One of the many things that I do here is create custom themes for Drupal. It’s kind of an artsy thing, and since I’m the resident designer (or so it says on my card), I tend to be a bit artsy about it. One of the things that being artsy means to me is being off-site. The Innova office is a very cool space, but I like to have a change of pace every once in a while. A change of lighting or a change of atmosphere does a world of good.

But one thing that becomes a problem is remote access. Sometimes, I really like to get off the beaten path, and away from it all. I have a laptop, but I’m not going to be able to connect to anything when I’m sitting in the middle of a park. And even if I could, I certainly don’t want the lag time in connection, especially if I’m tweaking css. “Okay… just one more pixel to the left. Right. Save. Okay… Now I’ll go make a sandwich while that goes through the VPN.”

In be beginning stages, I like to do everything remotely. Most of the time, the client has only sent a spec, maybe some rough ideas about what they want the design to look like, and maybe some color ideas and or photos. Usually, I don’t have any content at all, besides a tentative site name, and I can’t sit around waiting for content.

To develop locally, and rapidly, I use MAMP (what do you want? I’m on a Mac). You can do the same thing with a windows machine, with a stack called XAMPP. It’s a full Apache-Mysql-php stack that you can kickstart whenever you need to, and can shut it down when you don’t. In short, I love the thing. I didn’t at first, but I didn’t like Drupal at first either.

Until I get content here’s what I do:

• I have two different setups: one for Drupal 5.x and one for Drupal 6.x.
• I keep two seperate databases: called drupal5 and drupal6. These databases contain only the most generic of content. It’s basically all lorem ipsum but it has the content that I expect clients to want (stories, pages, blog entries, etc.)
• Copy one of the stock themes in /themes to /sites/all/themes/projectnamehere. This keeps all of my new themes separate from the stock ones, and if this directory gets clogged (which it will after a few projects) it’s easy to offload the directory to somewhere else.
• I’m not usually trying out modules at this phase, but if I do need to, I try to keep them sequestered out from the stock modules and keep them in /sites/all/modules. That way, I remember that there are modules that I need to upload to the production environment.

And away I go. I can take my laptop anywhere I want, and I can sit down pretty much anywhere and get things knocked out pretty quickly.

Getting out of the office is often a great way to get things done. If I can work without a network connection (as I generally do when working as outlined above), it’s a great way to shut down a lot of the distractions. I can’t check the news. I’m not going to be pinged with IMs. I’m not going to be sidetracked with new mail. It’s a lovely world out there, so go out and get to work in it.