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).

Like the title says, Drupal 4.4.0 has been released. Lots of new features and improvements in the areas of usability and accessibility. See the announcement for full details.

I'm eager to upgrade, but I've encountered some problems with the current polytechnic theme. It's based on an old 4.2 theme called stylebox by Curtis Nelson, and the improvements to Drupal in the theme system don't play too well with my current setup (ie: it's borked).

I've been meaning to update the theme to the xtemplate system (specifically a variant on Pushbutton) so I'm holding off on the upgrade until I can get that sorted out.

In related news the Drupal 4.5 battle plan is worth a read. ACLs and improved image handling... woo!

So while I was away they decided to release drupal 4.3. What swines!

Anyway, we're now on 4.3 and it's running like a charm. I had a few minor issues with the database upgrade, but nothing nasty and probably more due to me dicking around with some stuff during the 4.2 cycle.

Intergrated admin menus++ (hence the slight reordering of blocks).

Well that wasn't too bad. Cleaned out some old pictures while I was moving them across, but hopefully no one will miss anything major.

There are still a few kinks to work out

1. Some minor layout issues on the album lists, but that can wait. It doesn't interfere with the navigation.
2. I had to lose the existing comments, sorry, but the upside is that the comment system is now running through drupal and so is much more powerful (yes Martin, you can use HTML now). If you were particularly attached to some witty aside, then feel free to add it back in.
3. I haven't ported across all the descriptions yet, EUVolt, and some of the misc stuff has been done. I'm working on the rest.

Oh yeah, and the really cool thing is that I can now embed images into other node types, as you may have noticed!

Update: Changed the link to the EUVolt pictures.

Finally got the code in the drupal image.module cleaned up and approaching xhtml1.0 transitional, so I'm gonna take the Gallery off the site for a bit while I update and move the pictures over.

• Upgraded to drupal v4.2
• Spent some time looking at Wish You Were Here, a guerrila web standards postcard campaign (very cool).
• Produced a blog post with very little content (nyuck nyuck!).