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The importance of project management tools is almost never fully appreciated. I am shocked at how common it is for a group of developers to go working without version control, ticket tracking, development documentation and so on. The very first thing I do when working with a new client is to make sure that they get these tools in place if they haven't already.

Those who are used to working without a complete set of project management tools never fail to appreciate the benefits of them once they are introduced. I consider it next to impossible for a team to work together without managing code and tasks in an efficient and highly organized way.

Hopefully you do not need to be sold on this idea and are using CVS or SVN to manage your project already. You likely have some sort of ticket system. It is a little less likely that you have both of these components integrated with each other.

When it comes to choosing a solution for project management software, a die-hard Drupal user has a dilemna. On one hand, Drupal seems as though it should be the perfect solution. It's fully customizable, has lots of nifty project management related modules and, most importantly, it's Drupal! Why would you not use it? "Eating your own dogfood" is the way to go, right? Meh...

This is a very insightful article on MediaTemple's efforts to build one of the first massive web hosting grid: Anatomy of MySQL on the GRID

The contributions process for non-core Drupal themes and modules is in need of a revamp.

Currently the process is a very loose one that does not require adherence to any tagging conventions or release process. This makes it very difficult to know the status of the modules that make up a given site. I believe this probably results in many site admins out there just leaving their site as-is because the process of updating is somewhat confusing and tedious.

We want to fix this.

While there are existing 4.6, 4.7, etc... tags applied to contrib modules, they are not consistently used by module authors. Furthermore, tags are being applied inappropriately (4.7 tags applied to 4.6 code that is not actually upgraded).

One of the great features of Drupal is its ability to run any number of sites from one base installation, a feature generally referred to as multisites . Creating a new site is just a matter of creating a settings.php file and (optionally) a database to go with your new site. That's it. More importantly, there's no need to set up complicated Apache Virtual hosts, which are a wonderful feature of Apache, but can be very tricky and tedious, especially if you're setting up a large number of subsites.

No worries, there is a solution.

This article explains a practical implementation of a technique outlined in the article "Sharing Drupal tables between databases using MySQL5 Views".

Problem

You have multiple (multisite) Drupal sites and you would like to manage the content for all of these sites through a single interface. Depending on the nature of a given piece of content, you may want the content published on one, several or all of your subsites, but you do not want to have to create copies of the same content for each site.

Solution

Taxonomy plus MySQL5 views. (NOTE: this solution will not work with versions of MySQL prior to 5.)