After almost 22 months since our initial commit on the Rooms project we are happy to announce a 1.0 release! We are really proud of this release as it brings together a rich set of features built on a flexible core that can grow and improve over time.
We’ve been keeping busy since our last update on Rooms! We’ve just released Rooms RC2 and are readying for a V 1.0 release before we meet up for DrupalCon in Portland.
Please download and test, as we will not be adding any new features for 1.0, just cleaning up and fixing bugs. We’re very close!
For a recently launched Bluespark project that uses Drupal Commerce to support the sale to tickets to events we needed to implement a new payment method as no solution was readily available.
Drupal Commerce not only makes this possible, but it enables it in a way that makes good use of standard Drupal APIs, concepts and it plugs nicely into Rules, which Drupal Commerce uses extensively.
It is about time we updated everyone on what is going on with Rooms, our Drupal-based hotel booking solution. Development started more than a year ago and interest in the module just keeps growing, even though progress was made in relatively unpredictable spurts as we tried to juggle working on a product alongside consulting work.
Recently, I decided to take my transition from end user to Drupal professional even further by heading into the lion’s mouth and becoming a contributor. I first began working with Drupal as an end user, I was e-commerce manager for a brand whose website ran on Drupal 6. At the time, I didn’t know much about Drupal, only how to use it in my day to day tasks. I also didn’t know much about open source solutions and the communities that contribute to them. Fast forward a few years, and I find myself immersed in Drupal.
In keeping with our attention to detail, we wished to streamline the administrative experience on the Coyote Point home page. Using the nodequeue module allowed us to provide a simple drag and drop interface for selecting and ordering slideshow items and call to action panes. However, the workflow felt clunky, as with so many things created with the powerful but sometimes disjointed "There's a module for that" approach.
When I was a kid, we had a game called Mouse Trap that was based on the Rube Goldberg machine concept. The game pieces resembled common household items like a bathtub, shoe, plumbing pipes, a ladder, etc. You took turns building a trap, piece by haphazard piece. If you were successful, you’d have a complex but fragile working trap to capture the other players’ mouse.
Developing for Drupal can be exciting, but without a proper approach it can also get messy.
Bluespark Labs was a proud sponsor of the Drupal Developer Days event that took place in Barcelona, Spain last weekend.
Recently at Bluespark we had the opportunity to create a multi-country site to support Johnson & Johnson’s Splenda™ launch in Latin America. One of the main requirements we had was to enable the selective publication of content across all countries or for just a specific Latin American country. For example, all the Frequently Asked Questions are common to all the countries available on the site, so we want to publish one time and make this content visible for all countries; but there is also some content, such as News and Events, that we want to display only for specific countries.
