Joomla! and a new design online

I've recently been learning the ins and outs of Joomla! for the Merced Stop Walmart Action Team. I can't say I like it as much as Drupal, but it is certainly powerful. I dislike the fact that it outputs tables (being a css-layout purist myself), and it took awhile for me to realize that the structure of different pages is determined by the menus, but it has, I suppose, grown on me somewhat. I would still recommend Drupal for most uses, but I can imagine a few situations in which Joomla! makes sense.

In other news, a re-design that I've been working on for awhile is finally online — for United Academics, the faculty union at UVM.

Drupal and a flurry of new design

It's been a busy beginning of the year for webSkillet, as I've been learning the mysteries of Drupal, which I have fallen in love with. I've done two Drupal installations in February, in both cases to put new Drupal plumbing in behind existing designs: the Vermont FACES Network and Equal Time Radio.

In design-land, I've been exercising my design skills with a complete design makeover of the Grassroots Global Justice website. In addition to the new design, I also used simplepie to set up a "grassroots newswire" which aggregates RSS and Atom feeds from all of GGJ's member organizations' blogs, MySpace pages, etc. and compiles them into a new feed (the RSS can be found here). The site also produces output in JavaScript so member organizations can place it on their websites by cutting-and-pasting a few lines of code, as well as HTML output which can be included with an iframe.

Meanwhile, cooler heads prevailed upon me before rolling out the new webSkillet design I mentioned in November (which afflicted this blog for awhile), and instead the new webSkillet site (and this blog) have been done in a somewhat more somber note. November's pastel goodness is saved for the archives:

Google gadgets!

During a bout of insomnia this week, I decided to learn how to create Google gadgets. I made a very simple gadget which displays upcoming events from the Barnes PTO's Google calendar on their blog, and a somewhat more complicated one for the Vermont Workers' Center:



In its default setting, it reads the VWC's Google calendar and Blogger feeds to display upcoming events and the latest news. However, it also looks for information from the VWC's GetActive page — so if they have any current "take action" items they will be displayed at the top, and there is also an option to have the GetActive messages displayed in the News section (the VWC sends out 3-4 electronic newsletters per month, though they often duplicate the content of the blog posts).

To see how the gadget is customizable, visit Google's gadget syndication page. People who use the customized home page iGoogle can also add the gadget to their home page:

Also, over the holidays, a new design

With a lot of time to sit around and learn GIMP tricks over the long weekend, I've also come up with a re-design for the webskillet website. The new logo graces the blog, and I'll probably be rolling out the new design by the end of the year. Another new feature of the site, a slideshow of my web designs, courtesy of Google's picasaweb:

Vermont Workers' Center and Google APIs

Over the holiday weekend, I completed the transition of the Vermont Workers' Center website to where almost all of the content is read from remote (free) content-hosting sites using Google's Ajax Feed API.



The main column content is drawn from the Workers' Center's blog using its atom feed; each entry is truncated to, essentially, one paragraph of text (plus a photo if there is one above it), with a "more" link to the full blog entry (on the blog). This allows VWC staff and leaders to use Google's user-friendly Blogger interface to update the website with news and announcements, including the ability to do rich formatting, upload photos (and video), and paste in other web content.

In the right sidebar, the upper box includes links to Workers' Center video, which is hosted on blip.tv. This is the simplest feed, as it is simply a list of titles and links.

The "Upcoming Event" box below the video box reads from a Google calendar. This is a little trickier, as the atom feed from a Google calendar doesn't list the actual date of the event as a date element in the JSON object (the JSON's date object is the date the event was posted), so in order to manipulate the event date (to display in different ways), one has to parse Google calendar's somewhat idiosyncratic (and periodically changing) "When: Tue Dec 25, 2007 to ..." formatting from inside the description element. Anyway, it seems to finally be consistently working. Clicking on any of the titles pops up a box with a description to the left, and the site also features a calendar page which displays information about all the upcoming events.

Because all of these use Google's Ajax API, the work is done by Google's servers (which find and cache the feed) and the viewer's browser (running Javascript), meaning the basic page downloads quickly. Also, it allows most of the dynamic content of the site to be handled by third-party providers (Google and blip.tv) who have highly-developed, user-friendly interfaces.

So I thought I'd start another blog...

...this one for my web business, not my clients or my personal blatherings.