Tapestry | A Drupal Theme via kwout

Tapestry comes with 20 pre-built styles that can be used as is, or used to provide a starting point for a custom style sheet. It also comes with a very flexible set of layouts for 2, 3 and 4 column displays.

2.2. Using Tapestry Sidebars | Tapestry via kwout

Even greater flexibility is given by the Block Theme module that site administrators can use to apply a custom themes to any block on the site.

2.3. Using the Block Theme Module | Tapestry via kwout

While the template itself gives an easy mix and match approach to site design, it also acts as a solid starting point for additional CSS development, inspiration for which can be taken from some of RoopleTheme’s designs for dooce and 43 folders.

Services | RoopleTheme via kwout

(CLARIFICATION: The 43 folders theme was created by RoopleTheme based on a design by Chris Glass.) 

Tapestry is open source, released under the GNU General Public License it is compatible with Drupal 5 and 6.

Tactile CRM: Easy to use affordable CRM. Client and contact management, sales pipeline reporting and email management. via kwout

Before building Tactile CRM, Senokian spent time working with local companies to better fit the software design to the needs of a typical small business. Their approach is described in an evaluation of an implementation of Open Source in Health Care by OpenAdvantage.

NHS: National Institute for Mental Health in England — OpenAdvantage – Freedom, Choice, Control via kwout

Tactile is built on EGS, an award winning open source Enterprise Groupware System, built using PHP, Postgress, adodb, Smarty, Prototype, Scriptaculous and the Zend Framework.

EGS via kwout

With prices ranging from free (2 users) to 75GBP (200 users) per month Tactile’s hosted service provides a scalable low-cost  CRM solution. Where and whether Tactile finds a niche depends in part on their selection of features and interfaces, but also may be affected by location, support and cultural nuances expressed in the interface.

Facebook can ruin your life. And so can MySpace, Bebo… – News, Gadgets & Tech – Independent.co.uk via kwout

Whilst those who brag about engaging in criminal activities on social networks can legitimately expect to have the information they’ve shared come back to haunt them; should employers, recruiters and educators assume the same rights as the police or the security services?

The terms and conditions of social networks often restrict activity to personal use only.

“You understand that except for advertising programs offered by us on the Site (e.g., Facebook Flyers, Facebook Marketplace), the Service and the Site are available for your personal, non-commercial use only.”

Facebook | Terms of Use

Any employer using these networks to gather intelligence about an employee will be violating the terms of service by gathering personal data for commercial use.

Ownership of content is generally retained by the users of social networks.

“You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

Google Terms of Service (covering Orkut)

In many cases media displayed in social networks are stored on separate hosting services with their own conditions and requirements, and have the additional protection of declaring Creative Commons licenses that explicitly state the media are for non-commercial use.

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States via kwout

Employers who include text and images from social networks as evidence at an industrial tribunal will be violating the copyright of the very employees they are in conflict with.  Employees who are unlikely to waive the unnegotiated (and presumably quite high) fees for the prejudicial use of their intellectual property.

Even where an image is marked as available for commercial use issues of privacy and model consent remain.

On the Texas suit against Virgin and Creative Commons (Lessig Blog) via kwout

Employers and educators who violate privacy should be aware that they may also be violating contract law and copyright law. They should be unsurprised if they face legal consequences as a result, and should budget accordingly.

The question is, who will sue first:

• individuals protecting their privacy

• content owners protecting their intellectual property rights

• service providers protecting their users and their market share

• the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, because that’s what they do

Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation via kwout

Google Open Source Blog: Google Sponsors Wine Improvements via kwout

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API that uses 100% non-Microsoft code. Google contracted with Codeweavers, who provide professional Wine services, to develop over 200 patches that increase the stability of Photoshop when running in the environment. In addition, Google interns have contributed over a thousand patches.

Wine HQ via kwout

Long committed to Open Source use and development, Google’s support of Wine is a natural part of its Picassa for Linux project, coincidently making it makes it easier for Windows users to move to a Linux platform.

drupal.org | Community plumbing via kwout

Significant changes include:

• easier setup and installation
• drag and drop administration
• multilingual interfaces
• improved workflow handling through the use of actions and triggers
• OpenID support
• many improvements to theming
• enhanced security
• improved performance

Greg Knaddison has prepared a good screencast demonstrating some of the updated features.

New features in Drupal 6 (updated) | Mastering Drupal via kwout

For designers an important change is the introduction of .info files for themes, through which designers can define and control regions, features, stylesheets and scripts. This improves the separation between design and code, paving the way for smoother team interactions.

Work has already begun on drawing up a roadmap for version 7 with Dries Dries Buytaert’s definition of a killer containing:

• Better media handling
• Custom content types in core
• WYSIWYG editor
• Better performance
• Better tools to structure/organize content
• Basic Views like module
• Automatic upgrade functionality
• Improve node access system
• Better internal APIs
• Better external APIs (import/export, webservices)
• Usability improvements

Background information on this selection of features can be seen in Dries ‘ presentation on the state of Drupal at the Barcelona 2007 Drupalcon.

