Learning is easy, doing is difficult

veryone knows this - the potential for failure increases with the amount of work you're doing. What I need to keep in mind is that it will also plateau and decrease as I gain experience and skills over time, and that it will take time to get there. Patience is not always easy.

I learn by winging it, charging into a project and trying to do everything right away. Once I figure out that I can't bulldoze my way through, I start getting a sense for what I need to know, then I can backtrack and fill in the gaps before going forward or finishing up. It's not necessarily a great strategy, and sometimes leads to excessive frustration and going in circles, so I try to recognize when I'm just wasting time beating my head against something.

One of the things I thought I should do before I get too much further is just to go through some of the basic and general documentation for Drupal, so I have a better sense of how it works on both the front and back end. Sometimes when I start thinking I've got a hold on things I just glance over at the #drupal-contribute channel on IRC and feel humbled. Anyway, some disjointed notes:

Understanding Drupal- the basic stuff, explaining the system from the front.
Drupal 8.x API reference- all the stuff I've felt clueless about; hooks, menus, useful things when you're poking at core.

I had a poke around DrupalSites.net to see if anyone had something like what I want to do... no luck. Mostly I need to be able to use taxonomy terms on photos and blog posts (and whatever else I may add) and be able to search, sort, combine, filter etc for browsing (hello Views, my new best friend). And I'd like to be able to upload and update directly from Lightroom. I have a Lightroom plugin that lets me upload to Picasaweb and update files remotely without having to touch the site itself. So that's most of my needs, apart from some static pages for "About" and whatnot (see previous post): Taxonomy and ease of upload/modification.

...And someday, e-commerce. At that point, possibly authenticated users who can create little albums of my photos, save and share combinations that explore how each photo speaks to another through composition, color, subject, mood. I'm seeing this with draggable stuff, a large "desktop" where "prints" can be moved around freely, just as you would when laying out a gallery show using contact prints. But that's all someday. Maybe not even until after the D8 release, so going backwards to a D7 site would just flatten my little brain.

Cron jobs- at last I know how this works in the filesystem. (I'm less sure why I kept the bit below:)

• status: A bitmapped field indicating the status of the file. The first 8 bits are reserved for Drupal core. The least significant bit indicates temporary (0) or permanent (1). Temporary files older than DRUPAL_MAXIMUM_TEMP_FILE_AGE will be removed during cron runs.

All caps is a constant?


I plucked out a new task from the queue for myself, since it looked pretty easy and writing documentation is always a good way to learn more. While I'm in the API docs, I thought to check out how hook_help() works (keep in mind here that I know zero PHP, only some jQuery, and a bit of JS generally). Now I not only have a better idea what I'm trying to write for views_help(), but I have context for understand how hooks work. whee! I've only drafted some text so far, but might go ahead and make the patch so it can keep moving forward. 

There's a doc for writing the help text itself, but I still need to figure out/understand what exactly output=. does and if there's a more sensible way to deal with the translation bits t() than adding them in by hand, not that that would be super difficult in this case. Maybe somewhere in the Multilingual Support docs... Localization API? ah-ha. Well again, at least now I sort of understand all that. 

I think that's enough for one post, more later!