I use Marc Liyanage’s PHP5 distribution on my Mac instead of the version that comes installed with OS X; sooner or later I usually find that there’s some extension that’s either missing or too old for a particular development requirement, and Marc’s distribution is usually a little more up to date and complete.

I have been banging my head against a problem that has to do with passing FileMaker timestamp data to Drupal CCK date fields. Then, Andy alerted me to this post. So, it turns out that CCK date fields are stored in UTC format, which explains the -5 hrs time offset I was getting. Note this is not a Drupal config issue, ergo time wasted in wrong tree.

In an earlier post, I cautioned against using FileMaker's ESS feature to bypass application logic in order to write to external SQL databases. This sort of begs the question: If you can't write to it directly, how are we doing any sort of interoperability between FileMaker, Drupal or other systems out there?

(This falls squarely under the "Well, duh!" category, but remembering how long I used PHP without the benefit of a debugger myself, I figure it bears repeating.)

The flip side of Drupal's elegant and flexible system of hooks is that when you’re building a site that relies on lots of different modules, things can start to get a little bit slippery if you need to troubleshoot which module is hooking into the core and how/where/when.

Being “the web guy” in a FileMaker shop can sometimes be a solitary existence… even when you’re called upon to work on a FileMaker/Web integration point you usually get only a glimpse of the FileMaker solution you’re talking to, and the FileMaker developer gets only a glimpse into whatever it is you’re putting together. Most of the time there is not much discussion about what is going on behind the developers’ respective hoods, and that’s generally OK.