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While working on the Drupal based sports social networking web site Juump (www.juump.com), we used a tool called Rally to manage the Agile development process. Rally comes in 2 versions: community and enterprise. Rally is a combined project management, team management, time management and bug tracking tool.

At the initial stages of the development process, stories are created to describe the functional requirements of the site. For example, a story will describe the ability of a user to search for a tennis court using the search bar. A story will have information about the estimated hours for development, its priority and the developer who will be working on the user story. It is similar to a use cases. Stories are organized into iterations based on their priorities. The more important functionalities are placed into the earlier iterations. As the development progressed, priorities for user stories are modified. After each iteration, the actual hours for each user story is entered onto the system. This allows for comparison between the actual hours and the estimate hours.

I have been using Views 2 module a lot lately and the more I use it, the more I appreciate its elegantly designed architecture. It is very powerful and flexible. Popular modules such as Organic Groups and Location make the Views 2 module even more powerful. Showing information to end-users becomes easier when you want to show certain group posts or perhaps display the list of members of a group given a certain location.

I believe that the biggest factor which contributed to the popularity of Views 2 is its flexibility. You can pretty much override everything, from overriding its query using hook_views_query_alter(...), to being able to override its output at a very granular level(field result level).

Let's say that you want to show a yearly sales report of your 5 departments highlighting the sales per month. You can assume that a “department” is implemented as a node. Your have created a “Page” display of your View. The style of your View is set to “Table”. You have selected “Node:Title” as your department's name.

Here I will show you step by step process on how to override the result of a Views query.

1. Click “Theme:Information” under you Views “Basic settings”.

I previously created a blog post about Tools for Managing Drupal Projects. This time I would like to talk about the tools that we use at Appnovation for the actual development.

While we do not always work on every component of the project, most projects involve the following steps:

1) Wireframes Development
During this stage, we create wireframes that demonstrate the layout and site navigation of the web site. We usually create wireframes using a tool called Axure RP. We love this tool because it allows for the export of the wireframes into an HTML format. It also allows us to create wireframes by dragging and dropping web components such as radio buttons. By exporting the wireframes into HTML format, we can easily run through the wireframes with clients over a conference call.

2) Design

I'm interested in hearing about other peoples local environments - developer or designers! What applications do you use the most and how do you use them together to streamline your workflow and achieve maximum efficiency? I like to think I have it down, but I guess what it all boils down to is what you are comfortable with. Still, I long for less keystrokes, if only one.

Lately I've been growing irritated with my text editor - TextMate for the mac. Some negative things about it are really becoming quite apparant to me, one thing in particular is the searching capabilities, especially when dealing with a really large project. It takes at least 3 - 4 minutes for me to find something (on this one particular project) and lately it's just been hanging. Maybe the answer here is a re-install, but another answer would be to try something else. Any suggestions (other than Coda)?