We here at Redfin Solutions are proud to be Platinum sponsors of the inaugural DrupalCamp Boone. Western North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains are a thing of beauty, and we're excited to get down there and breathe in the fresh air. What better place for a giant blue drop than a Blue Ridge?

We also want to call attention to the other great sponsors obtained. For anyone new to Drupal, it's the community that makes Drupal such a powerful force in this world, and it wouldn't be possible without you.

Registration is open, so get on over to http://drupalcampboone.com and get involved!

It's been a crazy Saturday here at Redfin Solutions, what with getting a new server and immediately having at least one client to launch on it!

Redfin is happy to announce the redesign of Chapman Construction's new site at http://Chap-Con.com. The people at Chapman have been really great to work with. The design is by Jon Sachs, who we always enjoy working with. Living in the mountains of North Carolina, I'm happy to say Chapman has a very green focus, which brings out both the geek *AND* the hippie in me.

The Rave

Yesterday was the birthday of a shell script that Gina Trapani uses to (her words) "run her life." I am a huge Lifehacker fan, and when Gina started Smarterware I subscribed to its RSS as well. Though a lot of posts overlap, some do not - and it's good to keep up with what else Gina is doing. She's a very smart woman.

Last night I hastily decided to upgrade to Lucid Lynx on my main development machine. Generally, I try and wait a few months till things settle, but nearly 100% of the time that doesn't work. After a short battle with my wireless and some other small things, I finally settled back into "work mode" and wanted to get started working on a project I'm working on for Appalachian State University.

I spent a few hours wading through something yesterday that I hope will save some other people some headaches.

I had the notifications module on, and it was sending notifications for node creations and updates just fine, but it seemingly wasn't sending anything when I commented on a node. It would TELL ME it did ("notification sent to x other users") but I would never get an email.

For hours I've been banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why Drupal's date_make_date "wasn't working." I was always getting back an empty PHP DateTime object. I traced it back down to PHP's date_create. I suspected that there was no reflection capabilities, but searching against date_create really didn't yield me much.

Eventually I decided "let's just search up a level (date_make_date empty object)" and in seconds I came across this thread: http://drupal.org/node/514560. This is just proof to me that the Drupal community is super awesome.

Wow, it seems that Drupal's Webform module has come a long way since I last used it (which I believe was Drupal 5.x). It's so convenient and really latches onto the new template hints and stuff from Drupal 6 (here I am talking about it while Webchick announced yesterday the D7 criticals queue is under 200, w00t!).

Patrick is I'm sure somewhere while all of his and Elyse's extended family brood over Madeline, their latest addition. My family was awestruck by my nephew's second Christmas. We're off to do some of that typical holiday traveling, but want to with the Drupal community and all of our clientele a happy and joyous holiday season, spent with their families or friends.

I basically grew up at summer camp, and it has without a doubt made me who I am today (just refer to the ACA's new marketing campaign "because of camp," there's a lot of things you could fill in about me!). Redfin did some pro-bono work to develop the web site at http://savebement.org, making heavy use of CiviCRM - the open source constituent relationship management software originally developed to fill the need of grassroots movements like this one.

Thanks to a design provided by Jon Sachs, Redfin was able to recently launch www.livesinthebalance.org, a site aimed at providing resources and help to children and parents who struggle with their relationships, sometimes to the point of Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Collaborative Problem Solving is an approach to these unique situations, pioneered by Dr. Ross Greene.

Redfin had the pleasure of Co-Presenting with John Paul McNeal about the utility of Drupal in the camp website world. In addition to its features as a content management system, giving the camps the power to manage their own content, Drupal also has great support for integrating with the latest social media applications, such as Twitter and Facebook, via Ping.FM and directly.

Below are the slides from that presentation.
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dfnh54xz_89fb7kt5r9

There seems to be much debate regarding when to use node_save versus drupal_execute. Personally, I like the idea of drupal_execute, since it's just like the regular form executing--it handles validation for you, for example. This is an example of where I had to use node_save, but still needed validation.

Today (Sept 19, 2009) I had the great honor of being able to present to DrupalCamp Atlanta on something that I think is a major (mostly mental) hurdle in beginning to develop for Drupal. There are a lot of developers out there, people who are familiar with PHP or other programming languages, who clearly know how to program, but don't know the right way to program for Drupal.

I can't speak highly enough of Earl Miles, aka merlinofchaos. Despite the puppet act at DrupalCon, which I'm willing to forgive, ;) this guy is awesome. I have been using views for a long time, and Views in Drupal 4.7 and 5 was just awesome. Then Views2 came out, and while the learning curve was a little steep, it continues to blow my mind.

Here's a handy BASH script I wrote to pull down one copy of a database to a local version using an SSH tunnel. It's not super-secure, so it kind of assume that you have the script hosted on a local machine, securely (the DB password is in the script!).

First, go put a host named "tunnel" in your hosts file (usually /etc/hosts on *nix-type environments), that points to localhost 127.0.0.1 (mysql can get cranky when you try to connect to "localhost" - it always tries to use a local socket when you say that, so this is a bit of a workaround to make it work through the tunnel.

Redfin Solutions is proud to announce the availability of a -dev branch of code for integrating with the DOTGO SMS service.

One thing I got to hear about at DrupalCon during the Q&A at Sacha Chua's Totally Rocking Your Development Environment was someone who popped up quick and mentioned the utility of VirtualDocumentRoot, a directive for Apache which lets you automatically go find the folder to server the site out of based on the incoming host header.