Aylard.ca

Change is always tough, but sometimes the gain made by the change far surpasses the pain .  This may be one of those times.  Since this blog was meant to be a learning opportunity as well as a means to inflict my views and musings on anyone that cares to listen.  The first change will be a  to the format.  The blog content will be devided into a teaser and body.

In order to improve the usability of the blog, it is time to make some changes. 

I noticed a very significant colour shift in a few of my photos after I uploaded photos to my drupal photo gallery.   Since I have upgraded many of the image related modules over the last few months and also switched to Adobe Lightroom 3, it wasn't initially apparent what was causing the colour shift.

The process of developing a custom theme for the aylard.ca website is well underway.  A decision was made to start with a blank slate and build the theme manually. A custom Zen sub- theme was developed for acbsbw.com.  Based on the experience working with the zen theme, I didn't see a substantial benefit for using the Zen theme.

While working on the forum on acbsbw.com, I found that Internet Explorer was not applying my main css style sheet.
Some pages would display properly and some would not.
I tracked the problem down to a limitation in IE.  It seems that IE will only load a maximum of 30 style sheets and will just ignore the rest.  My style sheet was the 31st.

The creation of the email based news letter for the Bluewater Chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society is almost complete.  This turned into a terrific learning opportunity.

Although the task sounds easy, it is far from a "walk in the park".  The lack of support for HTML and CSS in todays email packages creates numerous problems in formatting an attractive and stable newsletter.  The worst offenders in HTML and CSS support is  Microsoft.  Outlook 2007 uses the authoring tools from Microsoft Word which is not standards compliant.  Support for newsletter layout using <div> tags is not possible.  The use of <table> tag seems to be the preferred method for creating layout.

But first let's set the scene for this project.  The website is based on the current versions of Drupal 6.x, CCK, Views, Simplenews, Insert, Filefield, Imagefield, Imagecache and MIME all custom themed with Zen.

The need to backup and restore Drupal websites was my focus over the past couple of days.
A proper site backup must target the MySQL database, the /sites/default directory and the /sites/all/themes directory.

I'm making progress with a Drupal Zen sub-theme for the ACBS Bluewater Chapter development site.  The Zen theming systems seems to be easy to use and customize.  The theming is far enough along to begin working on the newsletter, photo gallery and forum components of the site.  Biggest problem so far is that 'the transparency of white background behind the site name doesn't work in IE.  Seems that yet again IE is not standa

It is time to migrate the ACBS - Bluewater Chapter website to Drupal.  The new site will integrate the existing Mambo, SMF and Gallery elements to Drupal modules and will also implement on-line newsletter functionality.

Some of the key modules being used will be:

• CCK
• Filefield
• Imagefield
• Imagecache
• Galleria
• jCarousel
• Lightbox
• Views
• Zen Theme
• Simplenews
• Forum

Based on some feedback, I've decided to implement an RSS feed for my blog.  I thought this would be a great learning curve, but alas, all I had to do was add a display to the existing view and a very simple configuration of the view display.  At this point the feed only contains the tile of the blog post, but that seems to be adequate.