Advantage Labs

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. 

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.

Jay from the Twin Cities Daily Planet recently filed a request in our project management system requesting info about how to embed an audio file (with a player) hosted by a third party source in a story node on their site to allow visitors to listen to audio tracks while reading related stories. This question and its cousin about how to embed video files hosted by YouTube or Blip.tv has been coming up a lot lately. Here was my response, which I share since it may be of interest to you:

Maybe it's just because I've been in the dark due to the too-long MN winter, but only recently have I awakened to a flurry of activity around social media in the Twin Cities.

Just last week there was a lively Lullabot sponsored Drupal meetup last week closely followed by a reportedly rousing Minnebar un-conference.

So I've been trying to figure out how to make my organic group homepage look nicer than the default "River of News". Well I think we figured it out last night. You need to have the newest version of Organic Groups module, and the Panels 2 module.

Make sure that you enable all the necessary parts, like og_panels, and panels pages, etc.

When you are in the group that you want to modify the homepage of, you click on the 'pages' tab. And there ya go.

We had discovered 'Google Translate' a few weeks ago, and it allows a user to enter a URL into a field and Google translates the entire page AND allows the user to navigate throughout the page in the chosen language. (Languages include Portugese, Chinese, Japanese, and about 10 other languages)

Two weeks ago at the TC Drupal meeting, then again this past week at Lab Hours, the issue of using Drupal to create and maintain an image gallery came up. The general agreement amongst attendees at both gatherings was that using CCK, Imagefield, Imagecache and Views is the way to go but that no configuration of such was making everyone happy.

Bottom line, to send multiple posts, go to each of the posts that you want to send and get their post node number. Append those numbers to the send/news URL, to create a URL like: yoursitename/send/news/12+15+23. Then, click enter.

The details:

Once you have your news lists set up, you should have a news list signup block. To enable this, go into the administrative page and click 'blocks'. There, you should see a "Mailing List Subscription" block. Select the region and weight and click 'save blocks'. Then, click 'configure' next to this block to select which mail lists you want in this block and if you want the block to disappear once the users have subscribed for all the lists.

Go back to the mail list page ('administer', then click 'mailing lists' under user management) and click 'edit' next to the mailing list. Fill in the Welcome and Goodbye blocks and click submit. Be careful to NOT change any of the other fields, such as the List Key.