The last few years have brought about a lot of change for Shropshire Council. For us, this has also meant a lot more interaction with other councils and private organisations when collaborating on various projects, or through attending training courses or social events.
Whenever we meet a fellow web developer/designer the topic of conversation always moves around to technology, and quite often onto what we use the most in our day jobs. Each time I have this type of conversation I think "I really must get around to writing these down in a blog post" - and now, finally, I have actually put that thought into action...
What we use...
Notepad++
One of the most commonly-used pieces of software we have in our team is Notepad++, a free source code editor that supports a wide range of languages. It is quick and easy to use, and allows us to quickly read and update a variety of web scripts and markup without the headache of trying to remember which SDK we need to run for each web application. Whenever we have mentioned this it has been met with a mixture of approving nods from those who use it and quizzical expressions from the rest who had never heard of Notepad++.
In one instance, on a training course provided by an external company, we ended up talking the course instructor through the various features and plug-ins which he could potentially use for another course he was to teach the following week. In our own work, the compare plugin is incredibly useful when comparing source code between live & development environments.
Komodo Edit
As some of us are using Macs, Komodo Edit is the preferred text editor for that OS, which has quite a number of similar features to those in Notepad++
Visual Studio
We are doing a fair bit of .NET development at the moment as we are moving our website content over into a new site built using the Umbraco CMS, so, for once, we are using the right tool for the job!
Browsers - lots of them...
The thing about the world is that there are lots of web browsers out there, each of them with their own way of interpreting the W3C standards for rendering web pages. Because of this, a design that looks and works perfectly in one may appear broken and unusable in another - an effect that was diminishing as browsers were striving to conform to those standards but is becoming obvious again with the advent of HTML5 and CSS3.
For us, this means keeping an eye on our website statistics and making sure that we test our projects with the most commonly used browsers, including IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. We were tempted to follow the same model that Google has set, whereby the applications developed by Google will only support the latest two versions of any one browser (bye-bye IE6 & 7 - yay!), though sadly came against the practical matter of the variety and age of computers within Shropshire Council, which means we still have to consider browser versions much older than this (oh, hello again IE6 & 7... *mutters & grumbles*).
Browser tools and add-ons
A common ground for everyone in the business of building websites and web applications is the regular use of the in-built development tools in the latest browsers (and the Firebug add-on for Firefox). No matter how well planned a website is, a large chunk of our development time is spent trying to find and fix various bugs with the layout on a page (due to those pesky discrepancies between browser engines), or why a script isn't running as expected. Having those tools in a browser means we can quickly tweak and test any changes without making many modifications to the actual source code of a page.
For supporting the multiple versions of IE that are still in use, there is a handy little tool for testing older versions within a single install of Windows called IETester.
We do use other tools and browser add-ons to help us meet our accessibility standards, which I've covered in an earlier post.
Image editing software
Like many other web development/design companies out there, we do use Adobe Photoshop to help us create and manipulate images, but owing to our limited budget most of our team aren't running on the latest version (or even one of the previous 4 versions in some cases). Our editors rely on open-source solutions such as Paint.NET or GIMP to quickly tweak images for their content.
Online resources
Because of the shifting nature of our jobs, we try to keep up-to-date with design and development trends through other websites - either from studying their layout and design, or from reading reviews and tutorials on the latest development techniques. Most of this research happens during the planning/design/development stages of a project when we come across something we know how to do, but want to do better. In such situations we throw a question into Google and explore the results, as well as searching our personal favourite sites. Currently, the new.shropshire.gov.uk project is swaying my own learning towards Umbraco and .NET development, so the forums on our.umbraco.org and stackoverflow.com, and www.asp.net tend to appear in my browser tabs on a regular basis.
Google Analytics
The Google Analytics service is used on nearly all the websites we have produced, allowing us easy access to usage statistics and reports that we use to monitor, maintain and (hopefully) improve these online services. We have also given some editors access so that they are able to review stats for their own sites or sections of the main shropshire.gov.uk website, allowing them to maintain their content more effectively.
Umbraco
We currently have a pretty good website running on a very old custom CMS built with Lotus Domino, but are working on migrating our various services to an even better version of our website built with an open-source CMS called Umbraco. We've written up a number of other posts on Umbraco and on the development of new.shropshire.gov.uk if you are interested.
WordPress (and MAMP/XAMPP)
We have a number of sites that we have created using WordPress, either through customising the standard TwentyTen/TwentyEleven/TwentyTwelve theme, or through a theme we have developed ourselves. Depending on the operating system we are using (we have a mixture of Windows/Mac systems here), we use XAMPP or MAMP to create a local Apache/MySQL/PHP environment to develop in.
SVN & GIT
Like all good developers, we rely on source control to keep our code tidy and to provide version control. Primarily, this prevents us from causing havoc on our live websites, so if we accidentally upload something with a bug, or an errant typo (c'mon, we've all done it at some point...), then we are able to roll back to a previous stable version.
A recurring theme...
Some of you may have noticed that the majority of these applications are free, and some of those are open-source too. This is partially a decision shaped by the limited budget we have in Local Government, and also because we love open source!
All of these are things we have either come across from our own investigations, or have had recommended to us by others in our field of work. It may well be that some of you are using other software applications that can blow our choices out of the water. If so, please feel free to tell us about them - anything that can help us work better will always be welcomed!