Posted Tue, 10/20/2009 - 22:13 by Evan Lovely
Our most recent website project, Stand Against Poverty, was for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Campaign, which hosts the world wide event. The website hosted nearly 4,000 events which were created on the site from users that signed up all over the world. The web site allowed them to download materials, announce there event, and report the total numbers of participants that attended. Afterwards, we created the biggest Microsoft Excel sheet you've ever seen of event titles, locations, emails, and participants of all the events all over the world to hand off to the Millennium Development Goals counting team, who verified the events and the number of participants. This was submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records which gave them the record for the "Largest Stand Up in One Week" for the 173,045,325 participants that our website counted. The numbers were announced here.
The Drupal site had 26,359 nodes, or pieces of content, 3,664 users, visitors from 199 countries, and 298,922 pageviews this month. In addition, the site allowed uploaded videos attached to the users event get sent to their YouTube channel and photos to there Flickr photostream, which created an enormous amount of user generated content uploaded to these social media services. Easily our biggest and most successful project.
See the official portfolio item here.
Posted Mon, 11/16/2009 - 00:54 by Evan Lovely
While skimming through my ever growing Evernote (which is getting pretty awesome), I came across this funny, but very true look at what it's like to learn Web Design and Drupal:
Posted Sat, 11/14/2009 - 07:10 by Evan Lovely
The system we use to build sites here at freeStyle Media, Drupal, has won the Best Open Source Content Management System that runs in the most popular server language, PHP, again this year! Just goes to show how much work is at the base of every project we do for our clients. The post from drupal.org:
Drupal has won best open source PHP Content Management System for the second year in a row in the Packt Publishing 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal won by popular vote and a critical selection by a panel of judges. This award reflects the strong support of the Drupal community and our focus on quality which leads to critical acclaim and rapid adoption for large, high quality projects. Drupal won best overall open source CMS in 2007 and 2008. From the award announcement, We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public. While Drupal and Joomla! have always consistently featured among the top three in this category, WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year. This is the highest award that Drupal was eligible for in 2009. Our previous wins for Best Overall CMS in 2007 and 2008 has led to our graduation to the Hall of Fame. The winners of the Hall of Fame Drupal awards for best Drupal theme and best Drupal contributed module will be awarded Thursday, November 12th, 2009. The themes and modules nominated were selected both for the most used and for a diverse set of nominees. The new winner of the best overall open source CMS (other than Drupal) will be announced on November 13, 2009. Look for a post about Drupal's MVP tomorrow. The Drupal community would like to thank the judges and Packt publishing for having these awards and allowing open source projects to demonstrate their support and the quality of the work that their community's produce. The Drupal association receives a financial contribution from every Drupal book that Packt Publishing produces.
link: Drupal wins best open source PHP CMS for second year in a row | drupal.org
Posted Sun, 10/18/2009 - 01:14 by Evan Lovely
Inserting fresh HTML elements into jQuery can be a tough thing. A lot of time you are hand building every element, attribute, and content. It's unnatural. A better way would be to just to write out the HTML you want, then tell jQuery to find an element through it's awesome CSS engine, then toss it in. Sometimes, code speaks louder than words, so here it is:
var NAME = $('TEXT');
$("#DIV").prepend(NAME);
Enjoy.
Posted Tue, 10/06/2009 - 00:17 by Evan Lovely
Sometimes a typo in a new rule can cause your jQuery to stop dead in it's tracks and can disable certain things around your sites. One great way I stay up on this easily is by placing the rule
$("body").addClass("jQuery-script-js-ran");
at the very end of the jQuery file. Never put any code after this. If you don't see the class in your body tag, then you know something stopped your jQuery javascript from running fully. Likewise, if you see it there, you know everything's running smooth.
Posted Sat, 07/11/2009 - 03:07 by Evan Lovely
So on Evernote on my iPhone I was getting an error when attempting to sync a note I made on my iPhone up to the Evernote server that said:Synchronization Error u5I couldn't find anything on Google so I was about to uninstall it when I inspected the note that wouldn't sync up. It was supposed to have a picture of a receipt on it, but it just showed a question mark that looked like an image on a web site not loading. I deleted the note and then syncing began again normally.
Posted Tue, 06/16/2009 - 22:24 by Evan Lovely
If you are using Drupal with the Nice Menus module and if you hover over a menu item, then pause, then move off again, the entire drop down menu disappears. We found that this only happens when the anchor has a title tag. This line of jQuery fixes it:
$(".block-nice_menus a").removeAttr("title");
Posted Tue, 06/16/2009 - 05:00 by Evan Lovely
When it comes to web design, you want your clients to look at the layout of the site, and how the site handles the content. It can be easy to get caught up reading the text, so designers usually fill it in with Lorem Ipsum text. It's great, I love it. But what about images? Surely, you've got to demonstrate to your clients that the image upload feature of the content management system works, show them where they can expect the image to be once it's uploaded, and to know that an image can even go there, all while not distracting them with the image that you happened to have on your desktop that you decided you use just because it was closest one at the moment.
Posted Fri, 06/12/2009 - 17:57 by Evan Lovely
So I've been using the Admin Module for Drupal recently to create a better backend for my clients, who end up using the site to create and edit content extensively, but did not have to piece all the nuts and bolts together. This module creates a nice page for getting to the all of what my clients usually need, and frankly, most of what I need. AJAX is just the right places, this module delivers a smooth, enjoyable administrating experience. Although, I don't think I could ever handle not having the Admin Menu module installed too.
Posted Thu, 06/11/2009 - 19:02 by Evan Lovely
I am building a site with a gallery in it and rely on the taxonomy list page for displaying all the pages with images. However, when I create new terms, it auto creates a redirect from /taxonomy/term/xx (xx = term id) to /taxonomy/term. Disabling the Path Redirect module fixed this.
