Joe Merante's Blog

Last fall, I finally got around to moving joemerante.com, a Drupal site, to a new host. It was getting a little ridiculous that I had no way to ssh into the hosted space and couldn't simply git push origin master or similar to deploy (no need for anything fancy given the traffic and simplicity of the site - see my previous workaround here ). Why didn't I just quickly redo the site in Sinatra or Rails? Mostly because it works fine as-is, I like Drupal (the nostalgia factor of being the first web framework I learned well, also it's a great CMS and community) and jumping around between different environments keeps you sharp. This post rolls through a few things I came across while moving the site, maybe it'll help someone out there.

After first setting out to create something along the lines of Click-That-Hood with legal information about different jurisdictions, I decided to create a slightly more robust document management system to help keep track of existing and developing legal issues related to privacy law in U.S. states and/or nationwide. As someone frequently collecting references, annotating documents, bookmarking pages, etc, I wanted to bring things together in a way that also lets me play around more in Drupal 7. I intend to add features like news/API feeds, map enhancements and maybe even calendar reminders (for when a law takes effect, for example). There are some great tools out their to do similar things but I see this potentially turning into somewhere between a reference manager, CMS and task manager. You know, because none of those have been made before :) You can take a peek at how it's coming along here .

As I prepare to upgrade some sites to Drupal 7, it seemed like a good time to document my workflow. I'd used  Drush  for local development on Drupal 6 sites and it eliminated the time spent manually downloading modules and updates. In Drupal 7, module updating isn't nearly as painful - in fact, it's built right into the admin pages (though you'll probably want to do this on a local or staging server first, just in case). A few sites I'm working on are hosted with a cPanel-based host that doesn't allow ssh access, so I can't just set up a git remote and push to the production server. Moving them to another host also isn't the best option right now.  Git-ftp to the rescue. tl:dr  Set up your site and Drush locally, commit changes to git, test then use git-ftp to push them to the production server Here's how I set up things up: Set up your site locally. For OS X, I go with MAMP .  Install Drush  and git-ftp on your machine. Initialize a git re...

All year I've been telling myself I should start writing about coding on this blog, whether specific work on different apps or helpful resources for Ruby, Rails and other adventures. I've been telling myself a lot of other things this year too! I've mostly documented and semi-organized what I've been working on, it's just a bit scattered. One ongoing set is the Prepared.ly wiki which I've been trying to complete for easier consumption and to document its various features so it's easier to redeploy. I've also listed and summarized some of the coding projects here . A feature request for the geribrewster.com online store came in, so I decided to make a Drupal custom module for it yesterday. It's posted on Github now, along with a related Rails app I've been playing with. The Read Me in the repository does a good job of explaining the business reason for it, and the code is commented with what's going on. More detailed coding posts to foll...