Jennifer Franklin Elrod: "I wish I had the book MediaWiki Skins Design when I first set out to design a MediaWiki skin for my philosophy subsite. It would have saved me so much time and trouble. Those were the days when I didn’t have a baby. I could stay up half the night going through hours of CSS trial and error just to tweak one or two little design elements. I could never do that now. As soon as I have time I intend to use some of the info in this book to clean up my skins. Nothing like this existed to my knowledge when I set out to make my skins. Documentation is often the weakest link in the open source community. This book fills an important gap that should democratize MediaWiki even more, making it more appealing to a wider swath of the web population."

To read more visit http://squirreltao.dreamfishery.com/2008...

One of the easiest ways to change a well written theme in a Web content management system is by tweaking the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS).  To be honest, I'm horrible at theme development.  I prefer to focus my time on function, administration, and content of the information system.  However, any bit of information that helps you tweak those themes you downloaded for that CMS is good news, right?  After enough tweaks, you can may just have a theme with a style you can call your very own.

Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time - of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we, as web-architects, really couldn’t live without.

So if you need to do a little bit of theme development, don't hesitate to check out the post 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn't Live Without.  I found this link while visiting the blog of Nick Lewis.

PunBB 1.2.14 has been released. According to the original announcement at PunBB.org the new point version it not only fixes some bugs, but also provides some minor enhancements:

• Addresses a few security problems
• Fixes a bug or two
• Adds a search performance tweak
• Adds stylesheet fixes to fully support the up-and-coming Internet Explorer 7 release

I'm extremely excited to to see the stylesheet fixes for IE7. A few open source projects have been extremely slow in addressing the fix changes for IE. Some developers, in my opinion, seem to be personal opinions ahead of the needs of their projects and their users. Granted, IE7 may not be fully CSS compliant. However, Microsoft has come a long way in trying to develop a more compliant IE6 by listening to many of the demands in the open source community. The fact is that IE7 has a better chance of alienating IE6 users since it is a big change for the Microsoft Windows drone user. I think it's time we cut Microsoft some slack...

"The final release of IE7 is fast approaching … and I mean really fast … and will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it’s available for download. We want to ensure that you are ready and the information below will help get you there.

Compatibility with sites, extensions and applications has been a very high priority for us as we develop new features, enhance the existing features and move the platform forward to be more secure and standards compliant. We are continually listening to feedback from our customers, partners and leaders in the industry to resolve major compatibility issues to ensure our common customers have a great experience with IE7. As we make key improvements in areas such as layout and security, some changes need to be made by site owners to work smoothly with IE7."

Complete Story

mojoPortal 2.1.3 was released over the weekend. Since mojoPortal 2.1.2 was released just a day sooner...we'll lump all the changes since mojoPortal 2.1.1. New features and enhancements in the new versions of mojoPortal include:

• Improved Module Caching
• New CollapseLinkButton Control in mojoPortal.Web.Controls - this control can hide any other server control using cleint side javascript and css, you just enter the server side id in markup using the ControlToCollapse property. I used this in several administrative pages to hide sections of settings that don't need to be changed often
• A new skin by Jasmin Savard, currently being used at mojoPortal.com
• FriendlyUrls are now automatically created when creating pages
• Multi Sites Feature theme caching issue is now fixed and can now run multiple sites in a single application due to improvements in SiteMapProvider configuration
• Users are now logged in automatically upon registration (thanks to Bo Rey for this fix)
• Newest version of NeatUpload
• The VS 2005 Solution now works with the VS Web Server, its no longer neccessary to setup an IIS application, just set your connection string and go
• Updated the new CSS Menu adapter release from Microsoft and now menus working correctly in IE7 running on Vista RC1.
• Usual bug fixes

Further information can be found at the mojoPortal site.

Another "official" site has received a face, this time the Ruby language site. The Ruby site runs on the Ruby-based content management system, Radiant. My impressions in one word...Impressive.

In my opinion, Ruby as a programming language and Radiant as a CMS are still in its adolescent years of development. However, if the Ruby language site is any indication...it is more than ready to compete with those that have been around a lot longer.

There can be a lot of politics involved in changing community sites, but it seems that the site maintainers did everything right:

As you can see the much anticipated redesign is now live. It was over a year ago that it was suggested that a “visual identity team” be formed for the purpose of redesigning the Ruby Web site. The redesign team created over 20 mockups for the the new site, posted several for the Ruby community to comment on, and finally decided on the current design.

Once the design was chosen it was lovingly converted to CSS and XHTML and an administration system was written for it. The content was then ported over from the old Web site and massaged by an enthusiastic group of volunteers.

Congratulations to all those involved with this both leading edge languages and CMS.