sirkitree.net //say it out loud, [sur-ki-tree]

There's been quite a lot of confusion around Panels 2 Context lately, so let's try to demystify some of that.

Activity Module came about as a result of a need to show what your friends were doing on a site, something like what facebook does with your friends' news feed. The original idea came from the mind of quicksketch, coded by myself (with much help from quicksketch) then improved upon (5.x.3 branch) by robertDouglass.

Since my inception of sirkitree.net, my goal has been to have a site that showcases and keeps progress reports on the work I'm doing with Drupal and to be working progressively towards Drupal 6. I kept quite below the curve on 6 pre-beta and all of it's changes because I was still so focused on learning things for 5, but once the Betas started hitting the street, I broke down and started paying more attention, then started this site.

I was checking out Michelle's Advanced Profile module the other day and was pretty impressed. This is just the sort of enhancements I think Drupal needs in order to compete well within the Community-type website market.

There's been a lot of debate on d.o in the past about revision control - cvs vs. svn. While drupal.org is still under cvs control, there are a lot of developers using subversion as a means of maintaining their code base. So how do you deal with this when you're familiar with subversion but cvs is the preferred system to work directly with Drupal and it's contributed modules? The answer: a combination of both systems.

I checked out the Asset module today was very impressed. The interface beats the pants off of IMCE and the concept of keeping the file system independent from the node system just makes sense to me. If it's one thing I've had a hard time doing, it's explaining how to insert files into content for users that I create sites for, and this just made that job much easier due to the intuitive design of the interface.

Recently there was a post on the [development] mailing list about dealing with _phptemplate_variables() and in order to get it all straight in my head, I thought it prudent to report on it here for my and your benefit.