Since AllPlayers kicked me out, I've had the chance to do the contractor thing for a little bit and it's been an interesting eye opener. AllPlayers was my first professional Drupal job and a fine example of a SaaS model at work! Best of all it sported what Drupal really could do running both a Drupal 6 install and Drupal 7 install that talked with one another. But that was only the start. Through all the use of Ruby's Rakefiles, Composure, and Jenkins, I found that we did a lot of shell scripting still there. Where I'm at now, Promet Solutions, things are done a little differently. Since the company not only builds websites but supports what other people have built, it's not always easiest to drag out all the big SaaS components that I'm use to. Sometimes, you just have to go a little lower tech.

So have you ever been stuck debugging where the heck that stupid page comes from that some random module seems to have placed in a configuration section that seems to be nothing related to the module itself? Well there are other use cases for what I'm about to show you as well but this is a cool little pro tip to get you on your feet and get you some place to start debugging.

I found this to be a problem recently when I built the documentation for the Views Natural Sort module. I always kinda envied the WordPress sites because they had this as an option to click on, but I had to code this for me. To give credit where it's due, this script was inspired over at Stack Overflow.

Recently, due to an issue I got in my issue queue on Drupal.org, I realized that there may be a bit of confusion about how to use Views Natural Sort. The following is some information on how it works and a quick guide on how to use it.

I've been plagued by the fact that at work I do my development on a remote system. This generally isn't a problem except on the rare occasion I want to use a debugger, since I'm a Vim user. However, when that time comes (and it always does), I have to sit there and wait while eclipse "builds" my project. Nothing irritates me more than "Hurry up and wait". Since I started working with Drupal, I've found this to be a very common theme. It's far from the speed that I got out of Zend Framework, or other MVC based frameworks, but it does so much for you.

A quick little blurb about xpath that I learned today.

I don't know if most of y'all know or not but I own a very small consulting company call Associate Innovations. Before I started working for AllPlayers.com I did a lot of php consulting and mainly worked with Zend Framework. In that time I started work on a product called Roommate Expense Buddy, or REB for short. it was built in Zend. Well one day I updated my operating system on my development box before checking to see if the backups I ftped over was good or not.

Just a quick blurb about some of the "supposed to be" easy stuff with Mink in Behat.

What is Selenium?

Selenium automates browsers. That's it. — SeleniumHQ.org Simply put, Selenium will help you make the browser do what you do, on it's own.