A brand new interview to MIKAMAI‘s technical director Giovanni Intini about MIKAMAI and many unconventional projects.

Stay tuned for the English translation.

We didn’t make a fuss about it (although we wish we had the time to do it :-) but we have recently released Montalbano.tv

We are working hard to fatten our portfolio, and it has been great to put a new notch on the belt in our portfolio, side by side with WikiSAP.it.

Both Montalbano and WikiSap are Drupal-based system, as they have a strong editorial component and make wide use of the CMS capabilities of Drupal.

Drupal is very very nice to get started, but as clients start asking you for more complex features – yes they always do! – you have to develop custom modules, do strange magic with the rendering hooks and coordinate more and more people working on the same Drupal instance. Not an easy task on Drupal, if you ask me.

What makes me proud about the people here at MIKAMAI is that we are never happy to just get the work done, but we are always try to extract every nugget of knowledge to hone the process and get the job done better and faster. Giovanni, our Technical Director, is now working on our own Drupal distribution, where we try to address many of the problems that you meet when doing team development on Drupal.

One big point is the externalisation of logic from the DB to files, do that we can put everything nice and safe on Git. The other issue is the deployment. Drupal doesn’t really help with it.. fortunately we are all Ruby on Rails developers and Capistrano always lends an helping hand. Here are Giovanni’s thoughts and experience on using Capistrano to deploy Drupal applications in our projects. Enjoy the post.