Michael J. Ross contributed a review of our Drupal 7 Module Development book. Slashdot typically writes very fair reviews, and Michael's is no exception. He does a good job of digging into each chapter and examining both the strengths and weaknesses of the book.

Up front I would like to make a...

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...

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...

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...

I spend most of my days doing software development and system administration. And I am always busy, so streamlining any part of my workday can have a big impact on how much I get done and how good I feel about my productivity. Taking a look back over the last six months, I see that I have added a...

The Learning Drupal 7 Module Development book is now in Packt's RAW (Read As we Write) program. This has been an exciting few months, as Larry (Crell) Garfield, Ken Rickard, Greg Dunlap, John Albin Wilkins, Sam Boyer, Matt Farina and I have all worked together to bring this book to fruition. As you...

When I tried to run pyrus.phar on Mac OSX recently, I had a strange experience. Executing php pyrus.phar generated the output ??? and then exited. With a little more testing, I discovered that all of my Phar packages, when from from the command line, generate "garbage" output (a series of question...

Did you know that you can reload varnish VCL configuration files without restarting varnish? While I could find any clear mention of this in the manual, it turns out to be a simple two-step task accomplished using varnishadm.

Prerequisites: Having Varnish Listen for Admin Connections

In order to...

In my current Drupal development environment, I run an entire Debian server stack (LAMP + Memcache + Varnish, etc) inside of a VirtualBox virtual machine. On those frustration-laden occasions when I need to fire up the debugger, I use MacGDBp to connect to the virtual machine. Here's how I configure...

When working with checkboxes in jQuery and JavaScript, sometimes all you really want to do is toggle the checked state of the checkbox. There are many examples of strange ways of accomplishing this, many of which are wrong or will only work on some browsers. Here is a correct (XHTML-correct) and compact...