October 2010

26 Oct

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, 2010

Posted by matt in drupal, google, gsoc

For the second year I was given the opportunity to represent Drupal at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. The primary purpose of the Mentor Summit is to bring together the projects that participated in GSOC, and provide a forum for discussions.

While there, I learned about what other CMS systems are up to and how other Open Source projects were working with Git and DVCS systems. Here are some of the highlights.

GSOC logo

Posted on 26. Oct, 2010 by matt
GSOC logo
15 Oct

Varnish String Concatenation in VCL

Posted by matt in varnish

For whatever reason, I have not seen Varnish documentation on concatenating strings. It's not on the official operators list. Even more bothersome, I occasionally see people using regular expression substitutions (regsuball) to do string concatenation in Varnish's VCL.

In fact, string concatenation in Varnish is simply a matter of setting a variable with two strings. For example, here's how to prefix a URL in vcl_recv:

set req.url = "/my_prefix" req.url

That's actually all there is to it. No explicit operator is needed.

13 Oct

Why Object-Oriented Programming is Bad for Drupal

Posted by matt in drupal, php

I have led or contributed to dozens of Open Source projects. And with one exception, all of my code has been Object Oriented. (That one exception is Drupal.) Java, Python, PHP, and even OO Perl... I'm a dyed-in-the-wool OO developer. So this may come as a shock to anyone who knows me, but I am about to make the argument that OO is bad for Drupal.

Trust me, this is not a high point in my development life. I feel like I'm telling my child that she should skip college; that such a level of sophistication is just not necessary in her life. And I guess in a way that is precisely what I am saying.