Posts by theme: Views

At Palantir, we try to be "sustainable" in everything we do. Our office is made from mostly recycled materials and we strive for being carbon-netural. Our approach to employees is to avoid the "long hours and weekends" trap, because we don't want people to get burned out before their time. Our approach to Drupal theming is built around site sustainability, and allowing the theme to grow with the site as it evolves.

It also means building code that is sustainable. That isn't really a new concept; generally it's called "reusable code". But with how straightforward it is to bend Drupal in various ways with form alters and theme overrides, it's easy to miss a rather important little revolution in Drupal development that Palantir has embraced wholeheartedly: Sub-module building blocks.

At Palantir, we frequently work with museums and universities that need to integrate large legacy data systems.

In the case of museums that's usually a Collections Management System and/or a Digital Asset Management system (DAM) of some kind, holding information on thousands or hundreds of thousands of works in the museum's collection. In the case of a university, that's usually course information and availability coming from a registrar system. As a result, we've gotten a disturbing amount of experience integrating with oddball 3rd party systems. At last week's Museums and the Web 2009 conference in Indianapolis, Tiffany Farriss and I ran a workshop on remote data strategies based on the work we've done on several different museum sites. Of course, as a pre-conference workshop attendance wasn't that big (even though we did fill the room), so for those who weren't at the conference we decided to put the information up online. The slides themselves aren't that useful, but consider this the novelization of the presentation.

For those playing our home game, there's sample code provided at the end. It uses Amazon as a remote data source, and requires just the base amazon.module.