Innova Partners / Loosely Typed in Ohio

Design, Open Source, Productivity Writing Drupal Themes

Posted by Kent Broestl on May 12th, 2008

One of the many things that I do here is create custom themes for Drupal. It’s kind of an artsy thing, and since I’m the resident designer (or so it says on my card), I tend to be a bit artsy about it. One of the things that being artsy means to me is being off-site. The Innova office is a very cool space, but I like to have a change of pace every once in a while. A change of lighting or a change of atmosphere does a world of good.

But one thing that becomes a problem is remote access. Sometimes, I really like to get off the beaten path, and away from it all. I have a laptop, but I’m not going to be able to connect to anything when I’m sitting in the middle of a park. And even if I could, I certainly don’t want the lag time in connection, especially if I’m tweaking css. “Okay… just one more pixel to the left. Right. Save. Okay… Now I’ll go make a sandwich while that goes through the VPN.”

In be beginning stages, I like to do everything remotely. Most of the time, the client has only sent a spec, maybe some rough ideas about what they want the design to look like, and maybe some color ideas and or photos. Usually, I don’t have any content at all, besides a tentative site name, and I can’t sit around waiting for content.

To develop locally, and rapidly, I use MAMP (what do you want? I’m on a Mac). You can do the same thing with a windows machine, with a stack called XAMPP. It’s a full Apache-Mysql-php stack that you can kickstart whenever you need to, and can shut it down when you don’t. In short, I love the thing. I didn’t at first, but I didn’t like Drupal at first either.

Until I get content here’s what I do:

I have two different setups: one for Drupal 5.x and one for Drupal 6.x.
I keep two seperate databases: called drupal5 and drupal6. These databases contain only the most generic of content. It’s basically all lorem ipsum but it has the content that I expect clients to want (stories, pages, blog entries, etc.)
Copy one of the stock themes in /themes to /sites/all/themes/projectnamehere. This keeps all of my new themes separate from the stock ones, and if this directory gets clogged (which it will after a few projects) it’s easy to offload the directory to somewhere else.
I’m not usually trying out modules at this phase, but if I do need to, I try to keep them sequestered out from the stock modules and keep them in /sites/all/modules. That way, I remember that there are modules that I need to upload to the production environment.

And away I go. I can take my laptop anywhere I want, and I can sit down pretty much anywhere and get things knocked out pretty quickly.

Getting out of the office is often a great way to get things done. If I can work without a network connection (as I generally do when working as outlined above), it’s a great way to shut down a lot of the distractions. I can’t check the news. I’m not going to be pinged with IMs. I’m not going to be sidetracked with new mail. It’s a lovely world out there, so go out and get to work in it.

permalink | no responses | share this

Culture, Design Estimates

Posted by Kent Broestl on May 5th, 2008

Andy Rutledge has a great article on estimating hours for projects.

This has always been a sticky spot, since I think we all want to have the most optimistic view possible of the projects we work on, our abilities, and our clients; however, having accurate estimates of of the time that we will spend on our projects is crucial to being competitive, or even competent.

My personal favorite part of the article is the footnotes to the discussion of Client B.

If the client cannot describe their brand: Consider not taking this project

If the client doesn’t understand the needs of their clients: Strongly consider not taking this project

If the client is abusive: Do not take the project

Would that it were always that simple…

permalink | no responses | share this