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Jay Callicott
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Up and Running With Eclipse for Drupal Development

Jan 11, 2010

Tags: Drupal | Module Development | Open Source | Productivity

eclipse logo Eclipse is a powerful open source IDE built on Java that has been around since 2001 and has become quite useful tool for PHP development, including Drupal. This post is meant to give some rationale on why to use this platform for Drupal development and get you oriented as soon as possible. With Eclipse, there is definitely a learning curve, but if you give it a chance I’ll think you’ll find it an indispensable resource for your toolbox. read more »

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Jay Callicott
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Drupal vs. SharePoint from a Developer's Viewpoint

Oct 5, 2009

Tags: Business | CMS | Drupal

Drupal v Sharepoint

After working in organizations that adopted both Drupal and SharePoint, I have been asked on several occasions my thoughts on the differences between the two platforms. While I was developing a Sharepoint site a few years ago I remember looking around for comparisons and was surprised about the lack of information. In 2007, Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, wrote a post that really inspired me that I responded to in the comment section. read more »

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Jay Callicott
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Drupal.org better_formats module review - Set default input formats

Jul 19, 2009

Tags: Best Practices | Drupal | Module Development | Open Source

http://drupal.org/project/better_formats

This is a quick review of a module that needs to make your "rotation," that is, a group of core modules you install on every project.

Drupal has different input formats that can be assigned to different roles, great, right? Well what's annoying about input formats is that by default you can't give a default input format based on a role. So what happens usually is that "filtered html" is the default format and even though the editor of the site has permissions for "full html" they will unknowingly add a new page or story as "filtered html" and wonder why they're images aren't showing up. read more »

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Jay Callicott
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Mozilla + Google Calendar Solution For Non-PC Users

Apr 5, 2009

Tags: Productivity

I recently stumbled upon a little known trick for getting your calendar to sync up with Outlook. I used to work for a web shop where all the managers had PCs and all the developers had Macs. Most of the Macs ran Thunderbird or Apple Mail and all the managers had Outlook. We tried Mac's Entourage for a while but found it could not integrate with Exchange Server. I remember being very annoyed that calendar invitations would come over as garbled emails, while the PC clients got nice little popup reminders. I often thought, couldn't Microsoft have an option to send a regular email for non-Outlook clients? Well now onto our little integration solution. I don't believe this solves the problem of integration with Exchange Server, but I think it does allow non-PC or non-Office users to accept, send and cancel calendar invitations. read more »

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