Matt Farina - Tech / Faith / Life

Rotating banner images is a simple way to spice up most sites. It adds something shiny that can hook people in. If you use jQuery, like I often do, then a simple way to do the rotating banner images is using the jQuery cycle plugin. This plugin can even be used along with drupals views module to create dynamic lists of rotating images.

But, there are some downfalls with this approach. For example, if you create a list of images for the jQuery cycle plugin to rotate through you need to set all but one of them not to display with css. Even though most of the images are not initially displaying they are still downloaded in many browsers. If you have a bunch of images loading that have any size this has a potential to waste a lot of bandwidth if those images aren't viewed.

This was a problem that I ran into working on a few sites. Here's a solution I use that solves this problem while working well with Views, jQuery, and any content Views can create.

You can read the complete article at http://www.innovatingtomorrow.net/2008/05/12/rotating-banner-images-with...

I recently moved MattFarina.com from a single site drupal installation over to a multi-site installation. This means that all the image paths in all the posts were updated (via a script). If you see an errors or anything out of place I'd appreciate it if you let me know.

Looking for an easier way to follow the content on drupal.org, drupal groups, the drupal planet, and all those forums? The drupal widget is here to help you with that.

The drupal widget works on Netvibes, igoogle, Windows Live, Opera, Apple Dashboard, and Windows Vista. Click one of these buttons to immediately add it.

A special thanks to Netvibes and Greg Cohn for producing this widget. This isn't the first time Netvibes has brought the drupal community something cool and useful. Last year Netvibes launched the Drupal Universe.

If you have any suggestions for feeds to change in the widget please let me know.

Every drupal site or app I've built has used nodes for the content/data objects. I've now come upon a few projects where the data already exists in it's own table structure and needs to remain that way. My first thought was to look at a development framework like symfony or cakephp. I have to use PHP and these are two good php frameworks. But, I'm starting to consider drupal 6 as the web framework for these projects.

Drupal 6 includes some handy features to help start the transition into using PHP 5 in our creations. But, as PHP 4 nears the end of it's life in a couple weeks there are many hosts who haven't switched to PHP 5 or are only updating to PHP 5.0, like Media Temples dedicated virtual server packages are planning.

It's time to push the hosts to upgrade. So, if your host isn't offering PHP 5.2 or not planning on it in the short term consider sending them an email or give them a phone call asking for it.

And, if your host decides to offer PHP 5.2 as fastcgi for an alternative you amy want to consider the performance considerations of such a move.

Last week, I created what I hope to be the final release of the Comment Info module. This version of the module strips out the opt in feature for the module and has it functionally operating the same as the built in feature for drupal 6. The migration path to drupal 6 is nothing. All of the anonymous user data should gracefully just show up in drupal 6 without needing to do anything.

This module will still be supported for bug fixes but that's it.

Those of us who have used the captcha module for drupal have experienced the pain of working with it. Over the past year there have been many times where the released version just didn't work. Or, you had to deal with the captcha always failing on cached pages. Sure, you could get around this with a little fancy hacking; but, for many drupalers that was more complicated than they could handle. With the new release, thanks to Rob Loach, it all just works.

One of the optimization features in Drupal 6 is going to be javascript aggregation/preprocessing just like Drupal 5 has this for CSS. Thanks to Wim Leers for sponsoring backport to Drupal 5 and to Ted Serbinski for rolling the patch.

Now that drupal 5.2 is out, it's time to re-roll the patch for this version of drupal. It's available here.

Don't even ask about putting this into the drupal 5 download. New features don't go into versions that are just being maintained so there is no chance at all. New features go into new versions which is where this will show up... in Drupal 6 download.

Did you know that the "www." is your sites URL could be hurting your search engine ranking? When most of us go to a website we start by typing in the standard "www." before we get into the name. Some tech savvy people know that we can omit those 4 extra key strokes for sites but most, even those who know, have it added in by habit. Yet, the fact that sites support both actually hurts search engine ranking. Thankfully there is a way to fix it; but, first you have to decide to www or not www your site.

A Little History

Have you ever architected a church community site? This is a task I am taking on for a new project. A basic architecture for a community site is pretty easy to throw together. Sites like myspace (ugly and bad example but still an example), yahoo360, facebook, and many other give an outline for that. In the church arena mychurch.org is a great example.

But, there are some major differences between these and this project. First, those are for massive amounts of people who are trying to create communities within the greater community. This project is for just a single community. Second, there sites seem to be more about socializing and gossip than working together towards a purpose which a church site would be about. Third, these sites seem to be individual focused rather than community focused.

Mychurch.org and fraternitylive.com are the sites that come the closest to what I am looking for but neither quite fits the bill. Though, they do give a great starting point for an information architecture.

Note: This is for a community driven site and not the main church site. There will be a separate main church site with info about the church, the pastors, the podcast, and all that other stuff.

Here's my first pass at an information architecture: