development guide

Hey RVA Drupalers! I thought you all may find this useful. If you struggle with contextual filters combined with Views to generate related content by way of taxonomy terms, this guide is for you!

There's a video guide for the Drupal View & contextual filters for the high level stuff and a text post for the in-depth guide on related content with terms.

UI-Patterns.com is a great resource for information architects, UX designers, UI specialists, but most of all, for developers!

How can something like this be made more useful and usable by developers of both drupal core and contrib? I would like to see usability start at drupal's roots, rather than being left for an after-thought. (This too-often results in interfaces that are harder to fix than they would have been to get right the first time).

Since several people expressed interest at our first meeting expressed interest in the Content Construction Kit (CCK), which is an add-on for 4.7 and built-in to 5.x, I wanted to highlight this article just posted at Lullabot:

What is the Content Construction Kit? A View from the Database (March 7)

Feel free to use this space to ask questions about CCK, talk about features, provide examples, or talk about the article.

Hey all, just thought I'd throw my hat in the ring so Laura doesn't feel too lonely up there on the front page.. ;)

What I would love to see come out of this group is some "best practices" documents for people building community sites. Especially sites geared towards online communities where the end user has special needs.

By special needs, I am not only referring to accessability issues, (although that is certainly one concern) I also mean things like ;

• How do you build sites for youth that give them adequate privacy, security and priveleges(spelling?) so they can feel like they own the space, while keeping parents satisfied that their children are safe from online harrassment and stalking?

• How do you provide a granulated set of user roles for a semi-closed group of low-level technophobes without overcomplicating the means to contribute to the site? [not like I've ever had to deal with that or anything ;)]

• How do you explain copyright and copyleft to inexperienced webpublishers and transmit the importance of the issue adequately? Is it even necesary? What are we leaving out if we don't talk about copyright before giving a community a site they can publish to?

• How does a web developer/social marketer do knowledge transmission for community-building online to end-users/ site editors who mostly use analogue technologies to communicate with their constituents.

• When is a community website the solution and when is it overkill? How do you help your client develop a project/product that really fits their needs.