Design

John Newton, Alfresco co-founder, is a man I have never met.  Regardless of this important fact, I feel like I have gotten to know a small part of him through his blog.  While Newton's blog may focus on Alfresco, his posts offers a wide range of insights on subjects such as commercial open source, content management,  enterprise software,  business processes, and information technology.  So if you have any idea of who I am through my own writings  it should be no surprise to you that I enjoy giving thought to some of

Here at CMSReport.com, I use a slightly modified version of the Zen theme.  Jeff Robbins is currently working on expanding his ideas via a series of default templates and variables added for the PHPTemplate engine.  This work is currently under the project name Zengine.  Lullabot.com recently underwent a new site design using Zengine and I guess there has been a number of comments for the site's new search tab.   Lucky for us, Mr. Robbins has decided to share with us how to code in the search tab.

This is a busy week for me with an all-day software load scheduled this week for my work's operational systems. Translation...you likely will not see many original posts from me for a few days. I will however continue to post some links and excerpts  on CMS news items that catch my attention.

On Planet Drupal, there have been a number of posts lately about the difficulty project leaders and developers have in  saying "no" while working on a project.  As much as Project leaders want to please both their client and their team members, real leaders understand the responsibilities they have in saying "no".  More specifically, I'm talking about Boris Mann's post, "Susan Mernit on the role of "no" in product development" as well as Laura Scott's own post You've got to know when to 'no' them.

One of the easiest ways to change a well written theme in a Web content management system is by tweaking the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). To be honest, I'm horrible at theme development. I prefer to focus my time on function, administration, and content of the information system. However, any bit of information that helps you tweak those themes you downloaded for that CMS is good news, right? After enough tweaks, you can may just have a theme with a style you can call your very own.

While most bloggers are using the new year to look ahead, I am not quite ready to make promises to the year of 2007. In fact, I am more inclined to looking at the past thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

I'd like to challenge anyone who has designed a web page to find the oldest site in the archive that they authored and post the Wayback Machine link in the comment section of this post. There are no prizes being awarded in this "contest" but I promise you can have some space for bragging rights. Feel free to include any history on the page that you feel is necessary to tell your story.

The archive contains archived web pages from 1996 to the near present. The oldest web pages I could find that I authored was from 1997 for the National Weather Service's forecast office in Sioux Falls, SD.

The above site actually originated in March 1996, but this 1997 image is the earliest I could find in the archive. Not very impressive is it? However, you have to remember that I was authoring with HTML 1.x and worried that Netscape's introduction of the blink element was pushing the envelope further than I wanted to go.

While browsing some of my favorite sites looking for quirks in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) that I needed to be aware of for Web design, I came across one of the most helpful design tools I've seen in a long time. Caleb Gilbert recommended at Drupal.org a site called Browsershots. His recommendation was prompted on the need for non-IE7 users such as Mac users to actually see what their sites would look like in IE7. This is a design tool not only useful for those designing themes for Drupal, but about any other content management system or Web page you may get your hands on.

PunBB 1.2.14 has been released. According to the original announcement at PunBB.org the new point version it not only fixes some bugs, but also provides some minor enhancements:

I have been sitting on this story for some time. Daniel Glazman has been writing a number of posts recently on a brand new project he's just starting. Daniel Glazman was involved in the development of the Netscape and Mozilla Composer (now called SeaMonkey) as well as the author of the Nvu Web authoring system. All these composers contain a WYSIWYG HTML editor and in many ways can be the considered the open source versions of Microsoft's Frontpage and Adobe's Dreamweaver.

As you can tell from the screenshot below, I am using a release candidate of Mozilla's Firefox 2 while viewing and editing content in my Drupal site. If you look closely at the image or click on the image to enlarge it, you will also see that I don't always focus my browsing on Drupal. Take a look at the tabs and you'll see me taking a look at a number of other open source projects (such as Joomla and e107). I have been known to have 20 tabs open referencing just as many different portals, forums, and blog applications as I can find. What can I say, I'm obsessed with Web content management systems (CMS).