designguru's blog

re: Dries Buytaert on the Future of Open Source

designguru — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:22:32 +0000

(This post is in reply to one that Dries Buytaert wrote on OStatic.com)

I agree with Dries that Open Source CMS' are putting more power into the hands of people who may not know or want to learn code, and that as their learning curves get less steep we will see more people jumping into creating and growing their websites themselves; depending on the type of website they want to have.

We've of course seen the *huge* acceptance of wordpress for simple content publishing (read: 'blogging') amongst all sorts of people ranging from tech pros to near-luddites. As people use more websites that have richer feature sets everyday they'll no doubt want to see the functionality of those sites in their own; for a while yet, though it may not require custom coding, I think the role of 'web master' or 'web developer' or whatever-you-want-to-call-them will be around for quite some time.

T read more »

We're now using Mollom

designguru — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:14:42 +0000

Okay, so I'm quite interested in options for avoiding spam which do not add to the frustration people already feel when entering info through forms on the web - we've just moved the spam protection on the site over from reCaptcha to Mollom.

In the whirlwind of spam comment deletions I just went through before switching over I mistakenly deleted some genuine ones - for that I'm sorry guys! Hopefully now we can leave things be and avoid seeing comments about viagra all over the place! :(

Make your own Tumblr in Drupal

designguru — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:16:39 +0000

Tumblr is a great idea - the hosted service lets you sign up for free and then create a blog that is essentially comprised of different types of content - text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video. Your tumblog can be posted to quickly and re-themed using their provided ones or custom html; all editable within their web interface so there's no need for ftp'ing files etc...

Okay, so its yet another blogging tool. What's so great about that? Well, asides from the fact that it has different content types to segment views by them (something not in the de facto wordpress standard approach), tumblr's unique in letting you import rss feeds automatically into your tumblr site! Cool eh?

Drupal heads reading this will no doubt instantly say "Whatever man, Drupal can do that in a second!" and they're right; it can. We recently took a stab at building out a site to do everything that tumblr does for Flavorpill in NYC using Drupal 6 and some contrib modules. Ultimately, we wanted a site that lets anonymous/public users contribute as well as logged-in ones, all submitting the same types of content. The main benefit of registering on-site was keeping track of your posts with a profile page that features a User Tracker. read more »

Drupal peops @ drinks in Toronto

designguru — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:39:52 +0000

Okay okay, I've totally ignored this blog for ages - sorry y'all, been mad busy @ Design Guru lately with our launch of Seedling, an open source distro/support initiative. Our initial release is a package of joomla and you can read about it @ http://www.plantseedling.com

Anyhoo, until I get a second to drop word on some cool Drupal stuff I've been playing with (expect a few catch-up posts next week), peep these shots from drinks in Toronto tonight; walkah got a few of us together for pints cause Rob from Acquia was in town.

Swati Bhagat and I

James Walker and Robert Douglass read more »

Drupal theming workshop in Toronto - November 22 2008

designguru — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:27:23 +0000

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

YUI Editor - a simple and easy WYSIWYG

designguru — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:08:25 +0000

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 »

Using Gravatars with Drupal

designguru — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:29:41 +0000

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!

Better control over input formats and html tags

designguru — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:30:26 +0000

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 »

Use reCaptcha on Drupal sites

designguru — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 02:13:40 +0000

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.

Creating easy rounded corners in a Drupal site

designguru — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 18:39:46 +0000

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 »