The gray dank yet unseasonably warm December afternoon led to a small but serious Lab Hours session today. We put our heads together to talk through when to use taxonomy vocabularies in Drupal 7 and how to divide them. Then we had a great discussion about the best uses for email newsletters. We were in basic agreement that general organizational newsletters are no longer effective at reaching out to constituents. Connected to Drupal site content, a newsletter can and should be targeted to specific audiences and feature fresh content that leads directly back to the site to drive interaction and action. Check out the notes below or on the original live Lab Pad.

Advantage Labs --http://www.advantagelabs.com/
Wednesday Lab Hours Session
December 14, 2011
4-6 PM

Anjali Dotson- resdac.org

• defining content types and adding content
  • We talked about using single vs. multiple taxonomy vocabularies and the differences and distinctions between taxonomy and custom fields with allowed values for various scenarios.
• taming the Balsamiq beast

Elysia -- darts1.org

• continuing to work on enews--applying new css; have some questions about follow-up process and incorporating polls into enews
  • CSS for enews continues to be a challenge given the difference in how various email clients read and render CSS -- see http://campaignmonitor.com/css for an overview and chart.  The main problem appears to be Google's online browser client for GMail.  It is the most restrictive and seems to omit any CSS added by <style> tags.  
  • Looking to find a middle ground -- a design that will give full control via CSS for most browsers but also look decent (and not compromised) in GMail.  Will take testing.
  • Configured SmartSVN to gain SVN access to the DARTS site repositories enabling quick and safe CSS file updates.
• changing two of our site's sidebar items to a different block style (I think the style already exists in our css)