Why Drupal?

If you're in or around Toronto on Saturday February 22nd, I'd recommend coming over to the Centre for Social Innovation to take part in a Theming workshop.

There's a page setup with information that will be updated as things develop in the next couple of weeks but at this point, Martin Anderson-Clutz, James Walker and I will be speaking on various aspects of creating themes in Drupal.  Actually, I'm going to be going a little off topic - here's some deets on my talk:

"User Interfacing to promote Social Activity Online, in Drupal"

This talk will look at various common activities administrators, anonymous users and authenticated users engage in with a particular website.  These common actions and their shared space will be contextualized within the perspective of promoting healthy social activity and a general emotive attachment to space.

From there, we will look at Drupal's stock options for allowing authenticated users to construct and develop an online identity, and then review modern approaches to profile infrastructure development.  Taking both Drupal 5.x and 6.x into consideration, this talk will review the Node Profile and Content Profile modules to ultimately relate the ease of implementing tracker/activity-based dynamic user identities.

The talk will aim to close with a brief section on theming as a means of developing furtive spaces for online social interaction and look back on the covered technical approaches to building 'profiles' such that they accurately relate the human user's persona.

You can register for the event here:
http://themeworkshop.avatarinteractive.ca

Quite frankly, implementing WYSIWYG editors (and choosing the right one) for Drupal websites has been a pain in the ass the past few years.  For a while I bounced between FCK and TinyMCE - both integrated in the right fields fine and played well with IMCE for image uploads, but I remember finding their markup dirty (lotsa br tags etc..) and clients getting quite confused with line breaks in the editor not being truly mirrored on live content.  Of course, some of this is due to configuring Input Formats properly, but then there's also general interface and aesthetic issues with those mentioned editors.

Recently I've begun implementing HTMLbox on a bunch of sites - its simple, seems to markup html pretty well, and affords site users the basic buttons for simple formatting and link embeds [look out for a more in-depth review soon].  However, one downfall with it is a reliance on IMCE for facilitating embedded image uploads.  For anyone who's ever used IMCE, you'll know how confusing it can be for anyone unfamiliar with inline editing - though it integrates with the editor, its interface is still seperate and requires a lot of styling effort to pretty it up etc...  read more »

For those not in the know, a Gravatar is an image that represents your email address which can auto-display next to comments on blog posts etc that you may make. 

Well, actually, that's just an 'avatar' - what makes a Gravatar special is that the image is remotely hosted and manageable on a website - so you can login, change your image and have it automatically instantly be changed on the gajillion websites you've posted on.

In Drupal 5.x the Gravatar module works pretty easily using Drupal's user picture support; install the module, enable picture support & gravatar user permissions and off you go - if a user on your site (registered or anon, depending on the permissions you set) has a Gravatar account their picture will display next to comment posts.

Try it out - get a Gravatar and then post a comment on this blog!

Before I jump into telling you how cool the htmLawed module is, let me start by stressing how important it is to get the input formats configured right on your Drupal website.

From a UI standpoint, its confusing for users when they are presented with the 'input format' tab underneath textarea fields on node submission forms - if they don't need to see them, the way to get rid of them is to just allow anonymous & registered users to use a single/default format.  Normally I recommend that being full html with a link filter to auto-code email and html links; of course, this should be done in cahoots with a wysiwyg editor, otherwise your users would have to enter html tags to format their posts.

Now, a downside to letting folks use full html is that wysiwyg editors normally don't do a great job of writing html in the way that you want....  read more »

You may already be familair with the concept of a captcha - essentially a little code for site users to enter into a field before submitting nodes or other forms to your website. Well, Drupal's had some good captcha options for a while now - including images, math questions and ASCII art.

Lately I've been noticing tons of sites on the web using reCaptcha and was happy to just come across a reCaptcha module for Drupal; you can grab a copy for 4.7x, 5.x *and* 6.x!

We're now using reCaptcha on this site so you can see it in action.  As for why its better than other captchas - not only is it a secure way to ensure human form submissions, you can feel good using it as the project was setup to improve Optical Character Recognition technology.

The conventional approach for rounding corners on websites has always involved creating images to position creatively via CSS at the top/bottom/etc...  read more »

Registration is now open for a seminar that Drupal development and education firm Lullabot is presenting this December in New Orleans.

The event, Do It With Drupal, looks to be quite good; their list of speakers includes Lullabot staff plus some authors and maintainers of popular Drupal modules such as Organic Groups, CCK and Ubercart!

Check out the seminar's website at http://www.doitwithdrupal.com/ for more information on the event and look out for more info there regarding seminar topics and schedule(s)

I'm bloody stoked about a module I just discovered on drupal.org - its called Movino and may just be one of the most powerful and cutting edge tools you can implement on your Drupal powered website.

As I understand it Movino consists of a program that you can load onto your smartphone/video-enabled mobile, plus a module for your Drupal site.  Once its all installed and configured you'll be able to stream live to your site or have your site record the stream for on-demand playback.

Imagine what you can do with this.  Video-blogging, indie concert broadcasting and well, a million other things.  read more »

I was quite interested to come across a very simple use of drupal today - a British firm called Record of the Day setup a very plain website survey (at http://www.whatpricedidyouchoose.com ) buyers of Radiohead's much discussed (new) album 'In Rainbows.'

The site is built in Drupal and uses the basic Minelli theme. Its developer was rushed to get something up live for Record of the Day and in effect created a great example of how Drupal can be used simply to powerful effect.  read more »

I just came across a great little chunk of php to bung into your template.php that will load icons next to actual file attachments in posts on a Drupal 5.x site, thanks to Agaric Design. He's got a basic icon set with MS Word, PDF and a couple more icons you can use - I also recommend looking @ famfamfam to see if anything else strikes your fancy/works better with your theme.