An Occasional Thought...

One of the greatest things about Drupal is the ease at which you can create different types of content – aptly named “content types”. The one area that we, as a company, had to iron out – and have been perfecting over the last few years – is the assignment of permissions for these content types. Anyone who has seen the Drupal permissions page knows it is a nightmare of checkboxes that must be precisely managed. While we – the core admins of the site – need to have full control over all aspects of the content, we also need to lock down certain areas that clients need to stay out of. After deliberating over how to structure our roles and permissions, we’ve solidly decided on a system of creating roles based on content types. For any given site we might have a “page admin”, “blog admin”, “gallery admin” and so on. In addition, we can also have roles like “blog author” that may add/edit/delete their own content, but not all blog content site-wide.

When you develop websites for a living, it’s inevitable that you write the same lines of code over and over. While the goal for some of these repititions might be to create a generic stylesheet (a reset) or create a plugin for javascript code, sometimes it’s just not enough code to need to create a whole system for. It is, however, enough code that not having to write it each time would save you hours of time over the long run. Enter TextExpander. (Or any other text expansion software. This just happens to be my favorite.) TextExpander is one of many text expansion softwares available for developers and everyday computer users alike. Text expansion is basically the ability to set up shortened snippets of text that automatically convert to long lines of text. For example, I could set up a snippet that would tell the computer to type out my full name – Marcus Dustin Burnette – whenever I type my initials – “MDB”.