Website in a week!

New layout is up! I looooooved my old one with the falling leaves when I first made it, but then as I experimented with making other drupal themes I felt more and more as if I had already progressed passed that design. I wanted to reflect that here on my personal blog so ta-da! I'm still tweaking things, but it's up! I liked the girl on the swing cause, well, she reminds me of me! Happily swinging along, content with the place I'm at right now but still keeping an eye open to what other opportunities may come my way. :) Now it makes me happy to look at this site again, which is important

So I guess a good indicator of whether or not you're doing well at work is how much responsibility you're given. How about being given the task of building out an entire website for a pretty big client in one week. Ever heard of Arizona State University? I can't divulge all the details just yet, but it's actually a pretty sweet website, but they want it this Friday. As in 3 days from right now. Ready for clients to start entering content. EEK! But no sweat, I was nervous at first but it's coming along so nicely! I think it's one of my best yet, which is how it should be, continuously getting better with each build. I'm very pleased with my code and I think the theme is going to hold out very well across browsers which means less stressful last minute browser testing for me!

Another reason I'm so happy with it is that I'm slowly learning to rely less on using views and more on writing my own queries for things that views don't handle well. Take today for instance. We have a list of upcoming activities on this site. That means current and future events only. Clients can enter in their own events and date for those events.

Our goal was to show in a sidebar a list of those events grouped by month name and year, sorted current to future, and only between now and one year from now. I found views to be pretty much useless in getting this specific with my cck date field. So I took up querying the database in a block to spit out, and correctly link to my groups of events. Works like a charm and is far less resource heavy than creating a view would have been. I got to learn some new mysql stuff in the process as well! So my new view on life is this: If you can sql you can rule the web. Ok, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. But seriously, what applications or worth while websites aren't running off of databases these days?

So I still love using the views module for spitting out nodes from a database or what have you, but there's just some things that go beyond it's somewhat user-friendly UI. I grudingly embraced the idea of custom queries in blocks at first, but now I think I'm hooked. And the best part? You can link to an include file via php in your block to the file with your sql. That way you can store backups in subversion. If your database is ever lost, your code won't be! Super cool since sometimes, even though programmers are geniuses, it's hard to remember exactly how you finally arrived at a solution to a problem at 3 o'clock in the morning to be able to recreate it again months later.

So query on Drupal warriors! Watch out, soon I just might be making my own modules! Now that's scary considering I had never even heard of Drupal 8 months ago! Wow time flies!