Drupal With the Pick of Addons and Themes.

I have been using the opensource Content Management System, Drupal, for a while now. It is one of the more versatile and feature laid en CMS that I know of. But the try functionality comes from the plugins or modules.

Heavily expanding on Keith Bond’s 5 must have Drupal Modules from a while ago I have pieced together a package of some of the best modules and themes.

Download here ~ 2.5Mb

Additional Modules include:

 Adsense / Adsense Injector, Nodewords, service links and feedback as mentioned in Keith’s post.

Ad - Advertising system

The Image systems that allow images to be uploaded and included in a post

Event - Calendaring API, calendar display and export

Mass Contact - Enables site administrator or privileged users to send mass e-mails to registered users.

FlashVideo - this is beta - but allows uploading of video and conversion to Flash - requires some special server configuration

Pathauto - Automatically generates User friendly / SE friendly readable URLS.

I have also included a dozen extra themes / templates.

More than enough to get you started producing well managed content driven website.

July 9th, 2007 Posted by admin | Web2.0, webdesign, xhtml, php | 2 comments

Affiliate Toolbox Part 2 - Web Design and Doing it right.

CSS Layout Generators

http://www.ibdjohn.com/csstemplate/ - OK but seems to be a little buggy in producing the CSS code

http://www.csscreator.com/version2/pagelayout.php This is the best little free utility to produce a basic CSS template that I have found online. This is nice and easy to use - with a really sweet colour slide to select colours. The CSS produced is spot on aswell.

As with all of these things you are left with a skeleton with which there will be alot of work in notepad / dreamweaver etc to get the site looking as you want. Once the template is finished the next step is to check that the site is working as it should.

The most obvious way to do this is check in a browser, in fact as many browsers as yo can find.

Then validate the code:

Start point is http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

The way the web is going valid css xhtml is more and more important. I am one person who still uses tables, but I am slowly weening myself into the world of DIVs, SPANs and CSS

Next thing is to validate the site.

I have found that http://sitescore.silktide.com/ is fantastic for this. Not only does it validate your code, it checks for incomming links, checks your title tags and gives you a full report and score out of ten for your site. There are 130 tests performed on the site!

Results are cached for 30 days - so you cannot check, change, check every few hours when tweeking a site. You can register for an account - as a registered user you can generate reports at smaller time intervals,

This site is very strict so FOLLOW it’s advice.

January 31st, 2007 Posted by scifind | SEO, tools, Web2.0, webdesign, css, valid html, xhtml | no comments