan to be closed completely by May 29, 2009.

Over the past five years, Bryght and Raincity Studios have forged many wonderful and productive relationships with partners and clients around the world. We pride ourselves in being able to create mutually beneficial partnerships.  As two companies that emerged at the same time and grew up together in Vancouver, we have had no relationship more meaningful than that with Bryght. The shared vision and complementary personalities of the two companies made for a excellent fit and we believe the cooperative efforts produced great results. 

created on Mon, 2009-03-30 16:07

The "featured content rotator" seems to have become a standard feature in our client sites - a front page device for promoting content, using nice "flashy" effects during auto-rotation between promoted items. For Drupal 5 sites I ended up always working off the same custom module I had built for the first one and having to tweak it according to different client requirements: Did they want tabs? Did they want pause and play buttons? Should navigation be triggered on tab click or on tab hover? And so on. I had been thinking to myself I should really get around to writing a one-module-fits-all solution, where these options would just be different configuration settings. Well, I am now certain I will never write such a module. Recently, we needed to implement a rotator feature for a D6 client site. I had heard vaguely that there were D6 modules available but until I came across this post in the Duplicated Modules Hall of Shame on groups.drupal.org I had no idea that so many developers had contributed their own version of this feature.

created on Wed, 2009-03-11 22:02

[See previous git blog post for more background on how this procedure isn't supported and other blah blah!]

In my never ending quest to make things simpler, I have distilled the process of using git with Acquia Drupal 6 (version 1.2.4 currently) down to 5 points:

1. Install git and create your RSA SSH key
2. cd /var/www/html
3. git clone git@github.com:rtanglao/acquia-drupal-6.git
4. edit settings.php, apache config, etc.
5. install.php (i.e. install Drupal as normal!)

And it's even simpler for upgrading:

1. On staging or dev server, backup your database and take site offline
2. git pull
3. update.php (i.e. upgrade Drupal following the normal Drupal installation process)
4. repeat on live server

After the jump, more git and Drupal geekery and the way forward with git submodules (tutorial, Daniel Morrison's tutorial)

created on Tue, 2009-03-10 12:58

Today is my first day back at Raincity after DrupalCon DC and I think so far I haven't done a great job of verbally communicating to my colleagues who didn't attend what the conference was like, what I personally enjoyed most about it, what new stuff I learned, etc. so here's a more organised version of my thoughts about the conference.

I got so much out of DrupalCon DC 2009 - there were great talks, great parties, great people. The main presentation highlights for me were:

• The session by Chapter Three's Josh Koenig on handling asynchronous data in Drupal. It began with a basic demonstration of how ajax is done in Drupal, the use of Drupal.behaviors, making sure your ajax degrades gracefully without JavaScript, etc., after which he asked the question "Who thinks this is totally remedial and boring?" and a handful of people put their hands up. Now, the room was pretty packed, so I think less than 10% found it remedial or boring. For me, though I didn't put my hand up (because I'm never bored when someone's talking about ajax), I was glad that Josh nonetheless moved on to talk about some more advanced aspects of the use of ajax that I had little experience with yet, in particular the challenge of building truly scalable ajax applications. He talked us through the problems they had come up against when building a live chat system and some of the solutions they looked at before deciding on using Memcached, the distributed memory caching system. He also discussed security considerations with ajax such as the ability of someone who knows the path to an ajax callback to access that path directly and e.g. make an unsuspecting visitor to their site cause a vote count to be incremented (as was subsequently demonstrated in one of the security talks).
Tags:
• Drupal
• DrupalCon
• DrupalCon DC 2009