Advantage Labs The Art & Science of Online Progress

A lot of Lab Hours regulars must have stayed indoors to avoid the heat this week.  It was a smaller crowd this time around, and I got to catch up with more people than usual.  It was nice!  After a brief diversion on the history of locally-owned bookstores (Barry has the inside scoop!), we set our sights on:

I must admit I'm pretty excited about our upcoming Drupal for Non-profits class.  Our primary mission has always been to help people get the resources they need to get a lot done.  For that reason, most of our development work has been focused on mail, contact management, donation, and tracking tools to help people get their maximum benefit from their online resources.  The cool thing about open source is, you can give it away and still have it for yourself, so after a customer helps to fund module or a feature, it's available for everyone.

Another jam-packed week at Lab Hours as the group grows!

• Don is new to Lab Hours, and has just had his inherited Drupal 4.6 site upgraded to Drupal 5. He's learning the ropes of our install profile, and getting up to speed on all things Drupal 5!. He created a reviews content type for his plays and events, and learned how to set up users to work with their own profiles. He also learned about "50 other things".
• Steve is working an image gallery.
  

Almost everyone has expressed interest in sending HTML formatted email newsletters.  Almost everyone is skittish about how such emails will look in various email clients-- for good reason.  At past Lab Hours sessions I've alluded to an online guide to CSS compatibility within various email clients, both desktop and online.  The good news is I'm finally posting this guide.  The better news is that it has been updated recently (June 11, 2008).  The not so good news is that there is little change from a year ago in terms of what is compatible and what is not. 

We had a tough time shaking out the sillies today.  Lab hours opened with dialects, gopher tails, and a few childishly derisive comments about taxonomy.  Kay even demoed her portable fan!

On my way to Drupal.org to check on some updates to modules, I ran into the latest report on Drupal usability. The report, in video and PDF forms, is the result of some testing done at the University of Baltimore. It seems to confirm and complement the usability study done here at the University of Minnesota.

Check out http://drupal.org/usability-test-university-baltimore-community-solution... for the full story.

A jam-packed week once again.  There were many exclamations of "Yessss!", so I hope it was also productive.  It's fun to watch people work as the lightbulb pops on.  In fact, there were so many lightbulbs, we blew a fuse!

It's certainly efficient when entering text into your Drupal site to cut-n-paste from existing sources. Why retype, right? I'm with ya. But be careful when you are pasting already formatted rich text (like from a MS Word document) into your node's body if you have a rich text editor (e.g. TinyMCE) and allow HTML in your Input Format options.

More fun in the sunny meeting room! Most of the members wanted to learn more about newsletter handling, so Lab Hours started out with Allie going through the modules and steps needed towards implementing a mail solution.