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Building custom Web platforms based on Drupal

Give Apture a try at crotown.com

Posted Tue, 07/06/2010 - 20:40 by Steve

Here is a little post to help you try Apture searches. This is going to be easy since I have Apture 2.0 installed on this very web site.

Suppose you are reading my previous post and you see the phrase "Having Apture integration built-in to a site's infrastructure lowers the barrier to trying it out" and you are wondering what exactly the term infrastructure means. So, highlight it (select it).

Apture Part I: Introduction

Posted Thu, 07/01/2010 - 20:07 by Steve

Building an OpenPublish (2.0)-based site has introduced me to Apture, a technology that is built into each OpenPublish install. (My recent post "My first Impression of OpenPublish: 10 Joys" gives a tiny introduction to Apture.)

Having Apture integration built-in to a site's infrastructure lowers the barrier to trying it out, for sure. All a site developer has to do is surf to apture.com, get an API key, and enter the key into the appropriate configuration page on the OpenPublish site. Then they are ready to experiment.

My First Impressions of OpenPublish: 10 Joys

Posted Mon, 06/14/2010 - 11:38 by Steve

We recently switched the new site development for Boston Review(BR) from a bare Drupal underpinning to an OpenPublish underpinning. In this post I share my early impressions from a the perspective of a developer and site-builder.

[OpenPublish is a Drupal distribution from Phase2 Technologies based (currently) on Drupal 6.x with many module choices, configuration, and default theming intended to be useful to publishers.]

Beware of extra Commas: PHP Function Argument Lists are not like Arrays

Posted Fri, 06/11/2010 - 11:42 by Steve

Take another look at the Drupal community's coding standard on Arrays.

A couple months ago I was working on an importer for a Drupal site where the originating data could be scripted in JavaScript. So I was writing PHP code (to upload the Drupal nodes) using JavaScript code (to access the original data). It occurred to me just how convenient it is to be able to write every array element the same way, with a comma after it and not have to write conditional code that makes the last entry comma-less.

Architecting the future of BR on the web

Posted Tue, 05/04/2010 - 15:20 by Steve

At Cronen-Townsend Consulting, I am building the back-end of a new web site for the Boston Review using the Open Source content management framework Drupal. The site will incorporate current standard features, like a block showing the most recent comments, sharing with all popular social-network sites, and a block showing today's most popular content.

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