Open Atrium is a Drupal package specifically tailored for use as an intranet (or extranet) solution. The system is based on the Drupal 6.x core and comes bundled with a number of modules that are specially configured to sing in harmony. The modules include a blog, a calendar, a project and task management functionality, a shout box and a threaded discussion feature that can also be used to add shared files. Open Atrium relies heavily on Organic Groups, which allows the administrator to group users with common interests and provide for each group their own sharing and collaboration space.
how-to
How YouTube and the Social Web Saved Winter
My back hurts. As with the rest of the United States, my neck of the woods has received more snow and cold weather than one could possibly want for the winter season. Due to the constant snowfall, I have spent a number of my days clearing my driveway from snow with the help of my 15 year old snow blower. Several days ago, the snow blower's auger died on me leaving me with a useless rusting piece of machinery.
Auger Belts
1. Remove the plastic belt cover on the front of the engine by removing two self-tapping screws. See figure 23.
2. Drain the gasoline from the snow thrower or place a piece of plastic under the gas cap.
The death of my snow blower couldn't have come at a worse time. Most stores in my area have already sold out their snow blowers for the season. The waiting list is long for seeing a small-machine mechanic to fix this heap of metal. I didn't even bother calling knowing full well I likely wouldn't even hear from the mechanic until March whether this snow blower was fixable or not.
3. Tip the snow thrower up and foward so that it rests on the housing.
4. Remove six self tapping screws from the frame cover underneath the snow thrower.
There was only one option left, I needed to fix the MTD 22 inch 5HP Snow Blower myself. I would need to start with a replacement part, Auger Belt OEM-754-0430.
5. Roll the front and rear auger belts off the engine pulley. See figure 24.
6. Unhook the idler spring from the hex bolt on the auger housing. See figure 25.
7. Unhook the support bracket spring from the frame.
The problem is that I'm not a mechanic but an information technologist. Not a single computer processor can be found on this snow blower. No keyboard, no user interface, and no scripting language came supplied with this equipment. They say manuals for computers can be confusing, but have you ever tried to decipher an owner's manual from Cleveland, Ohio for a 1996 snow blower?
Note: it may be necessary to loosen the six nuts that connect the frame to the auger housing to aid in belt removal.
8. Lift the rear auger belt from the auger pulley and slip belt between the support bracket and auger pully. See Figure 24. Repeat this step for the front auger.
9. Replace both auger drive belts by following instructions in reverse order.
Before there was YouTube and before there was Web 2.0, I would have resigned myself to spending the rest of this winter shoveling my driveway without the aid of a snow blower. But this isn't 1991, this is 2011. I can't think of a better moment in time to show positive proof the impact the modern Internet has for improving our daily lives. For if you ever find yourself in need to fix your snow blower, you can thank the social web as well as YouTube's Donyboy73 for reminding me once again that there is purpose in Web 2.0, social media, and information systems.
Without a doubt, my snow blower would have landed in the junk yard and my back ruined if it hadn't been for that video. Instead, I spent my Super Bowl Sunday knowing that the next time it snowed, I had a snow blower fixed and ready to be called back to duty. I am tech geek, hear me roar.
Content Management Technologies: 26 Alphabetical Tips to Spell Success
Content management technologies advance so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. From enterprise content management (ECM) to electronic document management (EDM), business process management (BPM), business intelligence (BI), EDRM (electronic document and records management), records and information management (RIM) and more, technology increasingly resembles a bowl of alphabet soup. So many acronyms are floating around that it’s hard to know what order to put the letters in and what they’re supposed to spell.
Whether you’re scanning files for historical reference, providing information access via a customer portal, or are in the midst of enterprise-wide process automation, there are standard steps you should take that will help you to succeed. No matter what acronym your solution spells or what your goals are, these 26 steps should be applied and revisited throughout your project implementation. If you miss one, your project might turn out a bit differently from what you are hoping for. How and when you use each tip is up to you, but be sure to use them all!
Align your business and IT goals. Some of the greatest project failures result from a mismatch. IT’s role is to support business objectives, but IT resources are often stretched. Educate each other. Negotiate.
Budget carefully. Software and hardware alone don’t represent Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Customizations, disaster recovery planning, training, and testing carry costs. Plan accordingly.
Collaborate with all of your department managers. Set enterprise goals even if you’re starting with a departmental project. Think globally. Otherwise, you‘ll find yourself reworking projects unnecessarily.
Online Guide to Umbraco CMS for New Users
I have only now started paying attention to the Umbraco CMS. While they may call Umbraco the "friendly CMS", I'm not sure I'm aware of a single CMS that doesn't self-describe itself as the CMS to use. This is why I enjoy blog posts from actual users new to a CMS describing what they have learned about the software. In learning Umbraco, I'm glad I came across Lee Messenger's "A Complete Newbie's Guide To Umbraco CMS".
This post really is a beginners guide to Umbraco, I decided to put it together because when I first started messing around with Umbraco I had more than a few issues trying to get it installed due to not being able to find the right answers about a year or so ago (Or was it I was just being impatient) – And I’ll hold my hands up, I threw my toys out the pram and just gave up… Now I REALLY kick myself and WISH I had carried on.
There has also been some great movements in pushing Umbraco to the next level and making it easier than ever to use. Now I’m no professional or avid blogger, so don’t expect miracles… this is sort of a guide/my own learning journey over the past 4 months all thrown together in one post. My only aim for this post is to try and give anyone looking to get into Umbraco and real life example and reference from someone doing the same thing.
