Drupal

I am very excited to announce the launch of Altek Business Systems' new website. I am really pleased with how the design turned out. It is proudly built in Drupal.

I just posted a news release over at OfficeProductNews.net.

Here is an excerpt from the press release:

“We have made substantial investments in new areas to enhance the services we provide to our clients,” commented Ray Derstine, President. “We wanted to make sure that our website communicated the value that we were able to provide.”

Over the past few years, the company has expanded its capabilities in offering document management solutions. This allows clients to create secure, searchable repositories of information scanned from multifunction systems. The new website explains the benefits of these solutions and features Altek’s primary software partner, DocuWare. continue reading...

Followers of this blog will know that I have an affinity to Drupal. I have been developing almost exclusively in that platform for about a year now. Prior to that, I did almost all of my work in WordPress.

Last week, I finally converted my blog (this masterpiece that you are reading from now) to Drupal. I thought that I would share some reasons why I made the switch.

First, let me share why I originally chose Wordpress.

It was easy.

That’s it. That is the only reason why I chose Wordpress when I started blogging. It was easy to use. It was easy to set up. For a blogging platform that you want to set up in a couple of minutes, there is no easier way to go.

I don’t, however, think that Wordpress is the best solution for bloggers who want power, and I especially don’t think that Wordpress is really the best way to go for people who want fully featured websites.

If you only want a simple blog AND never want more AND want to do it yourself, then stick with Wordpress. If you are going to hire someone to build it for you, you might as well have it done in Drupal because it is so much better.

Here are my top ten reasons why I think Drupal is a better choice than Wordpress for Websites as well as blogs. continue reading...

In my quest to integrate Drupal with Windows Live Writer, I had a chance to have a call with some members of the development team from Microsoft. So, first, here’s a shout out to Becky, Brandon and Joe of the Writer team. We spent almost an hour talking about Live Writer and what we might be able to accomplish in the future for Drupal integration.

First, let me say, the goal of the Writer team is to make a product that is great for the end-user. They want it to be easy to use and as feature rich as possible. Because the goal is to provide a tool that integrates on as many blogging platforms as possible, there are inherently some challenges and we had an opportunity to talk about some of the key components they have implemented to make integration more readily available.

Because of our conversation, I think we’ll be able to have some better integration with the Drupal Blog API module for Windows Live Writer… hopefully we’ll be able to get those released very soon. continue reading...

I was doing some research on the web tonight ('cuz that is what I do). I found a website whose internet marketing indicates that she teaches people how to use HTML. Her goal is to teach people how to use HTML because HTML is so important for the average person to know.

Her site says,

I get so frustrated when I read about some software package that claims you don't have to learn HTML.  HTML is the foundation of website building.  The more you understand the basics, the more productive and effective you are going to be in your Internet business. continue reading...

These instructions are now outdated. I have moved the latest version of these instructions to our development site on Tribute Media. Please check them out there.

Using Drupal as a blogging platform is pretty powerful. The challenge is that many blogging tools, like Windows Live Writer, don't seem to support it very well. It was okay with support on Drupal 5, but then it got broken. A few people have found some ways to hack the Drupal core, but that is not reasonable.

So, we built a WLW Module for Drupal 6. It is in beta right now, but we have some cool things we are doing on it. If you have some features you want to see, let us know now while we are developing. If you run Drupal (or if I have built a site for you... which is done in Drupal), you can use this module to manage your blogging.

You'll need to go to http://drupal.org/project/wlw_blogapi and download the latest version of the module.  After you install it, you'll need to make sure that your permissions are set right for your user to access it and you'll need to make sure that the content types that you want to manage are set on www.example.com/admin/settings/blogapi. continue reading...

Web development has gone through some significant changes over the last 20 years. I remember when I started working with web development in the 90s that most of the people that I knew that became web developers fell into two categories.

Category 1: Graphic Designers who learned HTML, ASP, etc

Category 2: Programmers who learned how to use graphics programs like Photoshop.

More often than not, these are mutually exclusive skill sets. More often than not, you can learn to be proficient at both, but not spectacular at both. There are some people that can truly be very good at both, but a programmer uses logic to design and a designer uses creativity to design. Neither is bad... just often are mutually exclusive skill sets.

Because of this divide in skill sets, the last few years has seen a turn in how web sites are developed. Specialization has become key to the modern website. Graphic Designers focus on their core competency and Programmers focus on their core competency. This is great because now you can get spectacular design and competent programming (although I still think that the majority of the graphic designers that are out there still think that designing for web interaction is the same as designing for static media).

But, what is forgotten? continue reading...