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by Robbie Ferrero, Web Developer
Here we go! Portland's Drupalcon is here. Here is a quick update about some of the exciting things that Metal Toad is bringing to the event. Stop by our booth (#207) and come party with us Tuesday and Wednesday. Come watch us record the podcast live and even step up to the mic if you dare. T-shirts, wine, stickers, foosball, Drupal!?!?! Whoa. Read More…
by Tom Martin, Web Developer
Meet Jake. Jake administers a Drupal site. Jake is not a developer, nor does he want to be. Jake does not care about field formatters, image styles, or even draggable views. What Jake cares about is being able to load new content to his site without feeling a tingling sensation up his spine that keeps saying: "just throw the monitor… that will make it better… yeah…." Read More…
by Chris Trahey, Chief Development Strategist
The most important question we should ask is, "to what are we responding?" It's not too far to jump from that question to the point I want to drill in: we're thinking about the wrong kinds of interactions. In some cases it's egocentric, but the main idea is that we must change the thinking and dialogue to focus more on real-world user interactions. Read More…
by Adam Edgerton, Director of Project Management
Project management. Is it a dark art? Is it science? Probably some combination of both. Across the web/app/software development industry, consensus seems to be that finding project managers is easy, but finding great project managers is hard to impossible. At Metal Toad (and likely many similar organizations), a project manager needs a much broader skill set than the ability to create Gannt charts, track budgets, and manage scope. Metal Toad project managers are truly directors of their projects, owning them in their entirety from inception to go-live and beyond. The vast responsibilities of our PMs (see below) make it difficult to find and retain the right talent. Read More…
by Tom Martin, Web Developer
Recently I was faced with the task of passing off multiple page arguments to a view pane, which seems simple enough after you have done it once, but the first time around I found myself wading through settings for far too long. The scenario: we were working with Page Manager to create pages and within a page we had a View Pane that needed to be filtered based on the context filters being passed to the page as arguments in the URL. Read More…
by Robbie Ferrero, Web Developer
ToadCast 16! A very special episode all about home brewing. Joining me on this episode are three Metal Toad employees with a lot of brewing experience - Dylan Tack, Peter Bliss, and Tyler Ward. Learn some of the basics of brewing beer, common misconceptions, equipment, books, and a little bit about wine making. Read More…
by Robbie Ferrero, Web Developer
Joining me for Toadcast 15 is Tom Martin to discuss ecommerce. That's right, a show all about a single topic! Read More…
by Dylan Tack, Lead Development Architect
Last week, this error brought many of our deployments to a screeching halt. "upload via sftp failed on metaltoad.com: Net::SFTP::StatusException (Net::SFTP::StatusException open ...releases/20130408223054/drupal/ sites/all/themes/boilerplate/css/compiled/default.css (2, "no such file"))". Read More…
by Jonathan Jordan, Web Developer
If you contribute patches to the Drupal issue queues, you often spend a lot of time and hard work getting that patch through the review process. Even though we do it for the good of the community, once it is all said and done, it's nice to get a little acknowledgement. While there is a page for module maintainers on how to properly attribute contributions to users, not all maintainers know about that, and it can often mean they have to spend a little extra time figuring out what your Drupal.org git email address is. But there is a quick way for us as patch contributors to make that easier for them. Read More…
by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master
In this episode our intrepid adventurers embarked on a quest to install WordPress. I have to admit, this was quite easy and didn't take nearly as long I expected it would. Since I was also new to WordPress, we explored together. We went through the process of downloading and installing it, setting up the database, and selecting a theme. Along the way we talk about other concepts as they come up like using Lorem Ipsum placeholder text, using rsync to transfer files, and using command line MySQL. Next week we hope to talk about WordPress theming, but that will depend on if I can get a guest speaker on it or not. If we don't talk about that, we'll do a sample PHP application and talk about basic database work. Here's the video: Read More…