Tip

I recently upgraded CiviCRM for one of our clienst from 2.1.4 to 3.0.4 and learned a few tips that I'll share.  In most cases you just need to be sure to follow the instructions that CiviCRM provides and make all the intermediate upgrades along the way.  But In doing so, I ran into some frustrating problems, but through perseverence, ingenuity, and most important;y awesome support from Fen, Alex and Galaxy, I got around the problems and got the site upgraded.

Outside of CivicActions I host some sites for friends and family on Dreamhost.  I've always had a decent experience with DH for the kinds of sites I am talking about, especially for the price.  Today I decided to get Drush installed. The first thing I did was ask on the drupal-seattle IRC channel if anyone had done it.  Thinkling (Maarten) directed me to this post on Drupal.org.

Recently a client asked if there was a way to add some custom HTML to a Facebook "Page".  I did a little research and found the My Info application and some handy instructions for adding it to your page, rather than your profile.

If you are a developer, blogger or a client who manages or participated on a technical project, screenshot-taking tools are a very useful way conveying your thoughts and ideas to others on your team. Screenshots save you from lengthy explanation emails and keep your team on same page while discussing an idea. This blog post is about different screen capturing tools available out there and which to use and why.

1. Skitch(mac only):

Skitch is more than just an image capturing tool. It is very quick, simple and efficient. You can edit your images - crop them, draw figures on them, write notes on them and share directly via uploading to skitch, flickr, ftp with many other options. This all is mere drag and drop with nothing complex to learn. Download Skitch. Images in this blog are captured using skitch only.

Shortcut keys with skitch:

• Command-Shift-5 – Crosshairs Snap
• Command-Shift-6 – Fullscreen Snap
• Command-Shift-7 – Frame Snap

There is also a great short video on the Skitch website that gives you a quick overview of how it works and what it can do.

We've created many sites with user profiles, and every site seems to have a few differences, but there are certain best practices which I would like to share.

Module Requirements

This article concerns user profiles in Drupal 6, and recommends that you have the following modules installed:

• CCK
• Content Profile
• Auto Node Title
• Filefield (optional)
• Imagefield (optional)
• Link (optional)

In Developing A Personal Email Management Strategy I discussed the sorting, filtering and processing of the seemingly endless flow of email I receive. Recently, I took the plunge and converted my non work email to IMAP in preparation for converting work email to the same. The goal is to be able to see important direct email on my iPhone without seeing all the list traffic, commercial communications and other solicited bulk email

First, Some History

Google Aps For Your Domain) for different types email traffic, travel@ for example for when i signed up for travel related services and lists, buy@ for commercial email and receipts after making purchases. This made sorting and filtering the incoming email really easy, just set up a message filter in Thunderbird based on the To: address. But all of these email addresses were just aliases delivering the mail to my primary account. Thus when checking email on the iPhone, sifting through all the solicited bulk email for the personal messages was like finding a needle in a hay stack.

Drupal's tagging vocabularies are really useful when webmasters and admins can not anticipate what categories or terms content authors and editors are going to need. The pitfall however, is that it is too easy for content editors to make a mess of the vocabulary by creating duplicate terms that are spelled wrong, similar to or synonymous of existing terms. And a "dirty" vocabulary such as this can be rather difficult to clean up and can be a real problem if content needs to be structured. The alternative is to create a fixed vocabulary which can only have terms added through the taxonomy admin UI. This avoids building a messy vocabulary, but does away all of the advantages of a folksonomy, or tags vocabulary. I recently learned a technique that offers most of the best parts of both worlds. Here's the recipe;

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.

To rebuild the menu in Drupal 6 you have to go to admin/build/modules. In drupal 5 the menu is cached in the cache_menu table, so it is easy to invoke a menu-rebuild by emptying the table with a simple mysql command like TRUNCATE cache_menu;. (I have a handy script that empties all tables starting with cache_).