April 2008

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.

Basically, the site asked users just a couple of questions - most importantly; the price they paid for the digitally downloadable album. The implementation uses the webform and webform report modules to good effect; the main goal in the site's architecture was to get an average value for the album and at that they were successful.

We're looking to expand our network of associates who are highly skilled in using Drupal to develop websites that support communities - preferably you would be located in Toronto for these projects, which start in May and will continue through the year, though we're open to working with website producers/developers around the world.

Also, we're looking for people who are passionate about innovating with Drupal that are familiar with things like building dynamic user profiles with Nodeprofile/Nodefamily/Usernode combinations etc... and certainly not people tinkering with Drupal - you must be committed to working professionally with it.

If you're interested in working with us, please send over an email with some links - including any personal blogs/websites plus on online portfolio or examples of work you've done!

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.

A while back I came across the Email Standards Project through Campaign Monitor - the weapon of choice on our client projects which require email campaigning with html-coded newsletters (such as the JC Report).

They've just made a jokesy video I thought I'd share that overplays relates frustrations we as designers face when trying to make code cross-client compatible with email... Personally, I've been doing this stuff for a decade so I'm used to making things work but it really is time to get email standards up to scratch so that design can get more racey and creative in email newsletters and such.

Et voila:

Something that can get confusing for site users is when you have created 'sections' of your site comprising of blocks, Views, Panels etc - often cases in Drupal 5, the menu system won't follow a Panel, for example as belonging to a menu item (it instead wants to refer to nodes only - which means that even if you use something like the Menu Trails module, you may run into problems).

Well, something very exciting is under foot - the smart chaps over @ Development Seed are working on a new module simply called 'context' - it allows you group things together in a drupal site, irrespective of their nodal identities, and have the menu system recognise the relationship(s) - *plus* you can stipulate rules for contexts such as blocks appearing in a particular context, without, as I understand it, having to assign blocks to particular positions in the usual fashion.  Peep the screencast for more info.

Some of you may have noticed that we've been offline for about a week - for months I've planned to overhaul the designguru website with something fresh that would profile all of our network associates who work on the various projects with me that DG undertakes.

Soon, when you click on 'who we are' you'll see a more fleshed out list of these people - it won't just be my smiling mug up there indefinately :)

Clicking around you might notice some things not working and looking wonky, please drop us a line to point out these errors; like any rushed launch, the site isn't fully where we want it to be - but that's often part of the fun of going live slightly pre-maturely anyway right?

More soon,

q./