The Bible is the most popular (and possibly hated) book ever. It's popular enough that when the iTunes App store launched for the iphone and ipod touch a bible application was one of the most popular applications. There are more translations of the original text into English than any other book I've herd of or even imagined. So, it should come as no surprise that there are a couple ways to integrate the bible into a drupal installation. Continue Reading »
Evaluating Content Management Systems
Content Management Systems are always being evaluated. Sometimes it's an organization looking for the next system to host their website. Sometimes it's someone writing a review about a system. And, still other times it's the competition taking a peak at the products they are up against. Let's take a look at some common areas we need to evaluate whether the system is open source or proprietary. Continue Reading »
jQuery Update and jQuery UI Release New Versions
New releases just came out for the drupal 6 versions of the jQuery Update and jQuery UI modules. These updates bring drupal up to speed with the current releases from the jQuery team.
Highlights of the new release of jQuery Update:
- Updated to 1.2.6 version of jQuery.
- Added ability to replace core scripts other than jQuery when they are affected by an update.
- Users can specify the compression level for jQuery between uncompressed, minified, and packed.
The 1.2.6 release of jQuery is the first to support jQuery UI 1.5 and sports a few changes along with bug fixes and performance enhancers. For example, event objects in Internet Explorer used to have the attributes offsetX and offsetY. These are no longer present in this release of jQuery. If you need to use them they can be calculated with the following code:
if ( typeof event.offsetX == 'undefined' && typeof event.offsetY == 'undefined' ) {
var offset = $(event.target).offset(false);
event.offsetX = event.pageX - offset.left;
event.offsetY = event.pageY - offset.top;
}While this release brings core up to date it's always good to test contributed and custom modules to makes sure they work as well.
Highlights of the new release of jQuery UI:
- Works with the latest 1.5 release.
- Inherits the compression level set by jQuery Update.
- jquery_ui_add() can now accept either an array of ui scripts or a single one as a string.
This version of jQuery UI is really impressive when it comes to building complex javascript interfaces.
Church Content Management: Open Source vs. Proprietary
Over in the Geeks and God forums an interesting conversation has come up around the difference between open source content management for churches and closed proprietary systems. This conversation got interesting when Chadwick Meyer and Brad Hill, who are behind two of the proprietary systems, joined in on the conversation. With so many choices in the content management system market for churches and ministries this is a question many churches are going to ask. So, let's take a look at a few things that matter and make a difference. Continue Reading »
Zoho Writer
I recently had to create a word document that was a little more complex than your everyday word document and I had to do it without Microsoft Word. So, without my security blanket I learned how the competition stacked up, or did they? Continue Reading »
Bible Reference Tagger by Logos
RefTagger is an easy way to convert bible references into pop-ups with the text of the verse and links to the verse at BibleGateway.com.
This is done through some configurable JavaScript you include in the page. When the JavaScript is included in a web page it looks through the page, finds bible references in full and abbreviated formats, replaces them with links to BibleGateway.com, adds a pop-up showing the verse when you mouse over the link, and provides a tie in with Libronix. Continue Reading »
Simplefeed 2.2 Released
Simplefeed, a simple aggregation module for drupal, version 2.2 has been released. This update was a bug fix to the 2.1 release which brought with it a number of updates and bug fixes including:
- Support for longer URLs.
- An update fix when migrating from Simplefeed 1.
- A more robust technique for identifying duplicates.
- A bug fix for cron removing expired feed items.
Performance
Simplefeed 2.2 is significantly faster than simplefeed 1. According to Ted Serbinski, the modules creator, Simplefeed 2 has preformed 380% faster at processing feeds than simplefeed 1. This was preformed with a sampling of blogs from the MomBlogNetwork.
Performance depends on many factors (e.g., hardware, operating system, etc.) so the important element to notice is the percent improvement over the previous version.
I'm a Maintainer
Along with these releases I was added as a contributor to the module. My hope is to move towards a drupal 6 release.
Blueprint CSS Framework and Drupal
Building website templates and themes can be a real pain. Not only do you need to layout your site, setup your columns, and get everything just how you want it you have to check it out in a half dozen different browsers to get it working for everyone out there. That's where the Blueprint CSS Framework comes in. It's designed to take a lot of the legwork out of taking a design and making it work for the web. Now, Ted Serbinski has released a Blueprint CSS starter theme for drupal. Continue Reading »
New Drupal Modules Churches Can Use
Every month more than 100 new contributed modules are added to drupal. Sorting through these with my church and ministry goggles on I've found a few that could prove to be fairly useful for churches and ministries. Continue Reading »
jQuery and Drupal
Drupal and jQuery have proven to be a powerful combination when it comes to producing useful and flashy web sites and web applications. In episode 88 of the Geeks and God podcast we talk about jQuery and how it works from within drupal. Part of my homework from the episode was to write up some examples of how to use jQuery from within drupal. Here are those examples. Continue Reading »
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