Archive for September, 2008

Screenshot of the Acuia Marina theme included in Drupal Acquia.

So here it is: today Acquia officially launched their network – codenamed ‘Spokes’ untill now – and their distribution of ‘Acquia Drupal’ which was codenamed ‘Carbon’ until now. This is the first commercially supported version of Drupal.

I took it up for a quick spin to check it out. Basically it’s a version of Drupal 6.4 with the latest versions of popular modules like Views, CCK, Image module, ImageCache and others. You can see the full modules list here. Also available are a couple specific Acquia modules which are needed if you have a subscription at Acquia.

Acquia has also published a full overview of their product subscription. They look pretty similar to the ones they presented at Drupalcon in Szeged. There is also a roadmap available to see what modules are under consideration for future releases.

Theme
As a bonus you also get a nice clean template from the guys at topnotchtheme. It’s basic but is very easy on the eyes. (and hey, at least it’s something else than Garland!)

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It’s an old but still frequent discussion I often have with – especially – graphic designers. The scrollbar: use it or avoid it? In my experience, many graphic designers don’t really like the scrollbar and try to avoid it whenever possible.

However, the trend for (non-flash) sites seems to be in favor of longer pages with the scrollbar at the far right (not in an iframe). This is also what we recommend in general: work with the scrollbar – not against it, don’t be afraid of longer pages, use good footers but keep the important stuff above the fold.

Facts and figures
Last week, reading webanalisten.nl, I came across research (part 1, part 2 and part 3) from Clicktale about scrolling behaviour, scroll reach, visitor attention and location of the fold. They used the statistics from their own analytics service for this research.

One of their conclusions is that the majority of users (74%) scrolls to some extent when a scrollbar is available. And 22% of those people scroll all the way down to the footer.

However, we don’t know why 26% of the users didn’t scroll when a scrollbar was available. Maybe they didn’t see the scrollbar? Maybe they didn’t find what they were looking for above the fold? (or did and didn’t need to scroll) Or maybe they never scroll at all?

I’m also curious if there is a connection between type of users and scroll behaviour. I suspect that experienced web users (and also generation Y)  tend to scroll and scan pages a lot. Unexperienced users might scroll less or not at all? I often found this true when watching my mother surf the web but can’t seem to find any research reports and hard data about this topic.

What are your thoughts?

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Today, Smashing Magazine posted quite a lengthy post about Drupal titled ‘Drupal Developer Toolbox‘. A long list of popular Drupal websites, modules, themes and tutorials. A nice guide for beginners and quite a boost for Drupal (Smashing Magazine has got over 94.000 RSS readers…).

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Dutch cartoon summarizing virtual identity symposium

Last week, we attended the symposium about ‘Identities in Virtual Worlds‘ in Amsterdam. Very interesting stuff with a philosophical touch. One of the speakers was Jos de Mul and on his homepage I stumbled upon this summary of the event in cartoon-style. It’s in Dutch but gives a nice impression.

Identity 2.0
From our perspective, the most interesting presentation was from Ronald Leenes who talked about privacy issues in a web 2.0 world were many people expose their personal lives on sites like hyves or facebook. His presentation was clear, fast-paced en funny – It reminded me the famous ‘Identity 2.0‘ presentation from Dick Hardt from some years ago. (Still good though!)

Second Life
But the symposium emphasized on virtual worlds – especially Second Life. One of the speakers – Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer – is a poet who explored Second Life with a female avatar and wrote about his/her(?) experiences in the NRC paper a while ago. He also published a book about it and made this great video taken in-world where he talks with his alter ego Lilith (Dutch).

Shoes…
Oh, and for everybody who wants to know how you can tell someone is pretending to be a woman online – apparantly there is a way to determine this.

Start talking about shoes…

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One of the great things in Drupal is the ability to set-up and manage workflows. You can even achieve a simple level of workflow without the special workflow module but only using views and cck. Without coding a single line.

Drupal + Views + CCK
Take for example this scenario: you have a client who wants to be able to edit the content on his Drupal site, but the client is really not an experienced CMS user, and is unable to ‘make a webpage look good’: putting the right links in the right place, headers, maybe a nice image here and there,  etc. etc.

The client does know what he wants to tell, but simply lacks the skills to transform his message into webpages. In this case you might have an agreement with your client where you are responsible for quality-control and final editting. Of course, you want this process to run as smoothly as possible.

You could try this trick
Using CCK, Add 2 fields in the content-type for the nodes the client can edit:

• A textarea (labeled something like ‘content remarks’)
• A checkbox (labeled something like ‘needs revision by my webdesign firm’)

Then, using Views, you create a RSS view which shows only the nodes that have this checkbox checked.

This way, when your client edits a node, he can put his remarks (drafts, links, suggestions and so on) in the textarea, check the box, and not need to worry about it again.

RSS updates
You subscribe to the Views’ rss feed and get automatic rss updates with links to pages that need revision and have everything neatly grouped together. You could also add a CCK filefield where the client can upload his raw camera images or other raw material which needs editting. This should save a lot of time.

You could also expand this functionality for nodes that need to be added, the possibilities are endless. But this simple example really shows how powerful a framework Drupal + Views + CCK is.

Email updates
You could even run the RSS feed through feedburner and enable email-updates. But then again if you need more extensive email functionality in your workflows you should use the workflow module.

Revisions?
A short word about revisions (as one might think revisions might be used for this): the default in-core available ‘revisions’ and ‘log message’ are not suitable for this functionality. The log message field is only used when a new revision is made (checkbox under publishing options) and used as a description with every revision.
This way you can easely revert to a previous version, but a new revision is immediately.

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