Nikoport

A couple of days ago i have put online a new site for “Dino Consult“, that was developed on Drupal. The design is very simplistic, to accompany the visit card that the owner of Dino Consult has. It was also based on the schematic design that was created by the client. Dino Consult is by their description a “consultancy firm for the export of innovative technologies, process comparisons and project management”.

Besides creating a xhtml/css template I have used the following modules: Views, Google Sitemaps, Update Status, TinyMCE (i still argue that it or any other editor should make into the core of the Drupal), PathAuto, Meta Tags, i18n and IMCE.
Basically the Views were used to place together. I still cannot imagine more or less complicated site or even a normal one (like Dino Consult) without Views module, it simply can do so many things for you.

I was quite unprepared to hear that the Movable Type has announced the Movable Type Open Source Project today. On the very same day as the announcement of the new beta of the Movable Type, they have announced that in a short time, after releasing the final version of the 4th Movable Type, they are going to release an open source version available for everyone for any use, including commercial one. Until now, the available for a free download version of a Movable Type is free only for the non-commercial use, which strictly limits the potential users of this blogging platform.

For me personally, this makes the Movable Type much more interesting for experiments and eventual use. Without making a clear free open source competition there is no way of appearing to the mass market, and i think that every company has already understood it - the best examples are Oracle and Microsoft with their Oracle XE and SQL Server Express Edition and, smile, IBM with a free version of a DB2, which is just a kind of a recognition, of the situation when the starter and independent developer markets are completely occupied by MySQL, for just one simple reason - it is free.

I am not going to wait until the release of the new open-source Movable Type to see if its really worth, but tomorrow is going to download the personal version and experiment a little bit with it, the same thing i recommend to everyone working with the web.

At the moment, in the spare time between projects (a very virtual thing - spare time, i have to say), i am writing 2 new modules for Drupal - one of them is a submodule for using Flash in a advertisement module and the other one is a directory module for Drupal. Both of this modules will be based on the 5th branch of Drupal.

First module was born out of the need for the current project i am doing, when i found out, that Advertisement module has had no support for flash-based ads. While smaller sites are basically using animated gifs (images), the bigger companies are using flash for advertisement. I was told by a couple of different people, that the “big firms” they are or were working for created the biggest the part of the online advertisement in flash. When i was responsible for one of the Fortune 100 sites in Portugal i saw a big percentage of their inner advertisement done in Flash as well. On a personal note, i would add that i do not like flash ads, and prefer the “normal” images - they are lighter and do not appear like a buddy-spam. After finishing this submodule or better “ad type”, i am thinking about submitting the code to the author of the Advertisement module, for his decision of inclusion into the “official package”.

The second module is being born for the other project, since it looks like there is no real directory module for Drupal, which seems to be quite a negative surprise. I am still in the phase of projecting it, but leaving the doubts behind, this module has to be implemented this year, because the website based on drupal, i am going to implement, is going to need it badly.

While the Flash Type submodule is virtually ready and being tested, the Directory module is likely to be finished in the second part of the 2008, mainly because of my newest personal project, which should go live in August this year.

“Wordpress is as good as it Getz“. After just a couple of weeks of delaying, the new Wordpress version is available. This is a second major upgrade for Wordpress this year, which comes as a new politics of Wordpress developers, but anyway, full of new enhancements the new Wordpress version has arrived and we are all encouraged to upgrade to it.
Some explanation - Getz is the name of a one of the most famous and recognized tenor saxophone player Stan Getz. This way, wordpress continue giving the name of music artists to the new releases.

While still thinking whether i should upgrade the wordpress, i have noticed a new article at the Wordpress dashboard, referring the security fixes that the new Wordpress version includes.

Mark Jaquith wrote that there are some important security issues, which were fixed in the new Wordpress version, but what is more interesting, that at the same day, at his blog he wrote
I’ll have upgrade files for 2.0.11 once it is released, and if 2.2 sees any security/bugfix releases, I’ll do upgrade files for those too. For me this is quite an interesting, that somebody posting 2 opposite things at the same hour.

What surprises me in this story, is the fact (if its really true), that no upgrade version for 2.1 and 2.0 branches has been released by now. Wordpress has a good fame of supporting elder releases and leaving users who can not upgrade (mysql version problems for example) is quite a sad fact. I have thought about ignoring this release for a couple of days, or at least testing it locally, before upgrading, but this leaves no option but to do wordpress upgrade as soon as possible.

1. Askimet - how can you build a site, with a possibility for users to leave comments and not to have this plugin ? There are thousands of spam bots around, leaving hundreds of stupid and sometimes offensive comments wherever they can. Askimet is a perfect plugin to stop them from doing it on your Drupal site. Originally created for Wordpres, the Askimet is absolutely essential for any community-driven site.

2. Category - allows you to structure your site and to organize content with categories, which is quite useful as for SEO. Categories and containers can be created as nodes and the content can be assigned to the categories. The category module will improve your site navigation vastly, turning it into more tree-like hierarchy.

3. XML Sitemap - generate dynamic sitemap for keeping search engines well informed about the changes in your site structure. At the moment of writing only Google and Yahoo providing the services for using this information directly, while MSN is already working on a similar solution, they have already announced about joining the sitemaps standard. For any webmaster this is a must have module.

