Bye Bye, Search Lucene API!

Submitted by cpliakas
on September 29th, 2011 at 3:38:29 PM

Search has been a passion of mine for some time now. In many ways the Search Lucene API module was my introduction to Drupal and helped me understand and love the platform. Therefore I am somewhat sad to announce that Search Lucene API has reached "end of life".

The reason for this decision is that the Drupal search community is fragmented. If you want to customize the search module you are using, you have to write code that only works for that specific module.

Series: 
Personal

What is Drupal?

Submitted by cpliakas
on September 15th, 2011 at 9:25:09 AM

Excellent video by Steve Purkiss explaining what Drupal is.

 

What is Drupal? from Larchmont Films on Vimeo.

Series: 
Technology toolshed

Switching Positions

Submitted by cpliakas
on May 5th, 2011 at 10:53:54 PM

Someone once told me that 70% of all technology projects fail.  Regardless of whether the statistic is true, it stuck to me like glue.  As an engineer I always asked myself what I could have done differently to have made a project more successful, although it seemed the failures had much more effort put into them than the successes.  When I joined Acquia as a consultant, I was surprised to see that many organizations were also experiencing the same anomaly.

There are many factors that contribute to the failure of a project, but a common ingredient is the mismanagement of expectations.

Series: 
Personal

Move over, "Kitten Killers"

Submitted by cpliakas
on March 22nd, 2011 at 4:40:13 PM

Move over, Kitten Killers. Drupal has a new anthem.

Series: 
Personal

Programmatic Document Conversion with OpenOffice

Submitted by cpliakas
on February 22nd, 2011 at 7:39:48 PM

OpenOffice is a free and open source productivity suite that is capable of reading and writing a majority of common document formats. One of its hidden features is that it can be run "headless" via the command line which spawns a listener that responds to requests for automated tasks. Using this technique, OpenOffice can be set up as a service to transcode Microsoft documents into well formed HTML and other common formats.

The commands required to convert documents are a bit convoluted, but fortunately Dag Wieers created a python wrapper that greatly simplifies the process.

Series: 
Thinking outside of the drop

Walk Left, Stand Right

Submitted by cpliakas
on January 19th, 2011 at 10:12:51 PM

As a member of Acquia's Professional Services team, I am constantly on the road helping customers succeed with Drupal.  This week I am back in Washington DC, and one of my favorite aspects of the city is the Metro.  Coming from Boston, I really appreciate the continuous notifications of when trains will be arriving, but it is how people adhere to unofficial governances that makes the system stand out.  Let people off the train before getting on. Move towards the center of the car to make room for others.

Series: 
Travel log

Not Feelin' the Flow

Submitted by cpliakas
on January 6th, 2011 at 9:49:47 PM

This week I am traveling to Washington DC to consult on a Drupal site being built for a government agency.  Due to the nature of the department I can't give any specifics, but Drupal is poised to be a huge disruption to the way things are currently being done.  With all of the recent successes surrounding Drupal, there is one recurring question that I have yet to find a viable answer for.  How do you accomplish common publishing workflows with Drupal?

The typical request I see is for content editors to have the ability to create content and send it off to a publisher for moderation.

Series: 
Travel log

Playing Nicely with Tomcat

Submitted by cpliakas
on January 2nd, 2011 at 10:13:29 PM

It is widely known that Drupal can run on many web servers such as Apache, IIS, and Nginx to name a few.  What might be surprising is that Drupal applications can also be served by Java servlet containers such as Tomcat.  Although it may seem like an academic exercise, there are practical reasons as to why Drupal might benefit from running inside of Tomcat.  This post explains how to install Drupal on Tomcat for Ubuntu 10.04 and discusses why deeper integration with Java applications will help the platform grow.

Unfortunately there are many people in the PHP community who consider Java to be a

Series: 
Thinking outside of the drop