B. Mann Consulting

I just got back from Galiano Island, one of the Southern Gulf Islands between Vancouver and Victoria/Vancouver Island. Theoretically it was a Drupal geek thing hosted by Christian Nally, and we did spend a fair amount of time thinking about install profiles for Drupal 6 core.

But really, it was a chance to get out of the city, and it ended up being a great place to connect with a lot of people. Did you know, for instance, that Avi Bryant has bought a place there? I've been doing my own thinking about how to get over Vancouver housing crisis/prices pain without doing a suburb, and Galiano is not a bad compromise.

I was lucky enough to get a ride from Bill of WorkSpace, and it turns out Josli is actually from Galiano. I'm an islander myself, having grown up on Bowen Island.

Actually, the Bill / WorkSpace connection is interesting, since Nally would really like to have a "WorkSpace Galiano". So, how do you grow/spread/franchise the concept/name and have it continue to succeed? Do alternate systems a la OpenCoffee plug into this? I have more on this rolling around, and I hope that something real/with money behind it comes of it. More soon.

P.S. Dear blogosphere: what's happening in Facebook is very important. More of the bits over there need to be dragged out here...and a lot of it is about this identity layer that's just not quite built yet out here.

P.P.S. Another great find over the weekend was Unfuddle. Raincity Studios have been using it for a while and have found it good (we use Trac, which is a lot like it only...harder for humans). I'm still kicking tires, AND I wish the codebase was open (just do the hosted service thing, guys....) but it seems very good. I still need to write up and/or do a training course on "Best Practices for Drupal Development using Subversion", and Unfuddle would be a good part of it. 

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.