Conservation Strategy Fund (CSF) recently launched their new Drupal website and the HydroCalculator Tool, both by CivicActions.  CSF's mission is to teach environmental organizations around the world to use economics and strategic analysis to conserve nature.  Their new website empowers them to do this with multi-lingual features, news streams and feeds, listings that can be filtered by continent, region, country or theme, tight integration with Salesforce.com for donations and newsletter subscribers and a range of detail about the training courses on offer, projects, and publications.

One of the findings of the Drupal usability testing at UMN in February was that users like, use and like to use contextual help. Many of the participants explicitly said that they would have liked more of it during their evaluations and in debriefing. As a developer it is difficult to anticipate where contextual help is appropriate, needed or perhaps why it's even necessary. While usability testing is possibly the only way to effectively determine exactly where contextual help is needed and useful and where it's not, I think this example might help developers understand when where and why contextual help is likely to be helpful.

A short, quick and easy tip for views theming and customization. To customize the text or the destination path/url of a 'view more' link in Views. Add this to template.php in your phptemplate theme and add cases. <?php/** * Override theme_views_more() to set custom link texts and destinations. * @param $path String *   The destination of the more link. */function _phptemplate_views_more($path) {  $text = 'more';  switch ($path) {    case 'foo/bar':      $text = 'doh';      break;  }  return "

Classic!

My favourite! :) The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.

This article about SilverStripe "giving away their product" completely misses the point of open source. I think that like most of the general public here in NZ (perhaps worldwide?), the author understands that "open source is free" (like free beer), but misses the point that SilverStripe's software, and open source in general, is not free because it costs nothing, but because the code that is written to create the software, is open for anyone to use, look at, modify, enhance, learn from, redistribute, sell, print out and use as toilet paper, or glorify in a nice picture frame above their mantlepiece.

Microsoft announced in January that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) would be standards-compliant, but only if you included a special meta tag or http header indicating that the page should be rendered in standards compliance mode. The uproar from the standards community led Microsoft to change the default behavior of IE8. Now IE8 will render all pages in standards mode by default, unless you specify otherwise with the X-UA-Compatible meta tag or http header.

"Does Open Source Have Commercial Viability?" is a response to my review of Xero.com by Stuart Bale, Product Manager at MYOB. Today he left a comment to let me know about it. This isn't my reply -- I don't think I can be bothered. But I know there are a lot of people that disagree and care enough to reply.

UPDATE: Can anyone tell me why this page gets so many hits? Good ol' 'Douglas Smith' of Prime Bank (at least the bank is real) wants to give me half of the £8.5 million pound sterling he's trying to steal from the bank: I am an auditor for PRIME BANK London, during my last auditing I realized an unclaimed Bank Draft of 8,528,000GBP (Eight Million Five Hundred and Twenty Eight Thousand GBP).