nutshell.nu

A few days ago I had a discussion with a friend that is on the market for a new website for his company. His main experience with websites are surfing the net and using web applications such as Gmail. When the discussion went into how much work would be involved and long it would take to build it, he couldn't really get around that it would take as long as I told him. I had to come up with an analogy to make him understand what is going on behind the pages he is looking at when browsing.

After a bit of thinking I said:

This is the first post of three about when Drupal 7 will be ready to be deployed on production (live) websites. The other two parts will be posted during the next few days. See end of post for index.

Are you like me and usually end up with loads and loads of tabs in your browser?

Then TabCandy for the Mozilla Firefox browser is going to come to our rescue. Just watch the video below where Aza Raskin gives you an introduction to just how amazing it will get.

I completely agree. In many aspects, such as those Jen Lampton is pointing out in the slideshow below, WordPress simply is better than Drupal. Same goes with Joomla as well.

Jen starts by comparing numbers, showing that WordPress has more installations, more modules, more themes and a much larger community. Then she goes on with telling you why its better, what Drupals problems are and rounds off with what the Drupal community needs to focus on.

In my First Impressions of Drupal 7 alpha 6 post, two weeks ago, I wrote that I was planning to update Nutshell to the new alpha. Unfortunately I haven't done that yet. This is mainly due to that I am involved in several large website projects and simple haven't had the time for it.

I routinly go through the Drupal logs here on Nutshell, mainly checking for any potential error messages for Drupal 7. Today when I had a look I noticed a big spike in the Mollom statistics. Yesterday there where 30 atempts to comment spam. Naturally I had to look further into it since I am just running small blog and that single spike doubled the total number of spam atempts since I enabled the Mollom module a month and a half ago.

The Drupal community is at the moment mainly focused on fixing the beta blockers for Drupal 7. The list on the Drupal core improvements page currently only list this ONE issue needed to be fixed for the upgrade path. It also lists THREE security issues. When those four issues have turned green the first Drupal 7 Beta will be released. We are very close now.

Drupal is doing a fantastic job with separating content, structure and design for websites. However, when it comes to developing a Drupal website, especially adding new features to an existing website, you will undoubtable run into issues that will require a lot of extra work.

Normal practice is to have a development server where you develop new features. Then you make a test implementation on a staging server. Finally, when everything have been thoroughly tested, you implement it on the production server.

One thing that fuels the power of Drupal is all the small focused modules that exists. These modules are absolutely lovely to work with. Not only do they almost always solve the task they are developed for perfectly, but also because they add very little, if any, complexity to your projects.

This time I have taken a look at contributed modules that improves your control over input and presentation of content. Many of these modules are also great for better SEO of your website.

There are some people in the world that has that rare skill of really being able to reach out and get you to simply understand that there are a bigger picture you need to pay attention to. Hans Rosling is such a guy. The way he takes boring statistics and turns it into something that makes you pay attention is amazing.

He gives you a view or how the world is transforming in a way you never going to get by just watching you normal newscast.