We have just finished a migration job for a client of ours from an old .Net system in to Drupal, the last task of which was to write some Apache mod_rewrite conditions and rules to deal with the URLs of their old website. This proved to be more trouble than I thought, mainly because I struggled to find examples of how this might work.

Firstly, the ground work. The URL pattern to be redirected looked like this:

So we've done all French sites before. And we've done all English sites before. But a recent project was our first real forray in to multilingual sites and it's an e-commerce/Ubercart job! Talk about gluttons for punishment!

There are bags of tutorials, so I'll keep this short but sweet. A list of dos and don'ts from our painful, recent experience:

1. Don't change the default language after initial set-up. Set your default language right at the start and don't mess with it. Ever.

Note: Apparently it works fine with Windows too! See comments.

I'm pretty excited right now. I just tried drush make for the first time. Download it here:
http://drupal.org/project/drush_make

That's an order! You'll need drush too, if you don't have it yet (in which case, shame on you ... call yourself a Drupal developer?!)
http://drupal.org/project/drush

Here's another one of my little Linux admin scripts for all you Drupal developers out there. It's a Linux shell script requiring Drush, MySQL and Subversion, but could be easily modified to work with other databases and repositories and should work fine on a Mac, I think.

Those familiar with Windows (and I guess Mac OSX too) will probably be aware that you can get an é character from your keyboard by pressing AltGr + E. You may not be aware that in Linux you can't. This was a bit of a problem for me, as I live in France, a country who's native language relies rather heavily on the accents in the special character set. For example, the town I'm in is called Uzès and my daughter is called Moïra. It's also been driving my wife bananas, since she actually needs to write emails and letters in French but we have British keyboard layouts.

Ups and downs again today. Some strong support from Europe again, but the US has yielded no strong continuation. Don't get me wrong, we have people in the US interested in helping, and we're extremely gratefful for that, but we don't seem to have a US project "driver", so it seems to drop to pieces.

I managed to make some good progress this morning with Feeds, Views and Panels. And numerous people added to that progress throughout the day, so we actually got a reasonable amount done.

Important edit: Seems it doesn't work with Google Apps accounts - apologies to Zach in the comments, you were quite right. I'm revising this post. However, it does still work as described with all Google Mail domain accounts (e.g. personal Google accounts).

So, OpenID. Been about for a while. I kind of knew how it worked. I also knew I had dozens of OpenIDs, all in places of no use to me whatsoever that were generated automatically when I signed up for some service or other.

Having finally sorted out our goals (use the Project EPIC Twitter syntax to get targetted information to people who can help, using Drupal as a tool for managing and organising that data), day 3 started with an ambitious set of tickets:

• Identify and engage with an SMS gateway
• Configure the Feeds module to create nodes
• Create views for displaying aggregated tweet nodes
• Collate list of Haiti resources
• Install Backreference module

So we've started the second day of this project. Our mission is starting to become clearer.

Yesterday, within 7 hours of the effort really getting under way, we had a server, a team, an installation of Development Seed's excellent Managing News, but no real clue about what might be useful. There was a lot of chat about mapping, but Robert pointed out the UN are already doing a stunning job of mapping the crisis and also need volunteers. So dividing the Drupal geo community amongst us would be damaging and stupid.

Then we found this:

You may have noticed a degree of Haiti noise on the Internet today. Michael Caudy kicked things off and Robert Douglass quickly joined him on the campaign trail to get Drupal developers on board to create a Drupal website to help the aid workers hard at their tasks in the aftermath of the earthquake there.