Template

Ah, source control. From Subversion to git and everything in between, we all love to manage our code. The ability to quickly branch from an existing base is incredibly important to exploring and potentially abandoning divergent code paths. One often overlooked Postgres feature is the template database. At first glance, it’s just a way to ensure newly created databases contain some base functionality without having to bootstrap every time, but it’s so much more than that.

Well, maybe I spoke too soon about Drupal. Why? Well… it’s 2010 guys, stop with the ID links. I know there’s a plugin that overcomes this shortcoming, but all the internal links, including edits, redirects, and so on, won’t use the aliases you define. No, foo.bar.com/node/123423 is not a valid url. It requires approximately ten minutes to add a table column for a ‘slug’ to look up the appropriate entry, but Drupal refuses to compromise.