Version 6 of Drupal, the famous CMS, is released and ready for download. Many new and improved features are introduced, above all the new OpenID integration built-in. More about the new version can be found here.
I’m currently using Drupal 5.7 for student’s computer engineering society’s new web site at my university. I’m going to upgrade to the new version, but I think after few weeks because I got no time to do many changes in the web site. I’ll announce the web site URL soon.
DotNetBoom and ProRangers are going to hold a Community Open Day for developers and IT professionals in February 16th, 2008 in Kuwait. It seems that there will be lots of activities as the schedule shows, but it will be limited to Microsoft products and solutions.
This tour, is packed with live demonstrations and technical content on the upcoming and much anticipated solutions from Kuwait MVPs.
Get a sneak peek into technologies that include Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, .Net, Silverlight, Virtualization and more. You will also be among the first to see us unveil the new Unified Communications technologies from MVPs – a solution that will revolutionize the way people communicate and collaborate in the workplace.
If you’re an IT Professional or a Developer looking to gain insight and an edge over others, then you’ve got no excuse to miss out on this event! You may even walk away as the lucky winner of a new XBox 360 Arcade!!
Facebook has Developer Platform for some time now. Obviously, MySpace won’t stay behind and let Facebook take all the credit. To counter Facebook, MySpace has announced the release of its own Developer Platform. That’s not all, MySpace Developer Platform is supporting OpenSocial API, an API that was released by Google awhile ago and has been giggling in the web since then.
As the title says, Google has released a new Social Graph API that reads public data from different social web sites and links the relations between people in the web. Basically, Google crawls between people’s relations and connections which is available in public personal data anywhere in the web, then it will find FOAF and XFN relations or any other way of connections as Google says.
So if I’m your friend, and you’re a friend of person B, and person B adds person C in his blogroll then Google Graph API can tell me that I have a connection with person B and also C whether that connection was found directly or indirectly.
If you are a web developer you’ll know how important WYSIWYG text editors for anyone’s website. Usually based on JavaScript — call it Ajax or DHTML it doesn’t matter — you can have a text box in where the user enter whatever to submit and he/she can edit the font color and style, add pictures, and insert a link without writing the HTML code for it. In addition, you can see what you did in real time just like word processing program! This technique is ‘kinda’ old but these WYSIWYG is getting more complex lately. The UI of WYSIWYG is much better now than how it used to look like few years back.
Deziner Folio published a new article that shows a variety of WYSIWYG applications for Drupal CMS.
P.S: WYSIWYG = What You See Is What You Get.
UI = User Interface, lately is being called UX which refers to User Experience.
Okay this one of the best articles I have read during the year. The author starts off talking about the Quite Structure design concept. Then he goes off explaining and comparing the between CNN and USA Today website design. For web designers this is a most-read article as it gives more and deeper ideas to consider when designing a webpage such as layout and image with text positioning, logo complexity, white spaces… etc.
Bored from the div attribute of HTML? Well, I am bored myself and I have been writing HTML 4 since I was in Middle School. We have been using HTML 4 for almost a decade and it really needs an upgrade. In fact, W3C and WHATWG have been working on setting the specification of HTML 5. Major browsers companies and groups are taking part in setting some specifications of HTML 5, but I don’t think it will be done soon.
A List Apart has a really great article on HTML 5 preview which I really encourage all web developers to read it.
Adobe has announced the BlazeDS beta release on Adobe labs. Now you can connect data between your Flash application and any other applications whether it is made by PHP, Ruby…etc.
Now, developers can easily connect to back-end distributed data, as well as push data in real-time to Adobe® Flex™ and Adobe AIR™ applications, for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences.
Google announced the release of a new charting API that can be easily embedded within a webpage using the <IMG> HTML tag. You send the parameter for charting specification using HTTP request, and then Google will return the chart as a PNG images. Currently, Google provides these following charts:
• Line chart
• Scatter plot
• Bar chart
• Venn diagram
• Pie chart
To illisturate how easy it is to embed a chart to a webpage, here is an example taken from Google Chart faq:
<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?
chs=200x125
&chd=s:helloWorld
&cht=lc
&chxt=x,y
&chxl=0:|Mar|Apr|May|June|July|1:||50+Kb"
alt="Sample chart" />
The boundary of web applications is over and we are now pushing forward to the next killer applications era. More and more mash-ups applications are lighten up with new unpredictable features provided for free. Google is taking the upper hand to cast aside old convention of web design and use ready-on-the-shelf professional web applications.
