CivicActions

Many folk don't know that the ACLU has a TV series called "The Freedom Files". Season 2 can be seen on PBS stations throughout the country. Episodes can also be viewed online at aclu.tv which we re-launched for the new season recently.

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).

Usability testing (hereafter "UT") is getting a lot of attention in Drupal -- and rightly so IMHO. If we aim to have "100%" test coverage on Drupal's code and functionality for Drupal 7, it stands to reason we also need test "coverage" on Drupal's usability. If not, it's far too easy for bad interfaces to be developed that pass all the functional and unit tests, but fail miserably in the real world!

Jimmy Berry (aka boombatower) of GHOP fame plans to take the initial (but giant) steps in this direction in the Google Summer of code 2008.

Have you ever wondered what a "themer" actually does? How are they different to a designer and a developer? In it's simplest sense a themere takes a flat static image, the design, provided by the designer, and a mostly-functional but ugly site, provided by a developer, and makes the ugly site look pretty like the designer wants it.

This timelapse by Matthew Buchanan of the theming of nzmusicmonth.co.nz sums up that process:

Wonder know more. In 2.5 minutes you'll know:

I just got this email from Mozilla about the soon release of Firefox 3 release candidate, asking addon developers to get their extensions updated and released for FF3 RCs. If you have an extension released on addons.mozilla.org you would have received this email too. I have two variations of FF2's default Mac theme that enable favicons in the bookmarks toolbar: Mac Favicon and Mac Favicon XL.

One of my 3 DrupalCon Session Proposals got accepted and was scheduled last week: Scalable Theming: Theming for 100s of node types, CCK fields, and views.

Advanced theming tips, tricks and techniques for very large complex websites with many node types, CCK fields and views. This session is targeted at themers & developers wishing to learn how to manage complex theming requirements in a cost-saving, maintainable and scalable way.

It seems there is a clean standards-solution that doesn't succumb to the X-UA-Compatible mess Microsoft has dumped on us, yet let's you author html in standards mode in IE8:

"John Resig points out something that I think a lot of the mainstream chatter around IE8 has missed - if you send it a currently unused DOCTYPE (like HTML 5,) it will not cower in IE7 mode.

"John examines this feature of IE8 in this post: http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/ .

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.

'They Shoot Browsers' by Jeremy Keith was better written in my opinion and has more convincing arguments, including this gem;

"The proposed default behavior for version targeting in Internet Explorer solves the problem of “breaking the web” in much the same way that decapitation solves the problem of headaches."

I'm still not 100% decided, but I'm pretty heavily swaying to the side against version targeting. Having said that, I can understand how and why Microsoft, even with mostly good intentions, came to this solution. I can see and appreciate the short term benefits, however I don't believe that Microsoft can pull this off in the long term. As web developers, we have no reason to believe that Microsoft is capable or even intends to follow through with it's promises

Views 2 Alpha 2 has been released (and it kicks ass), but views is still many patches away from a stable fully-featured release. This is blocking many drupal 5 sites from upgrading to drupal 6. Earl Miles has laid the groundwork and is now calling on the community to help get views 2 out the door.

Download or CVS-checkout views 2, install it, try to replicate your favorite view and see what features are missing or broken -- there are plenty.