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5 Great reason for web-designers to use Drupal

Fri, 15/10/2010 - 02:36 — john

If you are a web designer and you haven't worked with Drupal before, you should really give it a try. Here are the top 5 reasons why:

  1. You can protect your template layouts
  2. More features available
  3. Less competition from pre-made templates
  4. Theming in Drupal isn't easy
  5. Demand for Drupal is huge (and growing)

By Joaquin Lippincott, President & Founder of Metal Toad Media:  http://www.metaltoad.com/blog/top-5-reasons-why-web-designers-should-love-drupal

Mailing lists software

Thu, 23/09/2010 - 17:45 — john

MailmanFor the last 20 years I have supported various types of mailing lists software for clients wishing to communicate easily with a group of users.   I started many years ago with Majordomo and then moved to using Mailman (version 2.1.14 has just being released and Version 3.0 in alpha testing).  

Mailman is still one of the best pieces of mailing list software out there today for people wishing to simply send their messages by email, without any fancy modern day interfaces.   It is easy to set up and interfaces with all of the major MTAs (mail transport agents) hosted on Unix (or Linux) servers out there today.   Once setup it is a simple matter for an administrator to add a mailing list and then add subscribers, or have interested parties add themselves to the mailing list.    Once on a Mailman list all one has to do is to send an email address to the list address  such as listname@example.com and the email will get copied out to all the members of the mailing list.    Any members can then reply and the discussion starts.

Chromium, Facebook and Twitter

Tue, 09/03/2010 - 20:35 — John Vorstermans

I have been using the Chromium web browser now for a few weeks on my Ubuntu Linux system.  It is still a beta product but I have got used to its snappiness and also enjoy some of the extensions available for it. Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all users to experience the web.  There is also a new Operating System being developed called Chromium OS which is focused around the browser and web applications such as Goggle Apps.  Both are exciting innovative developments.

 

The Chromium Browser is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, so is good if you find yourself using different platforms at different locations.   The Bookmarks has some nice features.  You can easily import your bookmarks from other browsers and it allows you to upload them to your Google account and then import them into Chromium from other places or computers rather than having to use other third part applications.

Twitter and Facebook

I recently installed the Facebook and Twitter extensions which places a nice small icon on the extension bar (top right).   When a new tweet arrives or one of my friends posts and update on facebook a number appears adjacent to the icon to let me know.   I can then click on the icon and a  slider appears showing the updates. I can then scroll down to view all the messages or just see the new ones.   It allows me to retweet, add new tweets, update facebook status and leave comments. I find this much easier than using a separate twitter client. All pretty neat really.

Ubuntu - Lucid Lynx Alpha 3 install

Mon, 01/03/2010 - 12:30 — John Vorstermans

Ubuntu LucidI decided to testdrive Lucid Lynx Alpha 3 (10.04) over the weekend and installed it in parallel to my current version of Karmic (9.10).  It replaced the latest release of Fedora I had tried out.

The install went smoothly.  I manually created a new partition for the base of (/ and /var) and mounted my karmic /home and /opt without reformatting them.   The install was smooth and quick.  The most time seems to be in installing all the language packs.  No idea why it just does not install the ones I am using.

Using Google Apps - the good bad and ugly.

Fri, 26/02/2010 - 12:34 — John Vorstermans

I just Googled "using google apps" and came up with 44,200,000 results. There are a lot of articles explaining how good Google Apps is and then there were also many warning against using it.

In todays environment where Cloud Computing is the new child on the block you would think that people would be looking much more seriously at such options as Google Apps. Google certainly make it easy to throw everything into the cloud.... but what are the guarantees of it being safe from data lose and remaining forever private to the people who set it up?

Integrating twitter into Drupal

Thu, 18/02/2010 - 23:01 — John Vorstermans

I have just spent the last few hours integrating my twitter account into the drupal. http://serion.co.nz/blog

The Pros and Cons of creating a website with Drupal

Mon, 15/02/2010 - 15:07 — John Vorstermans

InternetNZ LogoDrupal is one of many opensource Content Management Systems (CMS)available to us today. It is a very popular package for website development and the one I tend to use most often for client website development. It is a widely adopted opensource CMS written in PHP. It has been developed by a vast community and there are a large number of modules which can be added to the base system to enable all kinds of features. It does take some time for a new website developer to become accustomed the the system. Here are the steps involved to create a Drupal website:

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