SourceForge.net: Project Statistics for Scribus via kwout

The program has now reached sufficient stability and capability for the National Library of Finland to recommend its use in brochure production.

The National Library of Finland Recommends Scribus :: Scribus :: Open Source Desktop Publishing for Linux, Mac OS® X and Windows® via kwout

The interface has the look and feel of a professional desktop publishing package. While lacking the exact feature set of Pagemaker or QuarkXpress it is capable, when properly used, of producing good results rapidly.

aqua2.jpg (JPEG Image, 1280×854 pixels) – Scaled (78%) via kwout

One of Scribus’ core aims is to produce high quality PDF files for commercial print production. The extensive list of success stories on the Scrbus Public Wiki shows that its achieving that aim.

Success stories – Scribus Public Wiki via kwout

Yahoo! Inc. – Press Release via kwout

This makes signing up for services and communities that much easier, simply a login, no need to bother with double opt in emails or miss-typed (unreadable) Captchas.

But what effect will this have?

Remove barriers and actions become more likely.

Facebook applications illustrate this wonderfully. Sign-up is so easy that profiles have become immensely crowded. So crowded, in fact, that Facebook have released a cleaning tool to tidy things up.

Facebook Developers News via kwout

Active Facebook use is dominated by a small core of applications with the majority having less than 2% of their users active on any day.

Good News, Bad News about Facebook Application Market: Long Tail Rules via kwout

Many users, few of whom are active. The same pattern might well be seen throughout the web as OpenID removes the effort needed to participate. We could see more ad-hoc use as people log in, use once, and vanish for months or perhaps for ever.

Potential issues include:

• how to structure communities and directories when the majority of members are in the very long tail
• what expectations users have about data storage without participation
• where and whether an application needs to store user profile data at all

With a long tails of users storage becomes more of an issue, particularly when they expect to bring their data with them.

Drop.io already has an interface for expiring data.

Drop.io: Simple Private Exchange via kwout

Smaller sites and communities running on shared hosts with OpenId enabled Drupal or Joomla installations could well feel an effect with abandoned member profiles gathering dust and clogging interfaces.

SIMILE | Timeline via kwout

Viewing the same information in linked time bands at different scales gives an interesting feel to navigating a chronology. Minutes and days can be scrolled with equal ease, balancing swift navigation with exact control.

Timeline runs wholly in the browser with no software installation required on either browser or server. It gets it’s data from XML or JSON sources, which means that it can be integrated into almost any web framework, adding another visualization option for extending existing reporting systems and data repository interfaces.

An example of an effective integration of third party data is Jörn Clausen’s USGS Live Earthquake Mashup which uses a combination of Timeline and Google Maps API to present information from the United States Geological Survey’s RSS feed.

USGS Live Earthquake Mashup via kwout

Timeline has also been adopted for use in commercial applications. One example is Salesforce Labs’ Campaign Timeline Calendar which displays an overview of sales campaigns and their durations.

Salesforce Labs Campaign Timeline Calendar via kwout

Potential business application include:

• marketing presentations of company or product histories
• conference schedules
• communicating project plans, achievements or activities
• documenting changing conditions for P.E.S.T. or competitor analysis

Timeline provides an engaging and innovative way to navigate chronologies and will become a part of many business and educational applications.

Technorati Profile

SourceForge.net: Screenshots via kwout

Rapla treats everything as a resource that can be attached to an event.

SourceForge.net: Screenshots via kwout

This simple model and easy definition of resource types makes it straightforward to set up Rapla for a variety of scenarios including:

Education | Allocating a lecturer teaching a module to a room containing equipment supported by a technician.

Conference Management | Assigning delegates to sessions in which speakers make presentations requiring equipment and support.

Rowing | Reserving a shell, blades and cox box for a crew, a coxswain and a coach.

Theatre | Managing rehearsal and performance spaces, actors, directors, crew, suppliers, builders and marketers for productions.

Rapla’s responsive interface makes it easy to detect and avoid resource conflicts and manage complex patterns of repeating events. Its flexible architecture makes it easy to deploy as:

• a standalone application
• a piece of groupware with a shared database
• a java servlet web application

This open source software was originally developed as part of a practical course in the Department of Computer Science III at the University of Bonn, Germany. It is now a sourceforge project.

Today Wikia launched the alpha version of its search engine. With a combination of technologies from the Wikimedia Foundation and the Apache Foundation (Lucene, Nutch), Wikia has some surprising features. When you conduct a search, in addition to the expected list of websites you get:

• a collaboratively edited “Mini Article” with information about your search topic
• a list of users whose profiles match your search terms

Wikia effectively combines three established web technologies:

• search
• wikis
• social networking

with each topic becoming an ad-hoc social network.

This is an alpha release, and the gaps in the feature set are clearly visible.

• no advanced search
• missing documentation
• a decorative, but unimplemented ratings function

This mix of technologies brings up some interesting questions. Will users participate? How effectively will the community deal with spammers? Where will the balance be reached between findability and privacy? Will the “People” results be dominated by domain experts, subject enthusiasts or spammers?

Wikia Search is innovative, with potential for business and personal networking. Its success will depend on the strengths of the communities it engages.