B. Mann Consulting

The purple module in my Drupal CVS sandbox.

After about 3 years of running multisite and working on some variant of "install profiles" with our whole team at Bryght, I reactivated my CVS account on Drupal.org and created the Install Profile API "module".

I'm incredibly proud of commit 62627.

As Kieran Lal of CivicSpace said at the recent OSCMS Summit, creating install profiles creates a new "profession" in the Drupal ecosystem: install profile maintainer.

It combines the consulting skills of taking business requirements and translating those into a selection of Drupal modules and configuration. It takes a bit of rigor and diligence to keep track of included modules, and listening to the community that is using your install profile. 

I'm excited about the installation profiles on drupal.org. Every community can potentially bundle a custom package and easily leapfrog the (frustrating) learning stage of what module should I use and how do I configure this.

I'm trying to find some time to setup a development environment locally again, and I want to invest in learning an IDE. Most of the folks I know use something like emacs or TextMate to code, but I'd love a little more of an environment. Also, I'm still trying to find more bits and pieces that together form a set of best practices for developing, deploying, and maintaining Drupal.

Initially I was thinking about learning Eclipse, except I've heard that it's PHP support isn't the greatest. Looks like the PHP IDE isn't going to be 1.0 until June 2007. But then again, IBM's Drupal tutorial also explained using Eclipse.

Xcode is Apple's own tool, and there are some guides on using it for PHP.

Then there's Komodo, made by Vancouver's very own ActiveState. 

I want to learn an IDE that has support for multiple languages, so editors purely focused on PHP are out. 

Integration directly with CVS / SVN is a nice to have. svnX works for me as a GUI.