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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.