acornThe more I develop the more I hate bloatware. Let me explain…

I code using Coda, because it does what I need. I looked at Aptana Studio, Eclipse, PHPIDE and lots of others, before settling on Coda. I signed up for MacHeist last year and got at license for Espresso, but still didn’t use it. Coda rocks. It is a fantastic editor. It may not do code folding – a favourite of mine, coming in Coda 2 apparently – but it does what I need 99% of the time.

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Anatomy of an Iteration

by Mike Richardson on February 16, 2010

in Code

Post it notes!As I’ve previously mentioned, we’re developing BeGrand.net using an iterative, agile methodology, which is nice. However, this is the most misunderstood element of my working life when I talk to other, non-techies about it. So I thought I’d write this post to describe what an iteration, in the terms of BeGrand.net, actually means…

We’ve just pulled down the wooly hat, given a lovely packed lunch to and generally kissed off to the first day of school our first proper release since we launched on 25th January. We’d codenamed it “Ellington” and were ready to begin on the next release which is codenamed “Armstrong”. The more astute members of the audience might be spotting a link here.

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Out of the box, the Drupal Organic Groups module doesn’t put the group name at the top of each group post. This looked a bit odd to use because we use a modified og_tracker block on our homepage to show registered users new group, blog and comment content.

When you clicked on the title of the group post from this block you didn’t really have a context in terms of which group you were in (apart from the not so conspicuous group tools block in the right sidebar.

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As we’ve now launched, we’re moving into Phase 2 development, which is nice.

However, we’ve moved from 2 week intensive to 3 week, more reflective, iterations.

We are due to deliver P2 R1 (phase 2, release 1) codename Ellington on 22nd Feb with testing starting on the 15th. I’ve been looking at change/bug management solutions as we go forward. At the start of this iteration we had 11 features, bugs or enhancements to include. Less than a week later, we’re up to 24, and counting.

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Connecting to Amazon EC2 Servers using Coda and Transmit

January 22, 2010

We’ve recently moved our servers to a new build on the Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure which has been an interesting process (more posts coming once we’ve launched the site and have a nice cuppa!)
We’re also big biG bIG BIG fans of Panic’s excellent file transfer client (Transmit) and amazing editor (Coda) both of which are [...]

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Taming Views output with Semantic Views

November 6, 2009

I made great play in the previous post about how we had managed to create minimal, concise and semantic markup but I neglected to refer to the elephant in the room, namely the ultra-div- and class-tastic non-semantic output created by the otherwise awesome and essential Views module.

var addthis_pub = ‘rikabel’;
var addthis_language = ‘en’;var addthis_options = [...]

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Lean, mean Drupal theming machine

November 2, 2009
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Two major aims when setting up the Drupal theming system for BeGrand were to use a grid-based theme (because I lurve grids) and to minimise the amount of crufty markup that a regular Drupal theme inserts into the page such that we have a nice clean, minimal framework on which to build the site. With [...]

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Consortium to build website focused on Grandparents

October 23, 2009

More information about the project is now available here.

var addthis_pub = ‘rikabel’;
var addthis_language = ‘en’;var addthis_options = ‘email, favorites, digg, delicious, myspace, google, facebook, reddit, live, more’;

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Creating the BeGrand social media toolbox

October 19, 2009
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As with most modern web projects, BeGrand.net needs to be linked to the social media web, both to be part of the distributed dialogue around grandparents and to draw interested visitors. However, keeping our finger on the social media pulse, even one as well defined as grandparents, requires a few handy tools to ease the [...]

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Keeping Acquia Drupal updated

October 16, 2009

As we subscribe to the Acquia Network I received an email this morning detailing some important security updates to the Drupal core. I was particlarly impressed with the speed at which Acquia had made the updates available. As described in a previous post, I’ve setup svn to manage our Drupal servers, so now was a [...]

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