New Drupal 4.7 theme available... Blue_mark

Screenshot of Blue Mark themeSomething old is new again. The Blue_mark theme for Drupal 4.7 is available at CMS Report. The Blue_mark theme uses Drupal 4.7's default theming engine, PHPTemplate. This theme is released under the GPL.

The Blue_mark theme was originally offered by Charles Lowe and available for download at his site, cyberdash.com. The original theme was written for Drupal 4.4's Xtemplate theme engine. I maintained the theme through Drupal 4.6 for a personal site of mine. With the switchover to the PHPTemplate theme engine as the Drupal 4.7 defualt, significant work was needed to keep old Blue_mark alive. The Blue Marine theme was used as a starting point. Minor tweaks were made to Blue Marine's PHP files and significant changes were made in the CSS.

Dizzying Thoughts of Drupal Developer, Nick Lewis

A post by Nick Lewis, Drupal and XML: Looking Forward, caught my attention. In his post he discusses work on developing the CAP XML format (Common Alerting Protocol).

In preparation for my /Nick Lewis/ trip to Washington D.C. next month, I’ve begun to develop a module that integrates the CAP XML format (Common Alerting Protocol) with drupal’s node, location, google map, category, and CCK modules.

Put plainly, the CAP format seeks:

Drupal Updates and CVS patching

A very common question among users of Drupal is, "How do I upgrade to the latest version of Drupal?" Drupal releases often contain instructions for how to upgrade your site from a previous release of Drupal (for example, 4.6 to 4.7), but quite a bit of confusion remains for updrading from much older releases (such as 4.3 to 4.7). The folks at 2bits offer some advice on how best to update your Drupal site in their post, Upgrading From Old pre-4.6 Drupal Releases To 4.7. The post is short yet helpful in getting you started on a Drupal update.

InformationWeek: Accidental Tech Entrepreneurs

Information Week has an interesting article about those involved in such online ventures as digg, del.icio.us, Zoot, and Six Apart's Movable Type. Basically, the article discusses how people have made their money off of blogging or providing the blog-like software and services.

Most people who pull down a paycheck dream of making a living at their hobby. For IT managers, the dream is more within reach than it is for most professionals, as their technical skills can give them a head start in building businesses on the Web. A supertalented few have even made fortunes.

Earl Miles: Another Attempt at Administrative Bliss

So Earl Miles, tell us what you really think about Drupal's administrative menus:

Drupal’s actual administrative pages suck ass. It’s not just the organization that’s wrong, as I had actually thought going into this. Unfortunately, no, it’s worse than that. While there are some pages that are (by dint of their brevity) relatively good, there are other pages that are nearly unworkable. block administration, menu administration, module administration, access control administration are all headache-inducing pages.