Advantage Labs

This wintry weather is reminding us all that it's time to make some holiday plans! I wanted to let you all know our upcoming schedule for the holiday season.

Official company days off:

• November 27th ( Thanksgiving Day ) 
• December 25th ( Christmas ) 
• December 26th ( Boxing day! ) 
• January 1st ( New Years Day ) 

Dreading that post-election "I-wish-I-had-more-things-to-vote-on" malaise?  Fear not, Advantage Labs is here to help.  This past week we had the privilege to apply to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Knight News Challenge with two projects in partnership with the Twin Cities Media Alliance, publishers of the participatory journalism news site, the Twin Cities Daily Planet.

Our proposals are now online and available for public review.  If you have a moment, go to our proposals page to read and rate them.

This is an exciting opportunity for us.  Partnering with a local nonprofit to enhance not only their Drupal site but also to provide advanced, improved tools back to the Drupal community is the essence of the open source ethos.  And it is a model we'd like to explore further with other local groups. 

And we're not talking résumés and debates, people-- we're talking nodes.  Kay explored adding a wealth of contextual content to her site's pages.  The journey included learning about linking nodes to each other using nodereference fields, using viewfield to embed views in nodes and using arguments to dynamically determine which nodes to display in embeded views and related blocks.  Whew!

Christina got to the bottom to the Mystery of the Picture File Renaming.

Lindagail investigated the curious and frustrating display of comments on her site.

Lab hours on a Friday?  That's right!  With all the new recruits from our training classes and the local Drupal community, our growing groups is starting to need an additional timeslot. Since Barry and I will be in Szeged next week, we decided to try out a second time slot on Friday morning.  So far so good!

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.