As Drupal has continued to grow as a system, it seems that we are getting more and more clients who come to us with a site that is halfway setup, and they just need some help with some custom modules or other more technical elements of the site.  Innevitably that leads to them sending us a database and filesystem dump, so we can start developing on their site.  The only problem being that we don't know the password for the admin user, so we are locked out of the site even once we set it up from the datebase and filesystem dump.

"Mobile Design and Development" describes the state of mobile software development today.  The author discusses a wide range of topics in great detail and gives a lot of good information and statistics about the current marketplace.  The book discusses the pros and cons of different mobile app design structures in great detail and gives a lot of history of how we got to where we are today.  The book is not highly technical as it focuses more on high level concepts than on low level system design, but there are definitely parts of the book that require advanced web development knowledge.

"Learning Flex 4" explains all of the core concepts for developing Flex 4 applications.  It is definitely a beginners book as it assumes only some basic programming knowledge, and the book doesn't really go much beyond the basics of writing a simple Flex application.

"HTML5: Up and Running" gives a concise history of web standards that have led to the development of HTML5 which is the next generation web standard.  The book then describes all of the details of the HTML5 specification, and how you can use the new features to improve your website.  It discusses the following things is particular: detecting HTML5 features, canvas tag, video tag, geolocation, local storage, and new form elements.

"JavaScript Patterns" takes the reader from a very basic understanding of JavaScript all the way to some very advanced language structures and patterns.  The book uses lots of examples throughout, and it explains everything from best practices to how to implement advanced JavaScript data structures and patterns (singleton, function chaining, inheritance, callbacks, etc.).  The book compares different patterns for achieving the same result throughout and draws conclusions about the best methods for different scenarios.

Tons of websites are now using ajax to dynamically load content into a page instead of reloading the entire page.  This gives a much better experience for the user, and it just feels much more seamless than traditional websites do.  However, people often run into issues with ajax because it doesn't update the url.  This means that the user cannot bookmark the page or use the back button like they normally would.  However, with some clever javascript, we can still make everything work as they expect.

Search engine optimization (SEO) seems to be the black magic of website design today.  No one talks about it in any depth, and the few that do claim to be experts, all have pretty disjoint opinions on how to brew the right concoction that makes Google happy.  Doing a quick search for "SEO" or "Drupal SEO" on Google will provide a myriad of results and people asking for your money to make your site more visible on search engines, but is the magic formula really that difficult?

Even with the vast number of sites out there using Drupal, the issue of how to migrate code from a development environment to a staging environment and then on the the production environment is a largely untouched and unexplained problem space.  However, I finally found the reason why everything is left so unexplained.  It is because, like most command line things, once you know the right commands it is really simple.  This post is going to discuss two tools that will eliminate all of the problems you might run into: Drush and Ægir.

"Cron run exceeded the time limit and was aborted."

Most of the Drupal posts on this deal with a module that has a problem which causes cron to run for too long. I want to have cron run long intentionally.

For a client's site we need to do some fairly major calculations during the nighttime when cron runs. These are going to take well over 30min per cron run.