Moon under Water is a website about good beer in great places, a collection of places and events to visit. Instead of reading a number of blogs, adding events to my calendar and book marking websites about places I could visit when I'm in the area, the site pulls in feeds from a number of sites. Where appropriate the nodes have dates and geo-locations to display them on maps and event listings.
But it's not only a tool for travelling to solve the question where to go when in London/Berlin/etc but also a place to try out OpenLayers, feeds and more in Drupal 7.
OpenLayers is currently still in alpha1 and the dev version works fine for what I need so far. (The latest dev version form 6 August somehow lost a save button, but I suppose that will be fixed.) However, I haven't yet fixed mapping geo-locations from feeds to OpenLayers. Using OpenLayers with Views 3 seem to work best with WTK, but the feeds I'm pulling offers geo:rss...
blog
Reminder to myself: It is worth the effort of installing Drupal straight away in the language that the admin users later will be using. Even if you can change the default language straight away after installation it still leads to a weird mix of some modules taking the default language from what was default during installation and some of what currently is default.
And while it might be cumbersome for me to come up with the right words in other languages in menus, terms etc - it is those admins and editors who will spend much more time using the site than me in future.
For languages like Dutch, Spanish or French with more than 99% of core translated - there is a pretty good starting point. However, the Swahili and Creole translations which I just checked for some projects are still below 1%.
However - as others have pointed out before - while the installer gives instructions where to get the po-files to install Drupal 6 in another language, it doesn't explain...
I've just spend a day in Berlin at the Drupal Design Camp - a day packed with sessions on rendering APIs, the Drupal Design Initiative, on how and why to use Drush and Aegir and more.
Actually there was very little actual design sessions, but talking to Morten revealed that the whole event should better be called "Frontend" instead Design - an approach that makes sense to me. "Frontend" would include not only design and theme and potentially also Usability but also issues like what themers require from a theme and what not, instead of separating coding and design as two completely different things that need to be dealt with for a good website.
Using taxonomy term images seems to be a good way to use icons instead of text-based tags, especially for a vocabulary with few terms that can be clearly visually distinguished.
However, some icons simply wouldn't show up - with no reproducable pattern. Turns out there is a patch that unfortunately hasn't been included so far. Using that means that taxonomy term images in a view can now be restricted to a vocabulary. Unfortunately - since somebody else installed the patch - I'm not completely sure any more but I think it was this one.)
It is a bit disconcerting that the term image doesn't show up with the taxonomy term itself, so at times the best way of finding out which icons I had used was to go to a node that should have it. There actually is supposed to be a list of all taxonomy terms, but at least for me that has a bug, and claims that there is no...
I'm setting up a site for a small NGO with an impressive 35 year history. Instead of just dryly listing all their meetings, publications etc we have decided to also add some of the political and environmental events that shaped those decades; events that on the one hand set the scene in which they were active, and events on which they had input, and admittedly who remembers from the top of their head in which year the Chernobyl disaster took place, when Austria had a referendum about nuclear power stations, or when mad cow disease was first diagnosed?
A good opportunity to use the Timeline module. It adds a plugin for views to display events on a timeline, to show a blurb with more information when you click on them, and to link to the individual nodes from there.
This will need a bit of tweaking, because the body text of the events are so short, that they can completely show in the blurbs, but they then should linked to...
Last week I attended this year's meeting of the Informal Advisory Committee of the Biosafety Clearing House (BCH).
The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety regulates the international trade with living GMOs, and one of it's key components is its clearing house. The BCH collects all the data countries have about GMOs from data about the individual GMOs, its transgenic constructs and risk assessments to national laws and decisions taken about import and cultivation. Given such diverse information, and the need to cross-reference a lot between records, the site still manages to look quite calm and accessible.
But what really made my day was the advanced search. Users can add additional type of records using "and...
In addition to localisation, I'm also adding some last bits to the site - "de puntjes op het i"
Twitter: The site uses the twitter module to import tweets. So all it needs is adding a the existing twitter account to a user, or better just making a new user 'twitter'. The latest tweets will be displayed in a block in the left sidebar, so I'm making a block and page for all tweets in views. I encountered two problems: First, quite counter-intuatively, the twitter module version 6.x-3 requires the 6.x-2 version of the oath module. Admittedly, it says in the description, but since I don't have access to the modules directory, it requires somebody else to do the changes. The second problem seems to be a bug: as site admin I was trying to add twitter accounts to other users, but while I was adding them from the specific users page ( > edit > twitter accounts), the account got added to my own account. I had to...
I'm working on the configuration of a bi-lingual site so that the partners in Tanzania can add Kiswahili translations. Since I was asked to explain afterwards what I've done, I'll just blog here while I go along.
The site is bi-lingual (English and Kiswahili), and content that is not translated is not supposed to be shown on the other language version. There are polls on the site which don't need to be aggregated. But all the interface and text like the footer do need to be bi-lingual.
On localize.drupal.org there is a group for Swahili (which according to Wikipedia is the same as Kiswahili...) but no contributions have been made at all there. If any translations done for this site would be submitted there, then that would be an added bonus. http://localize.drupal.org/translate/languages/sw
Among the modules installed is are also modules for...
It's time that this website reflects the fact that over the last years I've not only worked on GMOs and related issues (mainly GM trees and the CBD) but that I also more and more build websites for a number of organisations in this field.
Besides making changing the navigation and content of ifrik.org, this is a good opportunity to try out domain access control with content about website building on web.ifrik.org and everything about GMOs and agriculture at gm.ifrik.org
