Site Building

Quick follow-up on my post about local settings file template: colleague Ben Clark forked my gist and added all sorts of good stuff that I hadn't considered. Thanks Ben!

A couple months ago, I wrote about our strategy of using local settings files here at Jackson River.

I was setting up a new development site on my machine the other day, and realized that I've been consulting that blog post a couple times a week to copy over bits of code that were missing from various dev sites. It seemed like a good idea to move it into a gist:

When it comes to showing things like related news, or section highlights, I've gotten so accustomed to using node reference fields or a View to list nodes tagged with the same terms. I forget that sometimes, the content administrators will be perfectly happy to build their own list in the node body with a WYSIWYG editor. On a current project, they want more fine-grained control over the list, and it saves me time as the site builder. Everybody wins!

(Originally posted on BrockBoland.com.)

I have always felt that a site admin should have the option to disable or change functionality without having to hire a coder to do it for them. In my early days of web development, this meant I produced pages and pages of admin options. Instead of being highly customizable for the user, these apps were just highly confusing.