Tools

During the BarCamp-style afternoon session at DrupalCamp MD last weekend, some people got talking about the tools they use on a daily basis, including one of my favorites: Alfred, a launcher app that's comparable to Quicksilver or LaunchBar. I have several Drupal-specific custom searches setup in Alfred, and I've been meaning to write about them for the benefit of other Drupal devs on Macs.

To add custom searches, open the Alfred preferences and go to the Features tab, then select Custom Searches in the list at left. Click the plus icon at the bottom of the window to add a new one. You'll be asked to provide some info for the search, including the keyword to use—the command you'll type into the Alfred window—and the URL that the search should go to. You'll put {query} in the URL where the search string should go.

On my machine, I have two local sites I use for developing and testing modules and patches: http://d6.local and http://d7.local. After manually wiping and re-creating these sites several times in between some tests, I realized I was doing it wrong and wrote bash scripts to do it for me.

Now, I have templates for each of these sites. Whenever I want to start with a fresh dev site with some basic modules installed (like Admin Menu, Admin Role, and Devel), I run a quick bash script that drops and re-creates the database, imports a SQL file, and replaces the entire webroot directory with the contents of a tarball. I did have to manually setup the site, create my admin user, and enable the modules when I first set all this up. Now, I can easily update that template when I need to - for example, when there's a new versions of the Drupal core released.

Here's my setup:

(Originally posted on BrockBoland.com)

It is imperfect, but I finally found someone who figured out how to get TextMate to talk to Drupal using the Blog API. In short, the blog setup needs to include the content type you are using for blog posts after a pound sign, such as: Blog Name http://user@www.website.com/xmlrpc.php#blogpost Unfortunately, it doesn't support taxonomies at all, so it's unlikely that I'll bother using it until I feel like putting more work into it.