I’ve been a bad blogger and have not been posting anything. Since March, apparently. But I have been busy. Unfortunately, most of the work I’ve been doing is so specialized I can’t really justify “sharing” it here. I would like to start writing something. Just to show what I’ve been doing, even if it can’t really be re-used. But for now, how about some vague “what has Ethan been coding” type updates?
I’ve been posting 90% of the material to our web development documentation database. This database is meant to store code snippets for easy re-use. jQuery we can use on other projects, CSS tips, Drupal how-to’s, that sort of thing. Recently I was made lead developer for the company website, so I’ve been squeezing that in around billable work. I have been slowly testing module updates, which nobody bothered to do since March. Most of the work I do is Wordpress and Drupal. We like Acquia because it gives you a good place to start, including most of the modules you would otherwise have to install yourself.
In the Wordpress arena, I’ve been doing some sophisticated non-blog type stuff that I’m proud of. Clients like how easy Wordpress is to use. My little box of tricks gets re-used on almost every project, but every once in a while a project will require that I handle something a little differently. I was told that in a recent management meeting, three web projects that have come in way under budget were mine, and were all sites developed with Wordpress. I’ve also been trying to teach the rest of my team how to develop in Wordpress.
I’ve learned a lot about Drupal in the last year. Especially about Views. Views have become my new best friend, and I’m really impressed with how quickly it is to get something done, how easy it is to customize it’s appearance with templates, and how re-usable almost everything is. I’ve come up with a lot of “best practices” for building sites with Drupal that I am trying to get the rest of my team to use. They make everybody’s life easier. Those would probably make really good articles, even if they aren’t about code.