Sereno has been migrating a Drupal 7 intranet of several thousand content items from a menu-based system to one using taxonomy tags. We looked at coding the migration, but found a much quicker route using the Views Bulk Operations module (VBO) to crunch through the menu items, allocating each & every one anew taxonomy tag based on their pre-existing menu.
Git makes me happy in controlling the versions of a project's code base & allowing you to recover from wandering off in wrong directions.
But when you want to throw away some ill-considered changes to your code on your development machine, git can obstinately refuse to 'pull' from your repo. Try to do a git pull & you'll get an 'error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge: ...' If you want to throw away your local changes and re-sync with the repo (yes, you'll lose any commits since your most recent push), you can do this:-
In this post I wanted to highlight our recent experiences developing an intranet in Drupal.
In this it has been really important for us to not over-engineer our solution as our client is currently undergoing a major restructure - so while the need for a new intranet was pressing, this has to be built during a period of great organisational change. Having developed many applications over the years in different technologies, I was naturally a bit apprehensive about the impact of changing architecture on the build.
When organisations look to rebuilt their intranets, the obvious tactic - or 'strategic leap' - is to revolutionise design and structure and develop a brand new and improved experience for users. While this is clearly the most impressive approach in terms of demonstrating improvement and change, it is probably the worst way of effecting real improvement and productivity gains for users and the organisation at large.
I have recently switched development environment from Mac to Ubuntu. By and large this has proved a really positive experience as I can so closely match my development machine to the production servers we run. I ran into one sticking point during set up - configuring Netbeans to compile SASS. This ought to be straightforward and it is, although I couldn't find any clear documentation. So to save anyone else similar pain, here are the steps I went through to get my set up working.
At Sereno, we use a range of tools to help us keep on top of Drupal development and to keep our clients actively engaged and aware throughout our projects. I'm not suggesting the following approach is best for everyone - the joy of using Agile is that you should really be tailoring all your processes and tools to meet your particular team size and style of working - but this set of tools certainly works well for us.
At Sereno, we've been using Personas in projects for many years. In case you've never come across them before, personas are short character studies of the people who are going to use your website or application. They're usually fictionalised descriptions of real users, and they help you think through your design process from your user's point of view.
We have been using various approaches to lean or agile project management for some time now. With each Drupal project, we refine our processes. Or perhaps I should say, we simplify them with each iteration. So we use fewer software tools, we have fewer stages, our sign off lists get shorter. And this is making us much better at project management.
There is a gulf between managing learning and development in large SMEs (up to about 1,500 employees) compared to very much larger enterprise organisations but I suspect the gap is narrowing.
