Use SASS and Compass to streamline your CSS development

You may have heard of CSS preprocessors like SASS and LESS before. And you may have - just like me - never actually used it on a project. But for me, that changed recently. A few weeks ago, during Frontend United, I saw a few presentations that touched this subject and so I decided to put it to the test in our LimoenGroen projects.

Frontend United was awesome!

This weekend the first Frontend United event took place in Amsterdam. The successor of the Drupal Design Camp was visited by over 200 attendees and really one of the best Drupal events I’ve been to.

What to do with busy maintainers?

Or: how to improv​e the process of becoming a co-maintainer?

I’ve had more than a few projects where we used a contrib module and found a bug. We then searched the issue queue of that module to find out we were not the only one with that bug. And if we were lucky, there was also a patch that fixes the bug, so we could patch the module and carry on. But we need to make sure we document this patch to not override it when we update the module. As a Drupal developer you really want to use full released and unpatched modules.

The joy of views_embed_view()

I love Views. For those who don’t know it; it’s basically a visual query builder that you want to use in every Drupal project. You might use it to create listings of content, commens, users, and what not. Add arguments, filters, sorts, a search box… you name it. Views can do anything! Well, almost anything.

Exporting your module configuration using Ctools or with custom code - when to use which method?

When I recently joined Scott Reynen as maintainer of the @font-your-face module (blog post), one of the first tasks on my list was to enable site builders to save their font settings using Features. For those not known with Features; it’s a module that saves database settings (views, content types, variables etc) to code.