Web Design and Development. Graphic Design and Retouching.

Jon Hicks writes about the new Mac-friendly interfaces for Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3. In the article he mentions how the Opera icon desperately needs an update and how he'd love to do it. I flippantly said to a friend the other day that I don't use Opera because I don't like its icon in my dock, but I really do find it distracting. Now, if anyone can make a cracking browser icon it's Mr Hicks, so please, Opera, for the sake of all us fickle designer types, ask him to do it!

Some fabulous designs gathered together by WebDesignerWall.

Brief but interesting interview with Dries Buytaert, about Drupal's history, plans for its future and Acquia's role.

Great article on A List Apart about handling complex layouts with dynamic content: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxabsolutepositioning
There don't seem to have been any exciting discoveries in CSS for a while, and I seem to have been distracted by PHP recently, so I'll enjoy messing around with this.

BarCamp Manchester was fantastic and I can't wait for the next one.

Huge thanks to all involved in organising and sponsoring the event: believe me, it was worth all the trouble and expense. The venue was great, the food was great, the after-party was great. Did I say it was great? Hats off to the Idiot-in-Chief: putting something as good as this together can't be easy.

So, what happened on the day? Loads of interesting people, talks, presentations and conversations, and to top it all free food *and* free drink! When NorthPack get a chance, they'll be posting videos of the talks, so all those who weren't there can get a taste of what they missed. But only a taste: I don't think video can capture the real buzz and energy of people happy to be there sharing and discussing what they know.

Can't wait for the next one.

Quick reminder: Drupal NWUK user group is meeting on Wednesday at the MDDA. Whether you know Drupal inside-out or would just like to know what it's all about, come along (if you're going to Leeds GeekUp you'll just have to be in two places at once: we'll try to avoid clashes in future).

Seeing that Drupal 6 is out I think we should have a quick gallop through all the new features, but everyone's more than welcome to jump up and say whatever they want to say (and if it's about Drupal, even better!). So any projects, topics or questions, bring 'em along.

And if there's time maybe we'll have a look at the new Views alpha for fun :P (in fact, if you've already tried it out, come along and talk about your experiences).

It's on the shelves! http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0
Chris and I will run through the new features at the Drupal user group next week.

Chris and I have sorted the time and place for our Drupal training course in Manchester: Wednesday 9th April at the MDDA.

Pop to the menusandblocks website for more info, or give one of us a call if you've got any questions!

This course is an introduction to Drupal, but we'll be covering a lot of ground, from installing and administering a Drupal site to developing modules. Even experienced PHP developers will find this useful, as we'll be showing you the Drupal way of doing things.

For anyone who's already up to speed on what Drupal has to offer we're planning future courses that will look at theming and module development in even more detail.

The menu system in Drupal 6 has been completely rewritten, but most of the changes are under the hood.

There are a couple of usability tweaks for administrators: each menu now has its own admin page (an extra click instead of scrolling a potentially very long page: not sure which I prefer), menus can arranged by drag-and-drop (phew, no more juggling weights) and when you create a new menu item Drupal checks to see if the path you've entered is valid. If not, you'll get an error message: "The path 'example' is either invalid or you do not have access to it."

Which is great. Except you might not want it to be valid if you are quickly prototyping a site and just need some dummy menu items. Or if you perhaps want to link to something non-Drupal on your server, in which case you'll have to use the full URL, e.g. http://example.com/test/test.html. I'll have to see whether this proves to be a pain or not and, if so, work out how to switch the validation off.

Download it. Find bugs. Let them know.
As the release notes point out, Views 2 is still a couple of weeks off at least, but that doesn't mean we can't have fun trying out all the other goodies in 6.

Details here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/419074/
Groups page here: http://groups.drupal.org/north-west-uk

I'm planning to do a talk on Drupal 6 theming, to have a look at what's new, what's cool and why themes can be made of CSS and CSS alone. I wasn't planning on being quite so busy, but I should be able to put something together before then... (he hopes!)

See you there!

Chris and I are putting together a Drupal training course and we're really excited about it.
We've been working really hard: we've already sorted an identity (menusandblocks) and a website and now we're trying to let everyone who needs to know about it know about it.

So, if you or anyone you know up here in the North West would love to dive into Drupal but don't know where to start, we've got the course for you. Whether you think in PHP or prefer to point and click we'll get you doing things the Drupal way. It's going to be held at the end of March (date to be confirmed) in Manchester and as it will be quite hands-on places will be limited, so sign up now!

I'm really glad we're doing this: not only does it mean more Drupal for me, but I also get to work with a good friend who's as fanatical about Drupal as I am. Wahey!

Internet Explorer 6 is still out there and we still have to deal with it. Yucky, I know, but wouldn't life be dull if it was all too easy?

If your theme is using a non-white background, here's a quick fix to display the syndication icon in all its rounded-corner loveliness:

a.feed-icon img {
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=0);
}
a.feed-icon {
display: inline-block;
width: 16px;
height: 16px;
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='/misc/feed.png');
}

Just pop this in your IE6 style-sheet. If you haven't set one up, this is what I do: create a folder/directory in my custom theme called ie and put any IE stylesheets in there.

For example, in this site's theme I have just one, is_ie6.css.

Then I put this in the <head> section of my page.tpl.php:

<!--[if IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php print $base_path . $directory ?>/ie/is_ie6.css" type="text/css" media="screen" charset="utf-8" />
<![endif]-->

It's BarCamp Manchester right at the beginning of March (which doesn't actually seem all that far away) and I'll be going. This will be my first BarCamp but as I'm sure most of the GeekUp crowd will be there, there'll be a lot of familiar faces.

Many thanks to Paul Robinson who got this off the ground.
I'm teaming up with Chris Maiden to give a talk on Drupal, probably on all the goodness to be found in Drupal 6.

I've posted the notes from my Drupal 5 theming talk on drupal.org.uk: http://www.drupal.org.uk/node/474 (at the Drupal NW UK User Group meeting in December 2007).

I'm hoping to put together a talk on Drupal 6 theming for the February meetup. See you there!