Many enterprise clients rely on LDAP as their authentication and authorization provider for their websites. LDAP is used to store all of this information, the infrastructure already exists, so why not use it? There are plenty of reasons. So much so that I don't know if I can ever "recommend" a client directly integrate their web site with LDAP again.

At some recent clients, Drupal has been used purely as an input method for content to then be pushed into other systems. Although the Services module provides a decent method for receiving content, there appears to be no modules that allow nodes to be easily pushed out of Drupal into other systems in configurable formats (e.g. JSON or XML). I've started a new sandbox project on Drupal.org named Node Push to solve this problem.

Based on a presentation at Florida Drupalcamp 2011

Drupal's code involves many common coding techniques that make your code more readable, maintainable, and efficient. Although there are countless PHP tricks that could be used, I will focus on helper functions and other common methods used specifically by Drupal developers when writing good code.

In photography, there is the concept of the Exposure Triangle - an equilateral triangle balancing between aperture, ISO sensitivity, and shutter speed at each point. When you alter one of the three, the other two are affected as well. If you choose to increase the shutter speed for example, the aperture and ISO must change in order to compensate. Creatively, the ideal exposure does not always exist at the center point.

UPDATE: The latest version of the devel module includes xhprof support. No separate module is needed anymore.

xhprof is a great utility for profiling and now apparently the only method of profiling memory usage as Xdebug has recently removed this requisite feature (as of 2.0.0RC4). Here are the steps I used to allow xhprof to run seamlessly on my 64-bit Snow Leopard machine.