Ben Henick has a new article over on ALA: 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards. There are some great tips and hints here for those of you starting in web development, or those who are trying to break some bad habits gained over the years.

This one struck a particular chord with me, as it's something I've been trying to explain to clients for a while now:

Lesson No. 2: It’s not going to look exactly the same everywhere unless you’re willing to face some grief... and possibly not even then

There are an awful lot of differences between rendering engines, and the W3C specs sanction those differences. You can adjust, tweak, hack, and waive, but if you want to preserve your social life, you will learn to let go of the small differences—and convince the stakeholders in your projects to do the same.

Amen to that!

As part of their expanding developerWorks series of articles IBM have decided to use Drupal for a sample IT project entitled “Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site”.

They evaluated a number of different Content Management Systems/Frameworks including Ruby On Rails, Typo3 and Mambo, but in the end they went with Drupal.

We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal. The landscape of open source CMS is continuously changing, and in the future we'll revisit these and any new entries in the field.

Given the extremely high standard of the developerWorks articles I'm going to be keeping an eye on this. I'm always on the lookout for new ways to make Drupal jump through hoops.

Update: The second part of the series has been published, focusing on designing for an effective user experience.

Update: Here's an overview page linking to all 5 articles.

Drupal 4.6.1 upgrade done, spam filters in place, comments open. Let the fun begin.

Bit different round here isn't it?

This is what's happening. The site has been upgraded to Drupal 4.5.2 (really nice release), and I've also taken the time to start on a new theme, hence the whiteness. I've taken it right back to basics and I'll be adding in more as I work out what direction I want to take it.

I actually quite like this minimalist look, but I do need to sort out links and headers. The navigation isn't too clear right now.

I've also killed all the content that's isn't blog related for the time being. Until I get the architecture and main navigation nailed, photos are now over at Flickr and everything else will be coming back shortly.

Title says it all really. Drupal 4.5 has been released, and drupal.org gets a makeover.

New Features in 4.5 include:

• Tab based user interface
• Configurable menus
• Multiple roles per user
• Document/image uploads
• Node-level permissions
• Improved locale support
• Anonymous comments
• Theme system improvements
• Customizable user profiles
• Usability improvements
• Configurable input formats
• Performance improvements

Here's more information on the new drupal.org theme by Steven Wittens. Very nice it is too. Although 2004 is turning into the year of the rounded corners.

Polytechnic will get upgraded when I find the time. Not likely to happen soon though, client work pays the bills (actually, my employer does, but you know what I mean).