I have completed my first real Ruby on Rails app and it's in production.  The app answers a problem I have at work: individuals ask me to format newsletter templates all the time and it breaks up my day too often.  It's called Newsletter Maker.

ITWorld has a new article up about Joomla vs. Drupal and contains viewpoints of different developers.  I was asked by the author to give some insight on using either CMS so I'm in there around page two.  It's an interesting article because it's not from the perspective of one person and seems to cover many bases.

I noticed this happening while I was getting a site ready with the AddToAny Drupal module.  Pages would randomly hang in my dev environment and it was trying to contact Media6degrees.  After some Googling I found this was a third party tracking cookie being installed with the AddToAny module.  To disable it in Drupal 7, go to the modules page and click "Configure" next to AddToAny.  Under additional options near the bottom, paste this:

Here's a handy commandline snippet that will help you upgrade Drupal core (for example, 6.19 to 6.20) without having to replace everything.  It will only update the files that have changed.

Echodittolabs has a great and easy to understand write up about Drupal and web services.   If you ever need to interact with Drupal with an external application it looks like this is the best way to do it.

If you need a way to redirect webform submissions to a dynamic URL in Drupal 6, using the Webform PHP module can work well with Webform 3.x.  I recommend only using post processing conditionals on select fields if possible with Webform PHP since you need to enable the permission to "use PHP for additional processing" for users who submit webforms (typically anonymous).

Here's the process:

This week's links are pretty solid.  Happy birthday Internet!

This is obviously an amazingly large topic, but having recently been forced to increase usability of a business process with a monolithic Constituent Resource Management program (Raiser's Edge) I feel like I need to voice my opinion.  I have been a great fan of Drupal for the past year and my appreciation of the open source nature and ever-changing state of the software is great.  Processes greatly improve over time, the community talks about problems and fixes, and there seems to be a flexible solution for (almost) everything.

The new site is up and running.  I've been working on this on and off for a little while now and I'm happy with the way it turned out.  I'm running the site on Drupal 6 and everything is quite convenient to work with.  All of the old site's content has been ported over and it's also better organized.  The creations page is the portal to all of my stuff.