Loosing Site

It’s always nice to pop the hood and take a look at what drives a favorite web application. In the latest issue of Adobe Edge Julia Campagna reveals some of the technical wizardry behind Sproutbuilder, the free Flash authoring, viral marketing web application.

Adobe Edge: June 2008 via kwout

The Sproutbuilder web application makes it easy to build and distribute interactive Flash widgets like this:

Julia describes the some of the key architecuural components of the application as:

• Flex 3 – to create the rich client interface.
• Drupal, PHP and Apache on the server side.
• Amazon S3 for content delivery.

To get a feel for the powerful simplicity of the application take a look at this demonstration featuring the new Ribbit, Seismic Video, Google Forms and Twitter integration.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: SproutBuilder, Flex, Drupal, Flash, PHP

RoopleTheme have released Tapestry, a very flexible theme for the Drupal content management system. The tableless design validates against XHTML and CSS specifications and also performs well in Accessibility Valet tests. When properly configured Tapestry will not only give sites good browser compatibility, but can also comply with Section 508 web accessibility guidelines.

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.

Today marks a milestone for the Drupal content management system as version 6 is released.

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.