UPDATE: Due to recent changes to our website the code snippet (the valuable part of this blog post) got accidentally lost. If you read this already, please come back to see the sample code. Thanks! Often you want to add CSS files, scripts, feed icons or even set Drupal's page title from the theme layer. The most obvious place to call Drupal's functions for these tasks is probably in a page preprocess function.

My attempt to upgrade my unlocked and jail-broken first-generation iPhone were badly timed with Apple's release of version 2.0.2 firmware about 24 hours beforehand. This meant I initially couldn't use quickpwn because I couldn't restore the 2.0.1 firmware. Nevertheless quickpwn (windows only) worked once out of 3 attempts on 2.0.2, but wouldn't unlock the phone for my vodafone-NZ prepay SIM card. It stopped everytime after operation 0, and once restarted at operation 5 or so after I disconnected and reconnected the phone.

NZ government is negotiating a trade act that will impact your civil liberties. And they are doing it behind our backs — in secret! "ACTA is a controversial international treaty that impacts digital rights and is being negotiated in secret meetings. ACTA is proposed as a plurilateral trade agreement for establishing international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement. It is being negotiated between the US, Canada, Japan, the European Union, South Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand.

NZ government is about to pass a new Patents Act.  In the 8-year review, they seemingly forgot to consider the impacts of patents on computer software!  Submissions on the bill are being accepted till 2 July, so we need to move fast.  Make a submission now!  read more

Chris Messina's (aka Factory Joe) review of drupal 6 is a big contribution to drupal usability. I have highlighted about 50 actionable issues that have been raised and/or discussed through this review. Most of them are trivial changes for drupal 6, but are key usability improvements. Many are simply improving the help text. Some are larger tasks that require more work and changes and should probably wait for drupal 7.

For a long time I have wondered how the teams that design car stereos can fail so miserably at making car stereos easy to use. The function of a car stereo is not complicated, and there are few tasks that need to be considered in the design of a car stereo interface. Approximately in order of importance these tasks are; lower the volume kill the sound raise the volume select the source (e.

The Usability Testing Suite is in Beta! Google Summer of Code student Jimmy "boombatower" Berry has been coding hard and fast all this great usability testing tool. The Usability Testing Suite is intended to be used for remote 'guerilla' usability testing. Currently it allows a usability test designer/engineer to create a study with a bunch of tasks, and invite participants to attempt the task, whilst remotely capturing data about the pages / urls the participant visited, the forms they submitted, what data was entered, and allows the participant to log typed live feedback as they go.

It is generally recognized that CMSes are about separating the content from it's appearance and the logic that manipulates the content. In Drupal, it is good practice to maintain code in files which can be version-controlled (with subversion for example), and keep just the dynamic content and data in the database. In other words, executable code should not go in the database. read more

One of the problems almost every Drupal project or team comes across shortly after adding their Drupal site to a version control system such as Subversion, is whether to version-control the settings.php file or not. read more

Vertical tabs are finally in Drupal core! Screenshot of vertical tabs on an 'Article Edit' page in Drupal 7. A week ago Angie "webchick" Byron committed a large patch from #323112 Vertical Tabs to Drupal 7 core. This change is quite possibly the most significant usability enhancement to Drupal 7 to date. Two of the three formal usability tests did usability testing with vertical tabs and reported positively. Screenshot of a 'Story Edit' page in Drupal 6, before vertical tabs.