Productivity

Amaze your friends and co-workers with your cool animated gif screencasts!

A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s a tired cliché but it’s generally true. Sometimes it’s easier to show someone a thing than it is to explain that thing using the written word. Working with a distributed team has it’s share of challenges and one is explaining how to reproduce a bug or how a new feature should work. What if you could quickly record a video and paste it into a your ticketing system? And by quickly I mean seconds, not minutes.

This summer I was a mentor for the Google Summer of Code program for Drupal. I maintain the Facebook-style Statuses module, which allows users to have a stream of “status updates” on their user profiles and to write messages on other users’ profiles, like Facebook.

Drupal Commons (DC) is a Drupal distribution billed as “social business software.” That means that Acquia is distributing Drupal bundled with some other modules preconfigured to work as a company’s interactive user-facing website. The most recent DC update 1.0 was released on August 5th.

Eclipse is a powerful open source IDE built on Java that has been around since 2001 and has become quite useful tool for PHP development, including Drupal. This post is meant to give some rationale on why to use this platform for Drupal development and get you oriented as soon as possible.

There was some little reported financial news that came out of Wall Street last month that did not make much traction in the Drupalsphere, but it should – particularly to our partner Acquia and those of us in the open source world. The news was that the darling of commercial open-source business models, Red-Hat, reported that business is good, very good, despite the global economic recession.

I recently stumbled upon a little known trick for getting your calendar to sync up with Outlook. I used to work for a web shop where all the managers had PCs and all the developers had Macs. Most of the Macs ran Thunderbird or Apple Mail and all the managers had Outlook. We tried Mac's Entourage for a while but found it could not integrate with Exchange Server. I remember being very annoyed that calendar invitations would come over as garbled emails, while the PC clients got nice little popup reminders.