Latest shorts

We use scrum (agile development) in our larger projects, and recognize this issue: clients demand a fixed price for a project which is based on a fixed scope and fixed date. According to an article in the Automatiserings Gids (Dutch), this is still possible with scrum by dividing the original scope in iterations, but it does have its limitations and challenges. It's not the preferred way, but it's way better than not using an agile approach. In the meantime, we try to convince clients and partners to consider scrum.

If you search Google for "registry integrity constraint violation class drupal", you will get about 22.000 results of people talking about this fatal error. It only seems to happen if you're working in a multisite environment and are migrating databases a lot between localhost and test, but hey that's what we do all the time when working on big Drupal projects in a team! Thankfully, it is now marked as a critical issue for D7/8.

Wordpress 3.3 was released a couple of days ago, and I took it out for a quick spin to see how it compares to Drupal (7) these days. In short: I'm still very much convinced that Drupal is lightyears ahead if you look at it from a technical point of view. Wordpress might have grown towards Drupal but "CCK for Worpress" is still very limited. They do know how to create a solid media library, something which is still messy in Drupal, and Wordpress offers a great out of the box experience but the two still target a very different audience imho.

I was building a Drupal 7 module and needed to implement a way to import/sync thousands of nodes, files and terms through a SOAP connection. The manual sync can be accomplished in the UI using the excellent batch API (example) which was also available in Drupal 6. But when do you use the new queue API in D7? Short answer: when you need to perform large processes through cron. See also the DrupalCon SF video comparing the two methods.