Like any good CMS, Drupal is great at building new sites and maintaining existing ones, but when it comes to the largely mind numbing task of shoving in lots of existing static content, Drupal can seem agonizingly slow, as does any other mature CMS I have used in that situation. So, what are my options for trying to automate this task?

Recently, I had two clients with a need for customer relationship management (CRM) software, which up to that point, I had only had superficial experience with.

Its hard to think of many people more qualified to talk knowledgeably about Web frameworks than Matt Raible, particularly on the Java platform. The slides to his presentation, “Choosing a JVM Web Framework” contain some very interesting comparisons of the competing Java Web frameworks.

I seem to be writing a lot of “first impressions” posts lately, and I’ve definitely been using several new tools recently. Its fun and strange at the same time; I am doing a lot of learning, which is fun and horizon expanding, but I am also coding less as a result, and because my knowledge of these new tools is necessarily superficial as a newbie, I know that the code I am writing is probably not very good. This week, I started gathering requirements on a project that I initially expected to be coding in JRuby on Rails, only to find out that eventually, I would be handing off the application to a development group that only wanted to support PHP. OK, I thought, I’ll just use CakePHP, which is a Rails clone and one of the best PHP MVC frameworks offered. I know PHP, and I know Rails, so the transition should be smooth. and overall, it has been so far.

The biggest drain on my personal time lately has been my attempt to buy a home. Because I usually write about what I am doing at the moment, I decided I might as well write about my thoughts on buying a home. And because this is my second time through this process in my life, I think I am a little smarter about it now, and maybe I can impart some advice to those who have yet to buy a home.

I am starting my first non-trivial Rails application (finally!), and I quickly encountered the common situation in which you want to assign hierarchical subject categories to an entity. I also wanted to do this within the context of using RESTful controllers in Rails. Designing RESTful controllers is a relatively new concept to me, and its a relatively new feature in Rails itself. All in all, implementing this was remarkably fast and smooth, true to Rails’ reputation, although there were a few minor things along the way that weren’t immediately obvious to me. So, because this is probably such a common scenario, I decided to recreate the steps I took to implement this for others like me who are very new to Rails.

In a previous post, I went through my thought process for choosing Aptana/RadRails (on the Eclipse platform) as my Ruby on Rails(RoR) IDE. Well, that didn’t last long.

In a recent episode of This American Life, host Ira Glass suggested that we are now living through a “Golden Age” of television, a time when the major networks are responding to increasing competition with greater experimentation and better quality programming overall. He suggests that we may not recognize that we are living through this era until after it is over, and we are left to ponder fond memories.

I suggest that we are experiencing a similar “Golden Age” of Web application development. I think its been going on for some time now, taking shape in a recognizable form in 2005 and really hitting its stride in 2006. And, I suspect it may have peaked already and that in a few years, some of us may look back on this time and romanticize it.

Everybody else has been writing about the Blueprint CSS framework lately, so I decided I would too. In my case, I have spent several hours using it to create a layout for a customer, and in the process, I feel I have learned a lot about Blueprint’s current strengths and weaknesses, and a little more about CSS best practices as well.

or some time now, I have wanted a better solution for remotely hosting CVS and Subversion (SVN) repositories. Despite its name, I began using CVSDude for SVN hosting, and have been quite pleased so far. Its cheap and dead simple.