Blog

For a lot of our Drupal development projects, developing web site wireframes and information architecture is the first step in the process. A lot of web developers use Microsoft Visio or OmniGraffle as their wireframes tool.

At Appnovation, we have been using a tool called Axure RP for creating wireframes. Axure is a tool that is specifically designed for creating web site wireframes. As a result, all of the tool bar elements are strictly catered towards the web design world. We really enjoy working with the Axure for a number reasons:

1) Drag and Drop Elements
Using Axure, a web designer can easily add form elements and place holders to the page. Since all of the tool bar elements are designed for creating web site wireframes, there is no need to search for the right icon. This is the case for Visio since there are so many different elements available on the tool bar.

2) Export Wireframes as HTML

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.

Our office is currently installing an Asterisk based Phone system called TrixBox. Asterisk is a Phone Branching System which allows for corporate phone directories, voice mail systems and other great telecommunication features. Even better is that both of these software systems are also open source.

As I was reviewing the features offered by Asterisk, I did some research into how Asterisk can potentially integrate with Drupal. I learned about this Asterisk-Drupal integration module: http://drupal.org/project/asterisk.

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)?

When Appnovation started a few years ago, we did not use any project management tools. We only had a shared folder for managing all the documents associated with each project. Over the past few years, much has changed and we started using a few tools:

1) BaseCamp (www.basecamphq.com)
We use BaseCamp for most our project management. This includes the storage of client contact information, projects tasks, project milestones and project files. We find it to be a really effective tool for storing information. Unfortunately the tool does not have any ticket or bug tracking system.

2) TickSpot (www.tickspot.com)
We use TickSpot for all of our time tracking purposes. The budget feature allows to easily manage the time spent on each project and really figure the projects that we are going over budget on. Before using TickSpot, we were using the time tracking feature on BaseCamp which is not really effective.

3) TRAC