Merge

The Judson Community Center is a pretty cool place. The center provides after school care and summer day camp programming for kids in and around the Judson community.  Thanks to our YMCA alum Matt, I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to teach an hour-long computer class for three straight days.

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So the time has come to create or revamp your company's website, and you know that your plans are ambitious. There may be hundreds of pages of content, an events calendar, photo slideshows, and a blog--not to mention integration with Google Maps for directions, Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates, Vimeo for videos, and perhaps even e-commerce. When you start thinking about your next website, things can quickly start to seem overwhelming. And how easy will it be for you to keep that site up to date?

These concerns are quite common--so common in fact that today these problems have largely been solved by open source content management systems (CMS). Here at Merge, we have used such tools to help clients get the most out of their web presence, and one of our favorites is Drupal. The result of countless hours of development and improvement by thousands of contributors (including a few from Team Merge), Drupal and its vast collection of modules and themes greatly simplifies and quickens the task of creating complex websites.

When considering the difference between an established open source CMS and a proprietary one, the issue eventually becomes a choice between Proof and Promises. Whereas Drupal, and other popular platforms such as Wordpress or eZ Publish, have proven track records powering thousands of sites across the web, a proprietary system must be trusted on the basis of far fewer sites and its claims about what it can deliver. And with so many proprietary systems to choose from, there is no clear leader in this very crowded market.

With over a decade's experience programming for the web, I myself have used a mix of open source and proprietary CMS through the years while working for various employers, and the differences

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It's that time again. Time to make a few updates for a recurring project. You remember doing this several times before, but the details are sketchy. You recall a volley of emails sent back and forth some time in the hazy past. And once more, you are about to commence searching those email archives for the necessary details. But wait! What if there were a better, quicker way to retrieve this information you find yourself using repeatedly? And what if it could be centrally organized and accessible to each team member in your organization?

Right, so this isn't exactly a breakthrough idea. But strangely enough, individuals working in any number of industries often find themselves in need of such a remedy. We here at Merge have used a number of tools to share information in such a way, but we felt our process could become even better if we had more control over the content and organization of our documentation. Enter Drupal's Book module. Obviously this is just one of several options a team could use to stay organized, some more ready-made than others. But for our team, we prefer the customization allowed by a Drupal-based solution.

For our documentation site, we chose to organize our navigation first by client, then by relevant project, with additional levels possible if required. Employing the JQuery Menu and Advanced Book Block modules, we can also navigate to any documentation with only one page load. And by making use of Drupal's built-in File Upload and Comment modules, we can easily share files an

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All right, let's get technical. Here at Merge HQ we use a top-notch framework called CakePHP to build some of our custom applications, but recently I encountered a mystifying issue whilst hacking away on a big project. Cake seems to have an odd habit of ignoring some of your code when it generates error pages (you know, those lovely 404 "file not found" pages we all cherish). In my case, the title of the site and the main menu refused to display, so that's a bit jarring, to say the least.

Fortunately, after a day of sifting through more CakePHP code than I'd prefer, I happened upon a solution. This is a problem that has plagued plenty of developers besides me, and I can only hope they might benefit as well. So what's the scoop? The short version is simply to add the following code to your app_controller.php file:

function __construct() {
  parent::__construct();
  if ($this->name == 'CakeError') {
    $this->constructClasses();
    $this->beforeFilter();
  }
}

This forces Cake to load the components your site uses and run the normal setup code on your site's error pages. The long version of this solution can be read (or fallen asleep to) on my blog. Let it never be said the life of a web developer is just all cherries and ice cream (although admittedly there is an ample supply of both).

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That was the motto of Ryan Carson this past week at the Future Of Web Apps conference in Miami, Florida. And as a first-time and slightly skeptical attendee of this event, I can now happily affirm that I am indeed all three.

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