Thus the need to redesign the site from the ground up once more without the use of Ubercart but rather using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views extensively. Though it will look mostly the same I am switching from using the Zen theme as a base to the Genesis theme. The redesign I am currently working on will enable a clean upgrade to Drupal 7 once it is released, unlike the existing implementation.

In retrospect it was wishful thinking that the company I work for would ever be ready or capable of implementing my plans. The Managing Director has a background in sales and managing restaurants/retail outlets and is a man I have a great deal of respect for, but his background causes him to focus solely on getting the product out to the detriment of everything else and in my whole time here I have never been able to get him to see the wisdom of organising the company operations in a more manageable fashion. If I’m ever asked in a job interview to recount a situation where I could have done better this will be it. I have no hard feelings towards him at all though because were it not for him the company would surely have failed by now, I have only regrets of what I had hoped to achieve.

I don’t know if it is my own vanity or a real difficulty but I still haven’t found someone to replace me when I leave. I wrote a list of requirements for a potential applicant which featured only two points:

1. An understanding of business practises and workflow.
2. The ability to map business practises and workflow to the accounting software.

Am I being too vague? These two things are critical for any person who might consider replacing me because everything else can be learnt. Perhaps future experiences will show me there are more items which need to be added to this list.

It’s funny that this is the first time I’ve resigned from a job where I am still in love with the company. Part of me wishes I wasn’t leaving, not only for the warm blanket of job security (because I live in constant fear of getting a good job when I return home), but also in the vain hope that perhaps given time my plans would come to fruition. Another part of me is glad I am leaving because it acknowledges the futility of trying to improve things and, honestly, there are employees I will be happy to never see again.

The other day one such staff member¹ told me something I had asked her to do was not her job, causing me to spend the next few minutes explaining to her the many ways in which it in fact was, but she illustrated to me an important work ethic she lacks – the ability to separate personal feelings from the job at hand. This particular staff member has had regular occurrences of extreme conflict with every person in the company and with me leaving the thin buffer between the rest of the staff and her is also going to disappear so I worry for what will happen to them in my absence.

I’m hopeful that great and exciting things are in my future.

¹ This is the crazy woman I’ve mentioned before that I would like to fire but the Managing Director pities her (really) so lets her stay. If he said ‘yes’ tomorrow I would still fire her on the spot, though the act wouldn’t garner as much pleasure as it once might have.

While I’m on the topic of Texturas, they are an amazing product that I never knew about which allows you to some quite creative things with food that as a food consumer I always took for granted. No more though!

Anyway, the display of recipes is all done using the magic and power of the Views module for Drupal. Quite amazing really and perhaps I will come back to this post when my brother isn’t waiting for me in WoW to detail exactly how I did it.

Yesterday I discovered that the search functionality included with Drupal is capable of whole word searching only.

I really hate discovering huge failings like this myself and wish they’d be clear from the beginning on such limitations. As a result of this revelation I’ve been reading through discussions on drupal.org about how the search can be improved that have been going on for a disappointingly long time, which unfortunately is quite common with Drupal (a curse of being open source), mainly because certain decision-makers in the Drupal heirarchy feel that full-text search would incur too great a performance hit. This, rather than making it possible for people to find content on your site without explicity knowing what it is called.

This even affects site administrators because when sites get large enough that admins have to search to find a certain node (article/post in Drupal-talk) they must know exatly what they’re looking for to be able to find it.

Luckily there are modules available to replace the built-in search module, but now I am required to manually search through them to find the right solution.

Occasionally it would happen that I didn’t make a mistake though leaving me extremely perplexed and thoroughly unconfident in my ability to learn the intricacies of Drupal, only to have my original changes suddenly appear on the site without me doing anything.

Something they don’t do a good job of explaining is that Drupal maintains caches (yes, more than one) and when changes are made you will need to clear them to allow Drupal to pick up your changes. Even more confusing is that up until recently it has never been made entirely clear where to go to clear the various caches as they are buried deep inside the administration interface – in Performance configuration of all places. That’s all changed now thanks to a contributed module called Administration Menu that presents the entire administration interface in a menu that appears at the top of the page, bringing cache flushing to the top level, which is a very nice change indeed.

One other very important thing that beginners who are trying to customise the look of their site need to know is that all of the built-in Drupal performance settings found at /admin/settings/performance/ should be disabled to stop Drupal from caching things like the css and javascript. This will avoid the problem I described above. Changes to your theme files will always require a cache flush however, especially any changes to template.php (the home of all the functions that do the cool stuff for your theme).

Of course I’m completely glossing over the fact that you also need to have an idea of how theming works in Drupal. Yet another mountain for the army of noobs to attempt the ascent of.