No more spreadsheets and leg work to figure out if your Drupal site is ready for the next version. With the Upgrade Status module...

In the Modules for Social Networks group on Groups.drupal.org I saw what might be the best simple answer for when to use Drupal 5 and when to use Drupal 6.

By now most people have figured out what Twitter is - micro blogging of 140 characters or less. Many people can't figure out the point, though. Are you telling all your friends every time you get on the train or have another cup of coffee or something? While you can do this, and some people's Tweets (posts to Twitter) are inane and numerous, there is some gold.

It's things like these that are leading me to work on a Drupal book for the non technical, for producers and editors. I'd love encouragement, recommendations and book deals. :)

After dropping boiler plate language into a proposal regarding design and templates I recently had a great conversation with the proposal's recipient on what exactly a design was, what a template was, and how they related to pages in a Drupal site. Here are some thoughts on what templates are and what they offer.

Scheduler is a great little module to schedule when content is published and unpublished.

You can use it for seasonal content, to promote a live event, an to make your content publishing more regular.

Among the many things you need to check out with your Drupal site is it's RSS feeds. While RSS feeds might still be an unknown to many of the visitors to your site you can safely assume that will change sooner than later, and to those who know it, it's their way to monitor what's happening on your site on a daily basis.

LinkedIn is a social network that focuses on connection, as opposed to subject, activities, friends, etc. Connection in this sense does not really refer to you connecting to old friends or coworkers. It's really about connecting through your friend and coworkers to their friends and coworkers and so on. Think six degrees of seperation.

Printer friendly pages, meaning pages without the navigation or other items that are unnecessary on a printed page and would lower the usefulness of a print out of the content, are a standard feature of any site that as a client you should expect and as a developer you should expect to include.

XP was tolerable. Performance wasn't too bad. Being a vector for viruses wasn't fun, but if you watched yourself you could usually get your work done. When my elderly laptop died I bought a nice refurbished HP desktop that came with Vista. There are no shortages of rants on Vista, so I'll be brief. It seemed to be a RAM hog and applications froze and died on it just too much - even Internet Explorer. Man, at least the software made by the same company that made the operating system should work.

Over the holiday season we got the opportunity to do some QA testing that epitomized the type of work our QA team is set up for. Development of a 100 page static site was going over schedule, and wouldn't be ready for QA until days before delivery was due - and delivery was January 2nd. We set up a plan and on 12/30 we got the URL to test and jumped in. We had a site map and some screen shots of what the site should look at. The client had not had the time to put together a testing plan or setup an issue tracker. Our team was to test against 4 operating system/browser combinations for a total of 64 hours of testing.