Create your own private Twitter site using WordPress
Cats Who Code: "While Twitter is great, it may not be the best choice if you're looking for a private network, for example for sharing work tips with colleagues, or notice your familly about what's up.
As I was searching for an easy and quick way to create a private microblogging website...I decided that WordPress should do that job, and do it good as always."
Make your Drupal website Visitor Friendly!
Interesting and useful content is a necessity on any web site, particularly on those built around a Content Management System. However, this may not be the only necessity. Another necessity is making the browsing experience on your site pleasant for the visitor, and in this context, making the content easy to find. Having content on the front page of the site is one way to make it findable, but the amount of content is limited to a point before the page becomes unwieldy. In this tutorial, we will make it easier for site visitors to find our content in a number of ways.
Read more: http://www.packtpub.com/article/making-content-findable-in-drupal-6
New book for customizing Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management
Alfresco 3 Enterprise Content Management Implementation is a new book from Packt that guides readers to customize, use, and administer websites using the Alfresco CMS platform. Written by a team of four Content Management experts, this book gives users a clear understanding about how to integrate external applications such as Liferay Portal, Adobe Flex, iPhone, iGoogle, and Facebook to meet their Content Management needs.
Alfresco is one of the most popular Java-based Content Management System. Alfresco 3 is its upgraded version which includes Alfresco Surf, a new N-Tier Architecture, which delivers scalability and accommodates more users on existing hardware resources. Alfresco 3 offers true Enterprise Content Management (ECM) by providing an Open Source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum, and Interwoven.
This book guides users through creating smart, collaborative content repositories and shows how to use Alfresco 3 to create more elegant document sharing, better collaborative working, and reliable automated workflow processes. The book explains how administrators can set up Alfresco 3 for multiple business units as a single-instance multi-tenant environment.
Enhancing User Experience with WordPress 2.7
In this two-part article we learn a few methods for enhancing user experience and making your WordPress blog a better place. In this part, we see how to use paginator, highlight searched text in search results, and use the CSS sliding doors technique within WordPress.In the second part we will create a dropdown menu for your categories, add a breadcrumb to your theme, display related posts and tabs on your sidebar.
5-Step Drupal Distributions
Lullabot (Angie Byron): "A "distribution" of Drupal is one or more installation profiles included with Drupal itself and all of the required modules. Distributions can either be offered as a convenience to site builders by bundling together frequently used components, such as Acquia Drupal, or they can be used to offer a version of Drupal specifically targeted to a unique use case, such as Open Publish.
How-to import Drupal 6 content into Wordpress 2.7
SocialCMSBuzz: "After looking around the web reading various articles on the subject of Drupal to Wordpress conversion most of which are unfortunatley now outdated and with some trial and error we eventually figured out the MYSQL code and process needed to acheive a basic Drupal 6 to Wordpress 2.7 site migration. In this article we will describe the steps needed to import your Drupal 6 website into a Wordpress v2.7 install."
Steps on moving your website to a new web host provider
Examiner.com: "This article is a 'How To Guide' describing steps to take in order to move your website to a new web host provider, or how to just move your domain registry to a different registrar."
Battling Web spam - Part 1
IBM developerWorks: "Spam on the Web is one of the biggest threats to a modern Web developer. The "bad guys" become more and more sophisticated every year in how to vandalize and proliferate ads over any Web 2.0 page they can grasp. To make matters worse, spam is increasingly used to distribute malware. The arms race is on, and Web developers need to know what basic tools are available to battle spam on their Web sites. This two-part installment provides a thorough guide to anti-spam techniques.
OSC: The Art of Joomla!
"So, it is no small matter to learn that Andrew [Eddie] recently launched The Art of Joomla!.
Teaching is something Andrew is very good at, and in this monthly
webazine, we will learn from the Master about the inside and outside of
a Joomla! v 1.5 website.
The Art of Joomla!: Issue 1 is entitled Opening the doors to the developers' and designers' revolution. There is an Editorial, Security Essentials section where this month Stumping the Spoofers where Cross Site Request Forgeries is discussed."
Optimizing Xoops, its modules and your server
Recently posted at XOOPS.org was a how-to for optimizing XOOPS on your server.
Optimizing Xoops, its modules and your server - Sometimes, people are telling that Xoops is rather slow and it can be true but there are ways to improve things.
Instant Zero is in charge to maintain some websites using Xoops, so we decided to share with you our knowledge in this domain and we hope that you will find it useful.
In this article, and in 5 points, you are going to see what you can do for your site.
The tips given discuss how to make tweaks to your server, XOOPS, the database, files used, and the CSS to help optimize your XOOPS site. As usual, some of these same techniques can be applied to more than just one content management system.
Victor Kane: VPS! Getting Drupal up and running on a linode
Honestly, I'm not trying to put so much focus on Drupal when you consider CMSReport.com is a site that is supposed to put focus on at least 29 other content mangement systems. It's just that there is so much coming out from the Drupal community that it is hard to ignore. The latest is Victor Kane's experience with setting up a virtual private server (VPS) for the Drupal CMS.
Well, after realizing the limitations of shared hosting for Drupal development, I decided to go with the big boys and use a dedicated server or VPS solution, at least for development. So I can make a multisite install for the docs and I can make subdomains for each development site.
So after perusing various options, I decided for linode. After checking out the various plans, I decided on the Linode 300, and got 50% more disk space by paying for a year.
The good news for non-Drupal users, is that the VPS how-to can easily be applied to other CMS applications. Check out the complete story.
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