Freelance Consulting & Work in General

Well, 2010 is here, and so is March, and my blog has been pretty quiet for a while because of an insane amount of contract work that has left me with minimal time for anything outside of paid work. Drupal freelance has been VERY good to me over the last 4 months since leaving my full time employment. It was no doubt a very scary situation to be in again, but everything worked out for the best. Even the FT job that I ended up not getting that I was completely sure I wanted ended up falling apart for a reason.

Freelance Consulting/Contract work is a touchy business, and not for everyone, but for me, it really is a great way to be. What mainly attracts me to it is the ability to work from home, set my own hours, and oddly enough, make a lot more money than most full time opportunities. My days of commuting to ANY office are in the past, and while I will/am still considering FT positions that allow 100% telecommute, there's no reason for me to ever want to get out of my jammies and deal with office drama again.

Drupalcon San Fransisco

Enough of that catching up business, I wanted to talk Drupalcon! This spring, Drupalcon is in San Fran, and is going to be the largest Drupalcon ever. With already over 1500 registered attendees, this will be larger than the Drupalcon last year in Washington D.C., and is sure to probably surpass 2K atendees before the event actually gets here next month.

Drupalcon Paris was my first ever Drupalcon to actually be able to attend, and after an amazing experience there, including getting to present on the 960.gs/ninesixty theme, I knew that it would take a lot to keep me from going to each and every one after Paris.

The Problem

Today I ran across an issue when trying to format out some Views that were integrated with Organic Groups. I needed to format out a few things, and the one I will speak on and demonstrate here is pulling out the member count in an Organic Group. By default, when you pull that data out in a view, it creates a link to the default OG page for members inside a group. The default path for that page is: og/users/$nid/faces. I find that link horrible, ugly, and just pure nasty in a nutshell. I really don't want anything in a client facing path that references a module name or abbreviation in the path. Of course, you could use a custom path to overwrite those path(s), but that's only if you really want to also use the default view that OG provides for members.

In the project I'm working on, these links that I'm modifying point to a custom panels page with multiple views inserted that relate to the members of the group. This gives me a flexible usage so that any time the member count of the group is pulled & displayed using views, that it will render the way I want, and link where I want the user to go.

In that handler function provided by OG it's also only wrapping a link around the numeric value of the member count, but what I need is more text available to that linking the full text like 24 members.

The project I'm working on has some unique requirements in the wireframes & designs related to the groups, and so some custom work was needed. This walkthrough will show a setup in a custom module that overwrites the default field handler that views uses to render that field.

Admittedly, I have been one of the late comers to the Drush revolution. I've heard since it was released how amazing it was, and it's taken me forever to get around to playing with it on my localhost environment to see how it can best be utilized for my own workflow during development. I've been greatly satisfied on how easy it is to update modules, download, install & uninstall modules, and have been trying to dig into the MySQL usage as well, however ran into some issues with my current setup.

The Problem

I'm using XAMPP for linux, on my Ubuntu machine to develop locally, which alone has sped up my development considerably, and makes my life much easier. However, when it comes to MySQL, it is an issue as the setup that is created by XAMPP is not a traditional setup of Apache, MySQL, PHP that you would get by setting it up yourself in a more traditional way. Everything is operated out of the directory at /opt/lampp/ and some traditional commands that are available on my system from the command line like mysql, and mysqldump do not understand that other installation I have in the XAMPP setup. 

So when I was running commands using Drush like: $drush sql dump I was getting an error like the following:
mysqldump: Got error: 2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) when trying to connect

Okay, that's a pain in my ass. So I decided with my VERY minimal knowledge of Drush and the underlying code back there that it must be possible for me to set up something that could make that work properly.

Information

The screencast above demonstrates setting up Acquia Drupal in a Windows environment. The Acquia Stack Installer will install Acquia Drupal, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and PHPMyAdmin to give you everything you need to get set up and running quickly with a fully featured installation of Drupal.

Personally, I run XAMPP on my Ubuntu system for my own development environment, however, my Windows 7 machine is the only one I currenly have capable of recording screencasts, and I felt like I needed a local install of Drupal on that system. Using the Acquia Stack Installer was an quick option to set up a development environment in Windows without any hassle. For a more advanced user doing a lot of development in Windows, you can also use something like XAMPP for Windows.

I've spent a lot of time lately working with the Omega theme, and really trying to get features lined out that I've had planned for some time now. I spoke on many of those desired features during my presentation at DrupalCamp Montreal, and wanted to be able to really get some of those important features integrated prior to DrupalCampNYC coming up in December when I might have the chance to speak again on the Omega theme.

I recently had a quick blog entry on what those feature plans for Omega would be for my own purposes, and to document those features outside of my presentation. I created issues in the issue queue for Omega at Drupal.org, and then posted information on those here. The list of features that I had planned for the theme that relate to this post were: