Programming

The first revision control system I ever used was called RCS. It was the pre-cursor to CVS and stored all revision data locally. It was nifty but very limited and not suited for group development. CVS was the first shared revisioning system I used. It was rock solid, IMHO. But it had a few big problems, like the inability to rename or move files. Everything had to be deleted and re-added. 

Since those days, I've used several other revisioning systems: Perforce, Bitkeeper, Clearcase, Subversion and GIT.

I recently worked on a project which required a updated version of the jQuery library. While there is the jQuery Update module, it only allows you to upgrade Drupal 6 to jQuery 1.3. If you really know what you're doing and want to upgrade beyond that version, you can either hack core or create your own simple module to do it. While hacking core is certainly the easier approach (simply overwriting misc/jquery.js with a newer version), it is very bad practice.

You say you want to build a website? It must be feature rich, flexible, extensible, powerful, and very web2.0. This is an important site, and you don't want to be locked in to someone else's framework, so you have decided the smartest approach is DIY. You have a small team of very experienced LAMP developers who have track record building successful sites. They've promised to meet your every requirement.

The following is a guest post by Mitchel Xavier

One of the challenges of developing with Drupal is to understand Drupal’s structure. Until now, when working with the DOM structure, the DOM inspector has been the best tool for viewing the structure. A new tool has been created to make the visualization of the DOM structure much easier to interpret. It is a Firefox add-on and is called Tilt 3D. It creates 3 dimensional interactive representation of the DOM elements as a layered visual image.

A requirement to use Tilt 3D is that your browser supports WebGL. WebGL is a Javascript software library which allows for the creation of 3D graphics very quickly and without the requirement for additional plugins. Currently Firefox is the only browser to support this tool. Firefox has supported WebGL since version 4. The other requirement for Tilt 3D is that it is supported with a capable graphics card.

I was just working on a client site and had an epiphany as to why working with Drupal continues to be a frustrating experience for me.

As flexible and powerful as Drupal truly is, there is still an unacceptable level of non-determinism involved in working with Drupal whether it be in working with existing modules, theming or doing custom development.