4. Nodewords - which is also known as “Meta Tags”, a module which gives you control over meta tags and their content. I have seen a lot of Drupal-based sites completely free of meta information. From the site description to keywords and Geo tags, all that is to be controlled by the Nodewords. A good site may not have an empty <head> section =O)

5. Page Title - lets you customize every page title the way you wish. It is a very important factor for SEO and even if you do not care much about it, altering page title conforming the content you providing is so important for usability. A lot of times, the title of the page is not _exactly_ the same title that you are using for your heading, for example when providing a bigger view over the content of the page, you might choose to skip some of the words while adding others - for all those purposes and even more, i need “Page Title” module for every Drupal installation.

6. Path Redirect - Imagine, that you are moving some of your pages from one location to another. All the links that the search engines have indexed, and your partners have placed on your site are going to be destroyed, if you won’t do something about it. You can ask all the sites that are linking to you, to alter their links, but first - it will take some time and second - some of them won’t be available to do that; and what will you do about the search engines, waiting for Google or Yahoo to reindex your links will take some very serious time, and in the mean time, your potential users and customers will be hardly disappointed. Path Redirect solves this problem.

7. Views no modern Drupal site is created without this module. This module is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. The views module can give you the flexibility, that for example elder versions of Drupal were completely incapable of doing. If you want to sort your content differently, if you need to display a block with the 5 most recent posts of some particular type or if you require to provide ‘unread forum posts’. A lot of different modern Drupal modules also depends on the Views module.

8. Update Status - if you wish to have version control of your modules, then this is the best way of doing it. Update Status can automatically check new versions of installed modules and notify you at the administration panel right after you log in. Having a lot of modules on the Drupal installation will oblige you checking the updates very regularly, and that means visiting dozens of pages every couple of weeks, which is not a big fun. Update Status was created exactly to help resolving this problem. This module is only available for versions starting with Drupal 5.

9. TinyMCE - is the module that you probably can’t live without. Having anyone responsible for the content, who does not understand XHTML will be a disaster without this module, and in so many cases, the people don’t have an idea of what XHTML is. I believe it is a shame, that Drupal does not have a default editor for the image uploading, it’s hard to find any CMS which does not have this functionality. TinyMCE will solve all problems with images inserting by providing nice usable interface. One word of caution - consult this TinyMCE compatibility chart before you really starting using

10. PathAuto - is a module for generating automatically the path aliases for all possible types of content. When having a lot of content appearing almost every day then no one will be able to invent new url for every content post. The PathAuto module handles these cases, generating path aliases based on the content of the page.

There are some other modules worth mentioning, but they all depend on the implemented project, but may become quite popular with the time, such as Adsense, Flash Video (until the new <video> tag is not available in HTML, its a nice way to have videos), Video module (is an alternative), Events (a lot of communities have events =O)), Pdf View (there are so many times things that you might need in PDF format),

This is the release i have been waiting for quite some time. Drupal 5th version represents some major changes made in this exceptionally fine CMS, though i have to add that such necessary addition as an easy usable image upload module is still missing (argh - tinyMCE is not good enough). Since last major release of Drupal goes back to 2002 (that is 5 years ago), it is something to shake up the things in open source cms community a little bit. I have no doubt, that a new release will bring a big mountain of bugs in the nearest future, but thats life, and such releases are simply necessary, cause any new release has a destiny of producing a lot of small and not so small errors. I just hope that such things as one that has happened to Wordpress last week won’t happened to much times in the next releases of Drupal. =O)

I have become quite a fan of Drupal lately spending some time playing with it, experimenting with modules and even developing a theme or two for learning its template system. The CMS i have considered to be an alternative is Joomla, but as they are still beta testing their newest 1.5 release, and their default templates are a kind of table-based, i have decided to choose Drupal. I am going to play with the final Joomla 1.5 release when its appears, as i still consider Joomla having a lot of potential. Joomla guys are being extremely nice and even publishing a congratulation article to Drupal’s 5th release on their home page - don’t say a thing, but even in the open source community it is not a common way of greeting someone who in some kind of a way is creating a competitive product. My total respect…

I am looking to implement one of my two next projects in Drupal, as it really impresses me much.

Recently i have spent some serious time constructing a test site in Drupal CMS 5 beta2, and i was very positively surprised by the ease of its configuration a standard compliance, that i am definitely going to try constructing my next work in it. I have already made one site in Joomla, and it is a very nice system, but in the sense of standard-compliance it is still far away from Drupal. Though there are several templates on the net which are not table-based, the basis configuration of Joomla to start with (even in the most recent 1.5beta) is still largely based on the tables, when Drupal’s default templates are all standard-compliant div-based designs, which is a very decisive factor for me. Being still the beginner (actually a noob) in various CMS available on the market, i am even considering using Wordpress as a complete solution for some very simple projects.

I loved the ease and the speed of the changes that i made to transform drupal from what seemed to be a very blog-based system into a very well-looking content editing site.

The next thing i am going to do some heavy experiments is a user management, and if its going to be that good as the customization, am definitely going to consider completely switching to Drupal.