Software | Innovating Tomorrow

The new look GeeksAndGod.com is here. After several weeks of redesign and dealing with design debt, that was built up from drupal 4.7, the new site is live and running drupal 6.

The image below is what the screen would look like for a logged in user. There are 4 blocks at the bottom giving a snapshot of what's going on in the community. Anonymous users see a slightly different look where the podcast is front and center and the blocks at the bottom are replaced with information about the site.

Some of the new features include reviews, tutorials, JavaScript goodness, and we imported thousands of forum posts and hundreds of users from Christian-Web-Masters.com.

At this point I won't dive into the details of how we built the site. The next podcast episode is going to dive into the technicalities.

Continue Reading »

Resurgence, a ministry of Mars Hill Church built on drupal, had a bad piece of content in their popular content for the day. That would be their Page Not Found page. The landing page you hit when you went to a page on the site that doesn't exist. This page is by no means popular. In fact, this page may be the most unpopular and annoying page on the site. But, it shows us a great opportunity to look at a design flaw. Continue Reading »

Want to learn how to build a drupal 6 theme start to finish from scratch in one day? That's the goal of a free drupal theming workshop coming up on October 11th being held just outside of Detroit, Michigan, USA at St. Matthew Lutheran Church. The workshop is being led by Bob Christenson of Mustardseed Media Inc and the Mustardseed Media Video Podcast, a videocast covering drupal development.

Click here for workshop specifics or to sign up for the workshop.

Mustardseed Media, a company Innovating Tomorrow regularly partners with, recently launched a video podcast about web development focusing in on drupal development. This video podcast is unique compared to the ones I typically see in that it comes out regularly and offers low res and 720p HD resolution videos of each videocast. Plus, it has what might be the best introduction to any of the drupal videocasts I've seen so far.

These episodes don't focus on advanced development. Instead they cover the basic concepts and how tos new developers are asking and looking for.

Some of the recent episodes have focused on Imagefield and Imagecache, the Views Rotator module, module theming, podcasting With drupal 6, and Photoshop reflections.

If you're looking for some short and sweet drupal tutorial videos check out the Mustartseed Media Video Podcast.

Have you ever wondered who benefits from creating an accessible design? One that meets the needs of people who have impairments like the vision impaired. When I think of people in this situation I usually envision someone who is blind and can't think of many blind people. This can give way to the feeling that there aren't that many people with impairments and on the basis of this it's easy to make designing an accessible site a low priority.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are up to 60 million Americans with disabilities that are trying to use a computer to learn and interact on the web. If you do that math that's roughly 20% of the U.S. population. Yet, awareness of this issue seems to be fairly low and many designers are building sites and web applications that aren't usable to this 20%. Continue Reading »

When it comes to aggregating blogs in drupal there are any number of ways to do it (This is a big reason aggregation is being redesigned for the next major version of drupal). Most of these products are piece parts that need to be configured to work and aren't solutions out of the box. That's where the new Profile Blog Information module comes in. Continue Reading »

Drupal provides some great caching tools to improve page loading performance. Production sites see huge speed increases because of caching. But, when a site is being developed caching can quickly turn into a nightmare. For example, when you add a new theme override function your to template.php file it isn't picked up right away and you may end up banging your head wondering what's going on. Or, when your developing filter code your filtered content may be cached. Going to the performance setting page and clearing the cache is annoying and a work flow problem. So, let's look at a couple simple solutions that can make development a little easier and less painful. Continue Reading »

We just closed the door on the first Geeks and God conference and the planning has already started for the next conference. We are riding the wave of excitement and energy into planning the future of Geeks and God. The first planning meeting is this coming Friday!

I am looking for your help to make the next conference even more of a success than the first. If you have any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions regarding the next Geeks and God conference please comment on them here before Friday.

The Geeks and God Web 2.0 Conference was a success! We weren't sure what to expect at the first conference. The outcome was better than we could have expected and we have to thank everyone who was involved.

For those of you who are interested, photos of the conference are up on the Geeks and God flickr group Continue Reading »

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 »