Teacher's Sandbox

Drupal 7 Code Freeze

Elaine — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:37:19 +0000

I was happy to see a code freeze announced on the Drupal web site. I haven’t been following Drupal news lately, but as I know from watching Drupal 4.7 become 5 then 6, a code freeze means that a release candidate for Drupal 7 is about six months out. Exciting stuff! I’m going to have to install a test version of Drupal 7 to see what they are doing with the latest version.

Drupal 7 code freeze: status updates and next steps

I agree with this list completely

Elaine — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:11:30 +0000

Especially #6.

The article is called “Six Ways to Take Your Web design From Good to Great“. Read it and be enlightended.

Some WA for your pleasure, guaranteed to make you smile

Elaine — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:56:07 +0000

“If I ever meet you, I’ll control-alt-delete you!”

Illness, be gone!

Elaine — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:50:15 +0000

Go away!!

It seems everyone around my home is on the mend and I’m praying it stays that way. The illnesses have been pretty mild…but how do you explain that to a fussy one-and-a-half-year-old? In any case, barring unforeseen circumstances, I’m back in the saddle and will be available to help on Skype and IRC. As I said in the Roundup for this week, now is the time to catch up and, if you are having trouble, ask for assistance in getting up to speed.

Don’t be too concerned if you find yourself behind the rest of the class; I’m well aware that technical difficulties with installation and configuration can be a major time sink if this is unfamiliar territory to you. Now is the time to catch up, though. Carpe diem!

Remember, if you get sick yourself try and drop me a note to let me know what is going on. I anticipate this is going to be a rough fall and I’m willing to make allowances if you keep me in the loop.

Okay now…back to work.

Podcasts for passive participation while doing the dishes

Elaine — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:13:51 +0000

Last week you joined the online communities that will help you when you run into trouble with your CMS, as well as provide you an opportunity for giving back to the OS community yourself. Another way to participate and be “in the know” is to subscribe to podcasts that pertain to your CMS.

I like to listen to podcasts on my Zune when I’m doing dishes or cooking dinner. I’m always amazed at how much I learn! It’s like you are in the insider club even if you live alone on a mountain somewhere (which is kind of what it feels like when you are home with small children ). You can use any MP3 player, or you can listen directly on your computer.

There are several new podcasts that have started this summer, and what I’ve heard of them has been interesting to say the least. Here are the ones I subscribe to; I highly recommend you take the time to listen in.

WordPress

WordPress Weekly
Press This (check out “the future of WordPress” episode, especially)

Joomla

Joomla Juice
The Joomla Podcast (Joomla 1.6 news from one of the founders, Andrew Eddie)
10 Minute Joomla Tips (Video Tutorials)

Drupal

Let me know if you enjoy them.

Painless IE testing for Windows machines

Elaine — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:53:12 +0000

Click to see screenshot.

As you know, it is difficult to test designs in IE 6 without running a virtual machine or using some other technically cumbersome solution. This may or may not be important to you. If your client’s site caters to the technorati crowd, it’s doubtful you have to worry about IE6. However, if your client’s users are government or public sector types, there is a very good chance that a high percentage of them are using IE6 as their current browser (and that they don’t have the option of installing a newer browser).

Last year Microsoft released Expression Web, its standards compliant Dreamweaver competitor, to rave reviews. SuperPreview, a component of Expression Web, allows you to view a web page as IE6 and IE7, 8, or 8cv would render them simultaneously. Microsoft has made SuperPreview a stand-alone program available for download free of charge. I tested it while it was in Beta, and although I loved the concept, I couldn’t get it to work correctly. Sometime in July, however, they released the final version and I can now recommend it to everyone.

It actually does a lot more than just render the page; a number of views and comparisons are available. Also, as you hover over and click on various elements, it will give you information such as element type, width, and placement. In this way it reminds me of certain aspects of the Web Developers toolbar on steroids.

Overlay Layout view. You can see the text renders slightly differently in an annoying kind of way.

In the screenshot I took of one of my client’s pages, you can see how the placement of the image is offset slightly in the IE6 view in the side-by-side comparison. There are quite a few different layouts to choose from, however, and if you want to know exactly what the differences are between the two renderings, you can choose the overlay layout. That was very revealing!

If you are interested in learning more about how to use SuperPreview, see the following resources:

Download Link:

SuperPreview

If you try it, let me know what you think.

Template Starting Points

Elaine — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:35:47 +0000

It seems that some of you are already trying to alter themes or create your own with another theme as it’s base. In this class you will modify a template to fit your site by altering the CSS /images and you will create your own theme from scratch. Which one you use on your site in the end will be up to you; both skills are important.

In creating your own template, I do think it is useful to have a good solid framework from which to start. I do not mind if you use a “blank” template as a starting point for this task. You may wonder which ones are the best to start with, right? These are what I would use. If you find another starter theme or template that you think is better, please let me know so I can add it.

All of these templates are written in valid XHTML and come with pointers on what ids and classes to use to write your style sheet, which, as you may have found out, is invaluable.

WordPress: Sandbox
Joomla: Blank template from Bulletproof Templates
Drupal: Zen

IRC, baby

Elaine — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:08:40 +0000

Well, we had a pretty good experience on IRC last night in that we got online and managed to get into the same channel. Towards the end of the connect session we were talking about making my test channel #dmac217 “permanent”; well I’ve registered it now so hopefully that will work for the time being. In the meantime, I will be working on creating a channel for Cerro Coso’s Digital Media and Computer Sciences departments, with the idea that we can be an ongoing help to one another both as students and alumni. It’s Justin’s idea and I think it’s a good one! (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I suggest you watch last night’s recorded Adobe Connect session. )

I found a great resource of IRC/freenode ettiquette and expectations, so please read it before you spend very much time in the channels.

Freenode’s Channel Guidlines

One thing I mentioned last night was a website where folks could share code back and forth. If you get into any PHP tweaking of modules, etc., you will want to use Pastebin in order to get help and coding advice. In fact, I think I will encourage my XHTML students to use it next semester when dealing with coding problems! It’s a great resource.

See you online!

Update: Pastebin is good for posting programming code, but if you want to help debug HTML and CSS, use Webpage Test.

What is RSS anyway?

Elaine — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:10:16 +0000

I realize that not all of you are familiar with RSS feeds and how you might want to make use of them. The following article does a really good job of explaining the hows and whys of RSS in a very simple way. This may also convince you that it’s worth the effort to configure RSS feeds for your site if you were thinking of doing without them for the time being.

ProfHacker 101: Keeping Up Online–an Intro to RSS

Copyright Issues Website

Elaine — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 07:06:13 +0000

I came across a site called Plagerism Today that focuses on copyright issues, especially in this new world of all sorts of information being available on the web for the copying and pasting. They also produce a podcast. Take a look; this is something that you should be aware of as you start working with clients and producing your own original content. I thought of posting this immediately because of the problem that Maggie recently encountered.

(Yes, even clients can be plagerists. I was contacted by a photographer who claims the photographs on a website I built for a client were hers, with links to the photos on her own site. The client had presented them to me as his own. Of course I took them down immediately.)