Here is a fact: developers tend to overvalue their innovations.

Contrarily, consumers tend to undervalue innovation. This disconnect is fundamental, and explains so many behaviors in Silicon Valley, I'm surprised by the lack of awareness or at least attention paid to these points by venture and early capital investors. It's out there, but it's advice you'll usually only get after you drive a few companies into the ground, and that can be tough advice to learn.  read more »

Ruven made a really great post about cloud interoperability today:  read more »

I was just encountered with the need to have a multi-site drupal install which utilized a specific theme for each site. In a lot of cases, multi-sites are set up on one drupal install, but utilize individual databases for each site. This is done by setting $db_url in settings.php to point to the database to be used for each site.

In our case, we needed to have a multi-site platform on one drupal install using only one database, but each site needed to display its own theme. This is accomplished by modifying each settings.php file for each site and un-commenting the following code.  read more »

So during a routine project setup, we had a need to move a SVN repository hosted on Unfuddle to another provider (in this case, Beanstalk).

We'd had a lot of complaints from our developers that the hosted svn service on Unfuddle was extremely slow at times, and our tests of beanstalk showed markedly improved numbers. As a result, we've been regularly recommending that our clients move there as well. We've contacted the Unfuddle support team in hopes that they'll improve their performance, but until then, we've moved.  read more »

It has been talked a lot that people are experiencing issues with their user's sessions on their drupal sites in Safari. Most experience the same issue:

• A user logs in, tries to create content and are kicked / logged out and taken to the homepage

It appears the bug has something to do with the way Safari handles URLs (Domain Names). For most localhost environment set ups, its easy to put whatever we would like as our site domain. But there is a problem when it comes to adding (_) verse (-) in those names.

For Example:  read more »

I have been reading with interest the discussions at http://drupal.org/node/337079 and http://groups.drupal.org/node/15965 which both basically deal with the fact that Drupal has versions, and with each version comes a new set of changes both for procedural instructions and code samples, yet the Drupal Documentation can't handle changes in the same way.

So I came up with this idea. Let's continue the process of making a single page in the Handbooks for an idea, such as "Checking Code Out Of CVS", but then use jQuery to toggle hiding for all version-specific info of code snippets or explanations which don't pertain to your current Drupal version.  read more »

We just had an impromptu conversation over here about validating phone numbers that morphed into validating email addresses and more.

Adam brought up the fact there are a lot of email addresses that don’t pass the basic regex validation that a lot of sites use. In fact, there was a good discussion of this very issue on Slashdot in a larger article on regexes. One comment:  read more »

As most of you might know, Ubercart is chock full of AJAX, jQuery, and Special Sauce that both helps users along and also keeps them safe. One of those safety features is a nice little security check function which erases the credit card information on the Checkout Review page (cart/checkout/review) should a user's browser be refreshed. If a refresh occurs, the user gets redirected back to the cart/checkout page and must re-input their credit card information and then re-submit the form in order to get back to the Checkout Review page again.

This, as you might have guessed, is *really* not themer-friendly.  read more »

Komodo is a great cross-platform IDE. But I’ve noticed that as file size increases, Komodo’s performance slows to a crawl, becoming practically unusable once files hit 2.5k lines or so.

I opened a thread about it on ActiveState’s community site (which happens to be running Drupal!). It seems this is a known issue on OSX and they’re looking into it.  read more »

When users control the conversation, there is an interesting tendency for the elevation of users as experts based on contribution. If there is one thing I've learned about the Drupal community over the years, and in my years working around and in Open Source communities for years before that, it's this: contribution and presence are the basis of community capital; or, in short: contribution is social capital.  read more »