Here at the Worx, we often build Drupal websites as intranets. These have on many occasions, become full office automation centers and allow for faster work and better communications. But, they are also VERY custom and require a large degree of testing by the customer as we move towards production.

There are a variety of 'tests' that an application must go through before it becomes production. Most of this is done behind the scenes by the developers as they work their way through the development of your new application.

If you've ever used the drupal views module, chances are at some point you've needed to suppress any output until AFTER the user has made a selection from one of your exposed filters.  Views actually DOES make this possible, but it's not exactly self-evident.  I'm going to run you through a quick "howto" on this as I'm sure many people have needed it at some point.

We had a client requirement that a single view be the combination of:

1. a random list of attorneys with offices in a given state
2. a random list of attorneys that are licensed in a given state.

There should be no duplications and all of list 1 must precede list 2. We could not accomplish this with views alone. After talking to Earl, we were able to access the created SQL statement within views. Here we built each of the two queries. Then, we defined a 'pre' exit and replaced the query in our view with a new one.

Currently there's a pretty in depth discussion surrounding hosting install profiles on drupal.org and what the legal/other implications of such a thing are.  I feel this is an important issue to highlight to the community at large, and since I feel rather strongly about it, I'm using this forum to point it out, and also to focus a bit on my own feelings concerning this.  For those of you who would like some context, read this post on drupal.org.

It's about freaking time!  As a professional web development shop, sometimes your website can suffer from the "cobbler's kids" effect, namely you're so busy working on other people's websites, that you haven't taken any time for your own.  I've been working to remedy that for a little while now, but I'm always up for trying something shiney and new, so... I decided to do it in the (fairly) newly released Panels 3 module. For those of you who have not yet tried Panels I can offer no stronger encouragement than to say it is the best thing since cck and views.

We have installed a 'solr' server for the use of our Drupal sites. It has been an interesting experience so far. Many thanks to all who have blazed the trail ahead of us.

I started getting the error

"500" Status: Internal Server Error in apachesolr_cron

Oklahoma's very first Drupal Meetup is happening tonight!  We have a relatively small Drupal community here, but we are getting together tonight to meet each other, and discuss how we can further the Drupal community in Oklahoma.  We are guessing between 5-10 people will attend at Panera Bread for an informal gathering.

So, I have been inspired from a recent video to go play with AEgir. I thought I would try it on my laptop, so off to install DAMP.

I must say, I was very impressed with the DAMP install. Simple, straightforward, quick. Oh yea, and it 'Just Works'! Very impressive. I played with the Drupal install for a few minutes and it all seems in order.

I didn't get to contribute much to Drupal 6 before it happened.  I was still learning how to use the toolset the Drupal community uses for these things, and after one successful attempt to contribute to core, I decided to focus my attention on contrib for a while.  It's been more than a year since that time (probably closer to two) and I'm much more comfortable and familiar with these tools, as well as having a much better idea of what it is that Drupal is "all about".

We can definitely feel the year winding down here at The Worx Company.  Holidays always seem to be slow, everyone busy with their own personal lives.  With Thanksgiving in November and Christmas and New Years this month, things have been more relaxed around the office.  This has been a great time to catch up on things.  Here are some things that has been going around here: