Design

mojoPortal.com sports a new look

William Shatner as Denny CraneJust saw a post from Joe Audette that mojoPortal.com has a new look. A Jasmin Savard created the new theme (skin). We agree with Audette, the old theme was showing its age and we wish mojoPortal the best of luck on its new look.

mojoPortal is one of the few non-PHP CMS that we keep on our radar scope. mojoPortal is written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under mono on Linux or Mac.

ISEdb: Is your Website Search Engine Friendly?

We all have seen our share of articles on how to make your site friendly to search engines, but this article is probably one of the best I've seen online. The article is written by Ross Dunn and is titled, "Is Your Website Search Engine Friendly? Your Personal Checklist":

The following is checklist designed to help you gauge the search engine friendliness of your website and, if you are in the midst of planning a website this checklist will help you avoid the common pitfalls of unfriendly designs. Complete Story

Replacing the Drupal Dashboard

A sleepless night for Earl Miles late last week provided the Drupal community a replacement to his Dashboard module. Earl Miles announced a successor to Dashboard at his site, Angry Donuts. The new module is the Panels module and I expect we'll be seeing it used a lot by Drupal's users, especially newcomers of Drupal and those less inclined to dig into the PHP code.

Dashboard the previous module, allowed Drupal developers an easy way to implement "simple" two-column layouts of content (called nodes in Drupal) that are not sidebars. While you can put blocks about anywhere in Drupal, the core doesn't offer an easy way to put content outside the "main body". While dashboard overcame the "single column" for content obstacle, it required knowledge of PHP to implement.

New Drupal 4.7 theme available... Blue_mark

Screenshot of Blue Mark themeSomething old is new again. The Blue_mark theme for Drupal 4.7 is available at CMS Report. The Blue_mark theme uses Drupal 4.7's default theming engine, PHPTemplate. This theme is released under the GPL.

The Blue_mark theme was originally offered by Charles Lowe and available for download at his site, cyberdash.com. The original theme was written for Drupal 4.4's Xtemplate theme engine. I maintained the theme through Drupal 4.6 for a personal site of mine. With the switchover to the PHPTemplate theme engine as the Drupal 4.7 defualt, significant work was needed to keep old Blue_mark alive. The Blue Marine theme was used as a starting point. Minor tweaks were made to Blue Marine's PHP files and significant changes were made in the CSS.

Nick Lewis: Overriding Themeable Drupal Functions

I have to admit something. Before today I had never visited Nick Lewis' blog. However, I'm extremely impressed with the how-to content on his site. I'm sort of known to be theme development "challenged", so I look forward to articles such as the one I'm reading now.

The following is an excerpt of his latest article with regards to theming in Drupal using the PHPtemplate engine: