Content Management Systems

Drupal Design Favorites

Submitted by dthoma7 on Fri, 2009-04-24 15:01
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This site is maintained using the Drupal content management system, the system that provides the best overall power and activity among Open Source solutions.  In building and updating this site over the past 8 years, I have seen Drupal evolve from a very simple solution into the robust framework for collaboration that it is today.  I am taking this space to list out some of my top code favorites for use with Drupal.

Modules:

  1. Project Vote Smart api
  2. Calais and Calais api
  3. RDF
  4. FCKEditor

Tutorials

  1. Ventura Cottage Squares, Mailhandler and More
  2. Front-page Squares
  3. Introduction to Auto-Tagging (Calais and RDF)
  4. How to add images via Mailhandler using Email
  5. Nice set of tutorials.  I particularly like the jQuery / Media tutorial.

 Themes

  1. Nice packaged themes at Adaptive Themes.
  2. To generate themes from PSD files PSD to CSS is not bad as a jump start.
  3. Or, a better but more expensive way is to use Artisteer.
  4. Or, code one yourself!  http://drupal.org/node/587366

As a general design tip, we should design for a general audience by designing at an 8th grade reading level or below.  Here is a nice discussion of this need for the medical community.

Here is a print out of the $user variable for username: .
stdClass Object ( [uid] => 0 [hostname] => 38.107.191.106 [roles] => Array ( [1] => anonymous user ) [session] => [cache] => 0 )

Open Source Tools

Submitted by dthoma7 on Thu, 2008-10-16 14:56
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I frequently try out and contribute to a variety of open-source online community-type tools including Mambo, Tiki-wiki, Drupal (a commercial version of Drupal = Acquia ), and Moodle. I have several currently installed and use some of them for testing out comparative features.

Several guides on the Web provide discussions of the various tools available. Wikipedia provides one of my favorite general lists here.

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Digital Archives Make Massive Content Available

Submitted by dthoma7 on Mon, 2008-09-22 14:21
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When I first published this article, I noted that there is a massive movement in content acquisition and management. Old uncopywrited materials are being scanned and placed into digital media. In some cases they are being opened up to the public.

Here is a nice story on NPR that brings a piece of this movement into perspective.

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Content Management

Submitted by dthoma7 on Wed, 2006-10-25 13:03
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The basic premise behind content management is that intellectual capital of a firm can be stored and managed in some unified manner. Simple. The reality is that firms have huge loads of non-standardized content on all sorts of media ranging from the more manageable text and visual media (digital media being especially manageable) to the least manageable audio and tacit knowledge content.

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