Three tweets to think about:
“Everyone complains about bad clients.” (via @joshuapowell Tweet)
“I’m convinced there are more bad freelancers, agencies and business people that think they’re great, than there are truly bad clients.” (via @joshuapowell Tweet)
“Most people, especially in creative/tech fields, overestimate the quality of their work. Self-proclaimed design/dev gurus that underproduce.” (via @joshuapowell Tweet)
I find myself continually using the same 5-10 modules for each Drupal project I work on. I have never created an installation profile, although I should, to speed up the process. Perhaps when there is an official release of the much anticipated Patterns module I will make the jump into a more reusable Drupal setup, versus my current download-what’s-on-the-list-and-upload-it method.
Short-list of the Drupal modules I find myself using constantly
Pittsburgh votes on May 19th for their new Mayor. Vote Patrick Dowd.
I recently been presented with a unique opportunity with a small client project. The client has no preference on the way I build the small management system, as long as it’s easy to use and easy for me to add on to in the future. Since I’ve been wanting to get my hands dirty with building something with or around the Zend Framework I felt that this would be the perfect project to do that with.
The majority of my coding has been rather procedural, no messy and gross, but still procedural. The object oriented capabilities and MVC pattern that the Zend Framework presents is the primary reason I find it so appealing. I have however found it hard to find a tutorial that actually uses the Model in the MVC pattern, most tutorials instruct you to use a DTO inside of the library directory, which seems sloppy.
The people that have graced us with the NetTuts and other TutPlus family of sites, have launched a new tutorial site dedicated to Flash. The quality of content on NetTuts in the past has been great and I look forward to some amazing Actionscript 3.0 tutorials on the new FlashTuts site.
Visit the new Envato Flash Tutorial site
In addition to the great new Flash site, Envato is also giving away three copies of the fantastic Pixelmator application on their “Mac App Blog” AppStorm. Pixelmator is a great, lower cost alternative to Photoshop and a nice bump up from the open-source Gimp application.
Visit the Envato AppStorm website for your chance to win a free copy of Pixelmator
Jacek Utko is a Polish newspaper designer, who speaks about how design can turn an industry away from extinction.
Over the past couple of months I’ve been experimenting with the Zend Framework, building their Quickstart application and reading through their documentation. I’ve really enjoyed the frameworks object oriented approach and working inside of an MVC design pattern. When it comes to expanding your basic models, views and controllers, I’ve found that the actual Zend Framework website lacks thorough tutorials.
I found that Robert Basic put together a list of tutorials, books, people on Twitter and various other resources to help you expand your knowledge of the Zend Framework.
I also found that Killer PHP also has several screencasts walking you through setting up a basic Zend Framework based site and setting up a Zend Framework development area.
Visit Robert Basic’s site to view his entire list of Zend Framework resources
Visit Killer PHP’s site to watch there Zend Framework screencasts
Cameron Moll is one of my favorite designers because of his understanding and respect for front-end development. He has provided us with many demonstrations, lectures and writings enabling us, as a community, to learn.
Cufon is a newer font replacement utility written in Javascript, like sIFR. However, Cufon does not utilize Flash. Cufon like sIFR has leading, kerning and tracking limitations, but seems to excel in the quality of the final displayed typeface.
Cameron has recently put together an example directory on his website, showing several fonts each in various states of the document.
You can view the examples by visiting Cameron’s website.
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I read many blogs, micro-blogs and other websites. A few stand out in a way that speaks to a particular section of the design community, typography. Listed are several of the sites that I enjoy and check often for design inspiration and to keep me motivated.
Typography Served is a site that features the works of top designers that have a focus on their effective usage of typography. Typography Served is powered by the Behance Network, which I admire as an online resource for the design community.
Visit the Typography Served website
TypeNeu is a beautiful website in itself from both a design and development standpoint. Their use of an expanding and fluid user interface adds value to the quality content the are serving.
Typesites “is a weekly showcase of websites with interesting typographic design.” Instead of being another run-of-the-mill website gallery, we all know too many exist, there purpose is to “showcase only design that can inspire and teach — and then explain it.”
Reform & Revolution while not necessarily a website devoted specifically to typography, is the sister site of TypeNeu focuses more on art and design in the realm of culture.
X-Cart, according to their website, is open-source, but developer documentation is non-existent. With no documentation for pay-for open-source software it is very hard for someone to be able to take full advantage of the software package.
Thankfully, X-Cart uses the well documented template engine Smarty. By visiting the Smarty website they provide a detailed manual on the template engine. If you can familiarize yourself with the Smarty template engine, you can confidently tackle the procedural X-Cart code base with much less resistance.
Visit the Smarty website to view their documentation, manuals and examples.
