Du Vien Trang is a Freelance Web Designer / Developer based in Scotland. This is his portfolio, blog and his digital playground.

I was contacted by a web agency over the weekend to help add a 'search by location' feature to one of the client's website (CLS Group). The function of it was to show the location and area where their homes were located and provide information about the homes. This was simply achieve using CCK and views modules, and the cool hierarchical select module. hierarchical select uses Jquery for a sliding effect to show multiple select group. You can see a working example at clsgroup website. The site runs on Drupal 5.7

This is a new minor release - 1pixelout player version 1.5.2

It is only for Joomla 1.5.x (may work with J!1.0.x legacy mode activated though not tested)  read more »

It's been 3 days now that i've been using Firefox 3 on my Macbook Pro and i must say, it's certainly a big improvement. It's much faster than previous version and everything seems so much more responsive. What i really like is how the default theme really blends into your system making it less alienated.  read more »

Generally if a website can be reached by both www. or without in the domain name, it really doesn't matter much as this article will tell you. However, some SEO guru will argue that search engine will treat this as two separate pages, therefore can cause duplicate contents which isn't good. I'm still not 100% sure about this but to be safe it should be done anyway.  read more »

TroubleshootingWiki.org is a new website designed to provide users with comprehensive, free guides on software troubleshooting. This site intends to help users eliminate the potential problems that might arise while working with various applications.

It is often difficult finding a resource that is focused on providing quality, relevant, and free information on software troubleshooting at one central location. Launched initially with over 20 tutorials covering different Content Management Systems and other software, TroubleshootingWiki.org is expected to grow into an exhaustive troubleshooting resource where users are able to add their own tips and tricks.
CMSReport

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Today, i revisited the orginal site where i found 1pixelout player. To my amazement , Martin Laine the original developer had released a new version 2 for Wordpress. Almost 2 years of inactive development, it's refreshing to see it back on the block with a nice feature.  read more »

Joomla to Drupal

Migrate Joomla to Drupal. Tested on Joomla 1.0.15 to Drupal 5.7.
Joomla module features:

• import Joomla Users include "Realname". You MUST install Profiles module. Joomla module will create a new profile field called "profile_realname"
• import Joomla Sections & categories

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Opera is now out of beta and has released a final version of 9.5. It comes with many features including the following:

• excellent support for current standards — (X)HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS 2.1, SVG 1.1
• partial implementations of new emerging standards — CSS 3, HTML 5, and ARIA

Download a free copy of Opera 9.5

It's happen before and it's happen again... Another fork of Mambo CMS.

Couple of years ago, there was a split due to some disagreements between the Mambo committee and core developers, and the core developers along with some of the working group members decided to walk out on the Mambo project. A week later they formed their own open source project named Joomla. Joomla is a fork of Mambo as it uses the existing codebase from the Mambo CMS.  read more »

Last time, I’ve shown how to create accordion using jquery. But, In this post I’ll show you how can you create fancy accordion menu using jQuery. In this post, you’ll see two examples of accordion. First menu’s visibility get’s toggled on clicking on the header while the another menu’s visibility get’s toogled when mouse is moved over it.

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Following on from my previous post, you can now download this free template for Drupal 5 and 6. It has been commited to CVS at the Drupal official site.

The template is called 'Austere' and the download link is: http://drupal.org/project/austere

Austere template is Strict xHTML and is 100% CSS driven. What's more, it also includes the use of the colour module so colour of theme can be changed on the fly. I used Pixture as the starting point to build this template.

• Integration with color module, so that colors can be changed with a color wheel on the fly
• adjustable 2/3 fixed-width layout
• W3C Valid, and tested on Firefox, IE 6/7, Opera, Safari
• Support for logo, primary links, mission, search box, shortcut icon and user pictures

NOTE: Please use the bug tracker at Drupal if you find any issues with the template.

An article on 'how to customise Austere theme' will follow shortly.

UPDATE (1 Sep 2008):
Please download from http://drupal.org/project/austere

You will find more update to date versions. Thanks.

The Case for Drupal-- Why the Open Source CMS is well suited for a Medical Academic Library.

This is an interesting presentation by Paul Albert (of Cornell University) comparing Drupal with Fatwire (a proprietary, enterprise WCMS) But most importantly, he explains why Drupal is enterprise ready and why choosing Open Source over proprietary CMS is the way forward in terms of cost and ease of development.

I think Sun/MySQL's Marten Mickos nailed it when he said "There's a difference between organizations that have more time than money and organizations that have more money than time". Read Savio Rodrigues' post on InfoWorld and Matt Asay's post on CNET for more background.
- Dries Buytaert

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