Last month Chapter Three announced they were working on a Firefox plugin and Drupal module that would allow Firebug to talk with Drupal. As a Web Developer who uses Firebug heavily every day and who specializes in Drupal, this announcement from Chapter Three got me a little excited -- so I installed the plugin, enabled the module, and gave it a shot.

Any Drupal developer worth his salt at least knows of the Views module. The shear usefulness and time-saving nature of views has earned the module a place in every Drupal site I've developed. However, because views are stored in the database and their presentation is controlled by the views module itself, managing views between staging/live sites, handling updates, and tracking revisions become difficult issues when dealing with Views.

After the first day of having the new Mac and playing with iChat, it was time to hunker down and start accomplishing things with the Mac. In the last few years one of the biggest reasons I've been reluctant to get a Mac has been a sense (whether justified or not) that the software selection wouldn't be sufficient for my wants, needs, and tastes. Part of my recent decision to get the Mac was the general feeling that this was no longer the case. I've found this to be true.

I spend a lot of time on my computers. Most of that time is spent using or writing web pages and web applications (and the occasional video game). Web development isn't what it used to be, and tackling everything requires a lot of tools. I'll summarize my needs and the tools that I've settled on using to meet them.

A few months ago the primary project to which I'm assigned espoused an Agile/XP approach for development... well, a heavily modified Agile/XP approach as there is only one developer (me) working on features/tasks/etc that come from a team of people, funneled through a project manager of sorts before they get to me. Because of the unique relationship we've enjoyed with the client, managing the project has been an interesting challenge since client users are involved closely with the project and are sometimes responsible for tasks such as testing.

We've moved between a few task tracking/project management systems in the process, trying to find software that fit our needs, the latest of which is VersionOne. The client actually came across VersionOne, which I'd only heard of in passing before that point, and asked if it would be a viable system to use during development. After a quick glance by several of our team members, we agreed that the system looked pretty good and was unique in that it was designed with Agile in mind so it supported the Agile/XP workflow in a manner than other ticketing systems didn't. So, over the course of a couple days we migrated to VersionOne and started using it.