July 2012

We're frequently setting up servers for development, for staging, for production. I've lately preferred the Debian flavor of Linux, but up until now that had been something of a problem because Debian and Ubuntu did not include the higher-quality php5-gd library, which meant that you either had to compile your own PHP, pull from an alternative source host, or cope with substandard image resizing with limited processing features.

Certainly Drupal is no piker system. From a relatively unknown Content Management System (CMS), Drupal has burst on the scene and now accounts for one-percent of all websites, which to some might seems small until we stop to think how big the web is.

As a part of wanting to throw out some of the outdated design furniture of the 20th century, I created a new theme to simply float content elements against each other.

We're entering a new era of the web. To the ignorant masses, this transition will go largely unnoticed; they'll enjoy increased usability and convenience, with more robust functionality and more relevant data at hand. And they'll mostly just take it for granted.

So you're building a Drupal Feature! Woohoo! Okay, so…. What to include? What to leave out? How to structure the thing so it doesn't conflict with other Features? How to avoid known issues? Where to start?

Has it been six years already? I'm astounded. Drupal in 2004 was really really really different.