Software Free

A few months ago when I started using FF3 beta I was being driven mad by the default behavior of the browser when you clicked on the url in the address bar, a single click would highlight the entire url. Typically I click on the url with the intention of appending the url with something like "admin/build/views" and the entire url would get wiped out. Well, Owen heard my plight and taught me out to change this behavior: read more

Required modules: Panels 2 (which includes various sub modules), views, CCK: date, text, noderefence. Optional: pathauto, path, token read more

Ron asked me for a little help on a side project where he was having trouble adding a link to a CiviCRM contribution form to a primary navigation menu. This is a pretty common requirement: you want a "donate now" link in your primary nav. You are using CiviCRM for donations. You figure, "I'll just add the civicrm contribution form url to the path field for my menu item." Well, unfortunately you figured wrong. read more

One of the findings of the Drupal usability testing at UMN in February was that users like, use and like to use contextual help. Many of the participants explicitly said that they would have liked more of it during their evaluations and in debriefing. As a developer it is difficult to anticipate where contextual help is appropriate, needed or perhaps why it's even necessary. While usability testing is possibly the only way to effectively determine exactly where contextual help is needed and useful and where it's not, I think this example might help developers understand when where and why contextual help is likely to be helpful. This is part of developing sympathy for the user. read more

Last week the Witness Hub was updated with new enhancements and features -- most obviously, the Hub Map is now also on the home page! Here is a video demonstration: This feature required asynchronous loading of the Hub Map, including it's full-screen switcher and chunk marker loader code and features, on-load of the 'Map' tab (a Hub-customized version of jQuery tabs). read more

Recently I had a client who was irked by the way the "from" email address for messages sent by the subscriptions module appeared in users' inboxes. read more

A List Apart's Issue 253 continues discussing and debating the controversial IE version targeting that ALA announced a month ago. CivicActions blogged about this topic then too. Jeremy Keith and Jeffrey Zeldman provide very realistic and down-to-earth points of view and arguments both for and against version targeting. Although they each reach different conclusions, neither tries to persuade the reader one way or the other. Rather they leave you more enlightened so that you can make your own decision.