Using doc-comments in Eclipse really helps productivity by providing lots of tool-tip help and auto completion.

A colleague recently pointed out that Eclipse can auto-complete object properties (as long as you use the @property tag). I’ve found this really helpful and have been creating objects to return pass around - and found it a vwery neat way of working.

I’ve worked on a few internationalised sites in the past and it always raises challenges, Drupal makes some things easy - this post provides some simple tips for planning your translation process.

This advice is aimed at sizeable sites with formal release processes.

With any sizeable project maintaining good documentation is a challenge - it’s all to easy to skimp on documentation, or to start with good intentions but allow the documentation to get out of date.

The Drupal API project allows you to set up a documentation website for your project like api.drupal.org that covers all your code.

PracticalWeb is still a new venture for me; so far I’m really enjoying working more independently.

I find the relationship between client and contractor lends itself better to developing complex systems than that of employee/employer. I haven’t entirely figured out why yet.

One potential downside is trying to do everything yourself, legal, accounting, invoicing, purchasing etc…

When developing a website it’s important to test it in as many different web browsers as possible.

If a client has a problem viewing the page there’s little point saying “but it works on my machine”

I have found that the differences between different versions of firefox to be small enough that testing in one version is sufficient.

I’ve recently been working with AJAX and SOAP which both result in multiple sessions running concurrently.

For example if you have an AJAX progress bar for a large file upload one session is uploading the file while a series of shorter sessions check on progress and update the bar.

How to track both parts of this cleanly has had me scratching my head a bit - but the solution is fiendishly simple.

Any complex website that needs updating has to be tested without affecting the users of the live site.

The challenge then is how to replicate the changes made on your test site on the live site.

If all the changes are in code then version control systems such as svn and cvs solve this problem very neatly.

But with a CMS such as Drupal some changes are inevitably required in the database.

Managing these changes without affecting the site content can be tricky.

One of the problems I have encountered while developing for Drupal on a laptop is how to test the sending of emails.

I’ve recently come across two solutions.

I’ve just upgraded to firefox 3 beta and it looks pretty cool

I got my plugins working by following these steps

I’ve just spent ages trying to find out why I couldn’t add some default views to drupal

I’d set up my views, exported them added them to a module in a hook_views_default_views() function…

and nothing happened.