In the last 24 hours, I have had three glimpses into emergency plans. First, my local coffee shop -- the true source of my productivity -- experienced a water main break. Second, a site I manage experienced a server failure. Third, I came across Netflix's recently open sourced Chaos Monkey tool.

HP Cloud has migrated its blog site into Drupal. This makes the fourth Drupal migration for HP Cloud. But it is the first one to be running entirely inside of our own cloud.

We're using HP Cloud Compute instances, our Relational Database in-cloud MySQL server, Object Storage for all static files...

Pandoc is an Open Source tool (and a library) for converting documents from one format to another. Specifically, it can take a document written as Markdown, reStructured Text, Textile, HTML, DocBook, or LaTeX and convert it to any of a plethora of other formats, including:

• Word DOCX
• Open Document...

Aaron Winborn is a prolific contributor to Drupal, not just code-wise but as a community member as well. He's been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative nervous disease that will shorten his lifespan considerably. He has posted about his condition and its impact on his...

If there is one single problem I would identify with the now nearly ubiquitous JSON format, it's the absence of comments.

Why is this a big deal?

1. Comments can be used to document. Since JSON has gained currency as a configuration file format, this is a big deal. Take a look at the default Apache...

For a few years I have fostered the development of Fortissimo. Fortissimo is a different kind of PHP framework. Instead of the MVC pattern, it combines the Front Controller pattern with the Chain-of-Command pattern. Like Software Factories, it is based on the idea that developers should focus on...

In many ways, I am not the average PHP developer. PHP was not my first language. I came to it after learning C, Perl, Java, JavaScript and others. And my initial reaction to PHP was, "What a funny little template language!" But through a long and convoluted career trajectory, I ended up as a professional...

Dear Social Media Users,

I'd like to ask you to perform a courtesy.

Recall your six-year-old self on the elementary school playground. You're likely to have overheard (or perhaps made) statements like this:

• "She's stupid."

• "You're a fatso."

• "He's such a retard."

We all give a hearty frown of...

tl;dr: FIG is a welcomed force in PHP standardization. But I believe their recent two standards have undercut their credibility. By choosing contentious grounds, issuing an arbitrary standard that competes with existing conventions, and doing this in an area that does not actually improve the interoperability...

I hate typing long shell commands, so I often create for myself short shell scripts that perform common tasks for me. I can hard-code all those options and arguments. Sometimes, though, there are a few bits that I want to change on a run or I don't want to hard code into a shell script.

Here's an...