One thing I have learned is that it’s very hard to describe; Drupal modules. They often have to be seen to really understood, and a lot of what I write is hard to see because I like to write APIs and tools that let administrators have Phenomenal Cosmic Power without having to write much PHP.

As a result, it’s hard to tell what my modules do. I wrote this description of the Node Queue module and I’m hoping this might help people understand both what it does, and why many sites need something like this.

The idea behind the Node Queue is simplicity in administration, yet flexibility in presentation. It provides a 'queue', which is really just a list of nodes, and an easy way to add/remove nodes from the queue. It also provides a mechanism to re-order the queue arbitrarily.

I bet it won’t surprise anyone that I might blog about Views, here and there. After all, I’ve spent a great deal of time with it, and I’m very excited about its potential, and what it can do.

As excited as I am by it, I do keep finding myself running up against various limitations.

• Views can’t easily add itself as a tab attached to someone’s account. The only reasonable way I can think to implement this is to do it as an external module.
• Taxonomy is so darn flexible that views actually can’t do some operations that appear simple, because to do them you have to assume things about taxonomy. One good example is simply displaying all terms attached to a node. Because SELECT queries require you to know exactly what kind and how much data you’re collecting, and taxonomy is inherently variable, this is difficult to do in a single select.
• It doesn’t support group by, though I think I can add that one without serious trouble.
• I don’t really have everything that needs to be in there for filters, especially in terms of operators and special types. For example, we have a ‘date’ type in forms api that Views can’t really take advantage of.

There’s also a long, long list of things I need/want to do to Views.

Alright then. (alright isn't a word in English. I'm ok with that).

Today was my last day at the 9-5 job, and the malaise that affected that company is now behind me (even if it's still close and in the rearview mirror).

What this means is that I'm officially a free agent. Right now I've dedicated time to CivicSpace and I have one other proposal that I have sitting in my mailbox and I will read through tonight and see if it is something I want to work on. I'll happily entertain other offers, and I would also happily entertain advice from other folks who've been doing this for awhile.

I'm getting a little concerned about Drupal 4.7; it's really hard to keep track of what state my modules are in, because things keep changing. Here we are at beta4, and we're hit with this UTF-8 upgrade, which is a required change to all modules. It's not a difficult change, I suppose, but it seems rather late in the game to require yet more changes. DRUPAL-4-7 was released as a tag! At that point there shouldn't be any more required changes to modules.

Every time I turn around, lots of little things change here and there. I'm not a particularly vigilant person. I've been catching a bunch of these changes because I'm heavily involved in them right now, but I may not always be.

One of the things that happened with Angry Donuts here is that while I was fiddling with the logo and stuff, someone popped into the IRC and started asking about how hard it would be to implement DHTML menus based on this script. The person went by Aw0L and I have no idea who that is, otherwise, but I did end up getting the script working, after giving it a pretty serious workover.

This is my brand new programming oriented blog. Kind of odd that angry donuts have anything to do with programming. And they don't! But I had the name sitting around, and I had the logo sitting around, and I said to myself...self, why not. And I actually gave myself a whole lot of answers why not.