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.
A quick template override was needed. Here’s what I did:
- first I copied node.tpl.php to node-og-group-post.tpl.php in our sites/all/themes/custom/begrand960 directory (the actual directory will depend on your sites default template, ours is called begrand960)
- edited node-og-group-post.tpl.php and added the following code (just after <?php print $picture ?>)…
if ($node->og_groups && $page) {
$currentGroup = og_get_group_context();
print "<h2><a href='/".$currentGroup->path."'>";
print $currentGroup->og_description."</a></h2>";
}
The og_get_group_context() function returns an array with lot’s of useful information. As always, you can dump the contents of an array in php by using:
print "<pre>";
print_r($arrayName);
print "</pre>";
Don’t forget to make sure you put the code inside existing php tags!
Hey presto! Nicely formatted link back to the parent group that only displays on the post page and not the group summary. Which is nice.
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.
I love agile. I love iterating. BUT how do we manage the queue? Everyone’s suggestion is important. They all need to be included in the next release. Well, a week into the process, I realise we can’t please all of the people all of the time. There are some really easy things to fix (and we have), but some of the other stuff is really, beard-scrachingly, hard! Can I define the metatdata we’ll need to take the content, users and site to the end of our funding in March 2010? I doubt it.
So, I spent half a day wondering how we manage this. FogBugz? Trac? No, I decided to bite the bullet and use RTM (aka RememberTheMilk). My thought process was:
- Make decisions (can I do this in the next fortnight)
- Is it really useful?
- Are users asking for this? (One, very vocal, user doesn’t mean you should do it!)
- Will it make a real difference to my KPIs?
- If I was a user, would it make me a), b) or c) (enter your goals here..)
After going through this process it was easy to prioritise. You do not need a democracy, you need a benign dictatorship. I can do that in 3 weeks.
So that’s it. 3 weeks, in RTM. And I can hit those targets and reset afterwards.
- DEVELOP NOW
- ITERATE
- LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES
- ITERATE AGAIN
- REPEAT
And read this book...http://37signals.com/rework/
Seth is a God, and I met him at my time with beenz.com, it was a privilege.
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 Mac-only. However, being used to a keypair from the servers to manage ssh login and sftp transfers, I couldn’t work out how to connect using the default .pem file supplied by Amazon EC2. PEM – or privacy enhanced email – is another cert-based system see the ubiquitous Wikipedia article for more tech juice.
I downloaded my server .pem file to my local ssh directory (you can find this in your user directory called .ssh – notice that the prefix of . makes it invisible normally). I could then login via ssh using
ssh -i ~/.ssh/server.pem
but Coda and Transmit wouldn’t play ball. After some digging around, I discovered the solution…
- Replace server.pem with your .pem file in the following instructions
- Copy your server.pem file to ~/.ssh
- Open terminal and you’ll be in your user directory
- Edit (or create) the file config with: vi ~/.ssh/config
- Hit “i” to go into insert mode
- Add: IdentityFile “~/.ssh/server.pem”
- Hit: :wq!<enter> to quit and save
- Change the permissions on your pem file with chmod 700 ~/.ssh/server.pem
- Configure Coda and Transmit to connect to your server as root with no password
- Enjoy!
Job done, which was nice!
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. [read more…]
