Dreamweaver vs. Content Management part II

January 31, 2008

My position on Dreamweaver is no secret. Last fall I was talking with a colleague and journalism professor about the need for journalism schools to teach content management principles as part of their programs. A communications professional who knows nothing about Dreamweaver can have a bright future. A communications professional who knows only a little about content management is in big trouble.

After we were discussing the course yesterday evening I opened up Google Reader and read Ken Rickard's post about Amy Gahran's wonderful Poynter Online article about just this topic. Here are some of the high points from Gahran's article:

Apparently, this j-school (like many others) offers little or no training in true CMS-based tools. Their online courses focus on Dreamweaver.

That's a big problem, because tools embody mindsets. Focusing on Dreamweaver teaches exactly the wrong mindset for online journalism: that your Web site is mainly an island unto itself.

Quickly adding imagecache and lightbox to posts on Drupal sites

January 31, 2008

Imagecache options screen shot

Following up on yesterday's post this is a quick and dirty guide to adding images to blog posts using imagecache and Lightbox v2. The effect of these together is to create an image like the one in this post. When clicked the image will display in an overlay on this page thanks to lightbox. Imagecache handles making a static copy of the image available and resizing the image to provide several predefined sizes.

It is possible to do similar things in much better ways. For example creating an image field and a template for displaying posts that include the image. This method is a quick and dirty method using a minimum of additional modules. With Drupal 6 the FlexiFilter module will make this method even simpler.

The first step is to setup the necessary modules (imagecache and lightbox v2). The imagecache handbook page has some information about setting up presets for imagecache. The latest version of imagecache has new settings that deprecate some of the old settings. See the image in this post for a glance at what is in the newest CVS version.

jQuery goodness

January 29, 2008

While listening to the Drupal podcast #53 I decided it was time to take the plunge and do a few jQuery/Javascript things here. So comments will now preview live as they are being entered and thanks to the combination of imagecache (not jQuery related) and lightbox the pictures appearing in the more recent posts now display with the lightbox effect.

Occam's razor applies to technology too

January 23, 2008

Sometimes it takes a simple reminder that Occam's razor or the keep it simple stupid principles apply to most things in the technical realm just as it does to the real world.

In the server meltdown last week the data was all recovered but some problems with the backups made it impossible to get all of the file directories. The net result was a friend's WordPress blog melted down. Or at least all the goodies were gone. In the process of renewing the site and getting it updated a tagging plugin no-longer worked. As we talked this afternoon I looked through the database and figured out the schema and what was happening. Quickly enough I hit on a few simple queries and realized I could convert the data.

After another backup of the database it was time to set about migrating the data. The first query is:

INSERT IGNORE into wp_terms (slug, name, term_id) SELECT lower(replace(replace(replace(wp_tags.tag, '.' , ''), "'", ""), "", '')) a, replace(replace(wp_tags.tag, '-', ' '), '_', ' ') b, NULL
FROM wp_tags

That runs perfectly and it was time for step two. Or it was really time for step one. Not a major WordPress user I am not terribly familiar with the community. But it hit me that I was probably not the first person to be doing this. Maybe somebody else had published the SQL to make this process easier.

CSV Parser for PHP

January 21, 2008

This is a snippet of code that I had posted on another of my websites and in doing some cleanup it really fits better here.

I spent last evening working on a Comma Separated Values (CSV) list of titles for a project I'm working on. Below is a snippet of code I worked with. The first method from the PHP Cookbook suggests using fgetcsv(). That woks pretty well but the native function in PHP doesn't handle values (fields) that contain separators (commas) very well and doesn't have the concept of multiple values being delimited by a different delimiter within a field. So I whipped up the parser that comes second in the example below.

Lullabot workshops and server rebuilds

January 16, 2008

Lullabot LogoIt has been a busy 2008 so far. I spent the first full week of the year at the Lullabot Drupal API workshops in beautiful, rainy, Portland. It didn't take long to figure out that I also really wanted to head off to the themeing workshops in February as well. I came home ready to wrap up a couple of projects and spend countless hours working on patches and uber-cool modules and hacks for all kinds of sites.

All went well on Sunday as I moved several sites and did a little database trickery to make things hum along. When I shut down for the day early Monday morning things were buzzing right along. Murphy, however, was hard at work. A problem with the server resulted in the need to rebuild the whole box from scratch. Even more fun it is a remote server and the backups weren't working as well as they should have been.

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