design

There has been increasing amount of complain about how Drupal is ugly or not designer friendly yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, sure - it's not WordPress, because it is much more complex and used for building much more complex websites. Neither do I, personally, think should it try to copy WordPress. Whilst there's always room for improvement, Drupal and WordPress have very distinct niche areas that each should strive in and not try to compete with each other.

But, for the skeptics that think Drupal is just Garland, check out the new, shiny, semantically powered The New Republic [http://www.tnr.com/] website built using the OpenPublish distribution of Drupal. And it was built in a matter of couple months with a small team and without any crazy work hours.

Drupal is awesome and Drupal can be pretty.

Pee1's new website design is a great example of modern, user-centric, ergonomic design. Professional, yet fun, easy to navigate, stunningly beautiful and appealing, it inspires the emotions of trust, reliability, feeling of cutting-edge. Combine that with the promise of 100% network SLA and 24/7/365 support, plus different marketing messages cleverly spread-out across different pages and you get a website that immediately grabs user's attention.

I just wish they provided more modern services like virtual servers, server clouds and distributed CDN. Service packages from last century do not go well with the design of the future. Hopefully, in time, they will re-think and update business strategy, as well.

Joomla has announced availability of new ACL: http://is.gd/iA5B and they seem pretty excited about it. Is that something for Drupal community to be jealous of?

If you come from a Java/J2EE background the clear answer is: NO (yes, in capital letters). You have to actually suffer from a structured, strict ACL to really appreciate the simplicity of a security system like that of Drupal.

Now, you may argue that Drupal security is slightly over-simplistic and too code-oriented (makes us, the developers happy) for "business" use.

OK, but it does not have to be a "hierarchical ACL" or strings-based security. A flexible, rules-based security system may be the answer?

Zed Shaw, of the RoR world, has some very interesting things to say on the subject:
http://vimeo.com/2723800

Really nice and useful tool:
http://www.pixelatedsoftware.com/products/pixelstick/

Tools like this one are plenty, but this particular one has a great user-interface. Better than any other free one, I have seen.

A very handy PDF with a list of variables available when themeing Drupal: Download PDF

Kijiji US is eBay's attempt to bury Craigslist. It has been buzzed about for a while now, but I received an e-mail announcement, from eBay, only this morning. I guess, it is official starting today.

Kijiji is wrong on many levels, as in - it should have never existed in the first place wrong. An industry leader with wallet as fat as eBay's simply has to absorb iconic successes like Craigslist that rub shoulders against its primary business. Instead, eBay purchased minority share (25%) of Craigslist, in 2004 and a year later launched Kijiji overseas. Now it is bringing Kijiji to the US market, to directly compete with the company that it owns a large part of.

I have no idea what kind of world does the sequence of eBay's moves makes sense in, but who am I to judge? No doubt, eBay's executives are plotting something that our simple minds can not reach. After all, that is why they are eBay executives and us - just a bunch of lousy bloggers with too much time on our hands, right?

With a modest attitude like that, I give up analyzing the business strategy behind Kijiji and its future prospects. Instead, let me offer you a screenshot snippet that I found quite amusing:

Now, District of Columbia has indeed been "blessed" to have a special status, taxation without representation and alternatives for spelling, but I swear I have never seen it spelled as "D. Columbia". eBay did really go down the innovative path on this one.

Laughing out loud.

The dominant question popping up in a pragmatist's mind, observing the Web 2.0, is: how come people get so much free time in an increasingly hyper world? With the amount of blogging going on, either half of the literate population is procrastinating or the sales of Red Bull has to be booming.

Either way, even a child knows, these days, that it's all about content. If you got content - you got audience, with which comes influence, network effects, possibly money and vast amounts of bloated ego.

The thing about content is - presentation is every bit as important as the substance. Therefore, it is no surprise that the boom of Web 2.0 was inevitably followed by the revolution in the user-interface aesthetics.

The rarely addressed, yet important feature of the user-interface design is - scalability. If scalability for a software system means its ability to take brutally high user traffic without major changes to the source code, scalability for a user-interface means the ability to display vast amounts of content with the same crispiness which it handles just a handful of entries with.

Microsoft adCenter is an interesting example of Microsoft's attempt to adopt Web 2.0 aesthetics. It clearly is very different from traditional Microsoft design and if you look in the source HTML - it is amazingly clean and semantic, especially for Microsoft. Apparently it was not done in Frontpage :)

Alas, it's one thing trying and another - doing. The Sign Up button on the home-page has all the right stuff - big font, gradient color... but, boy, it is UGLY! Especially next to the green gradient thingie.

And what happened to the three orphaned paragraphs in the bottom? Why in the world do you need to write "sign up" in such an ugly manner, repeatedly if you have a huge sign-up button in a visible place? All of it just reminds a lot the infamous iPod/MS packaging video.