Jody's blog

Zivtech is excited to announce that Andrew Morton, aka drewish, has joined our team as a Senior Architect. Andrew has been a major contributor to Drupal core and contributed modules for five years. He is an official maintainer of the core file system and was key to the leap forward in Drupal 7's file and image handling.

Neither my father nor I are particularly meticulous people in the rest of our lives, but you could eat off his hubcabs or my team's code. I think it's critical that new developers are taught this principle from the beginning, and are mentored through their early impatience.

My father is a self-taught auto mechanic, and passed on a lot of 'fixing things' philosophy while I held a flashlight for him in our driveway as a child. Often I would grow cold and impatient and decide we would never succeed in our task. He would say: "There are two kinds of people in this world- the people who can fix the car and the people who can't. The person who never gives up eventually fixes the car. The person who gives up before it's fixed will never fix anything." When people fail to fix something it's not because they took the wrong steps in attempting to start fixing it, it's that they give up before they're done. Some of them even give up before they start, and others may give up right before they would have succeeded. He also felt it was important for the car to know which kind of person you are, to intimidate it into submission. Really it's just important that you know which kind of person you are, to believe in your ultimate victory as a protection against frustration. This philosophy is what gave me my reputation of being undefeatable by bugs- I simply refuse to give up fixing them as a matter of principle. (I also like to curse at them at times threateningly so they know who they're up against...)

Here's a small Drupal module (D6) and instructions to allow you to have both public and private forums on a site. It actually can be used to have any set of role-based access rules to different forum containers. It relies on the Taxonomy Access Control Lite module. You should already have forum module enabled (you can also add Advanced Forum).

drush dl tac_lite
drush en tac_lite tac_lite_create

Create two forum containers for your public and private forums.

We're pleased to announce Mason Wendell has joined our team as Zivtech's new Creative Director. Mason, who previously was co-owner of Canary Promotion + Design, we've long seen as a leading Drupal web designer and our ideal creative director. This addition marks a big, exciting change for us, as Mason will lead our design department, expanding our services. I originally got started with web development as an intern for Mason, working on the PHP, MySQL and CSS of his custom CMS. It was Mason who had me try out Drupal 4.7 for a project- neither of us have looked back since. I'm very excited to be working together again.

Read on for the full press release.

We're working on a project with too much non-uniform legacy HTML to migrate it all into Drupal. Some of it we're handling by migrating certain data into nodes and dumping the entire HTML content into the node body so it can be easily indexed by Solr for search and the titles can be included in other views listings.