Open Space has a new Drupal website that make it easy for staff members and volunteers to access information and archives online.

I also redesigned Open Space logo and branding as a part of this process.

This past Tuesday Love&Olson played at Cantos in Calgary with Steve Gibson and Adam Tindale. This was the 9th Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable and that makes our upcoming show at Computational Aesthetics EPI’s 10th show. For the performance we used video and audio samples from the Cantos synth collection and we rocked out pretty hard. Hopefully we’ll get our hands on some of the video documentation that was shot. Love&Olson will also be playing next weekend with Jackson 2bears at the Vancouver Island School of Art in Victoria on the night of the Art Crawl and the closing for Assume Nothing. Don’t be fooled, just because we’re not listed on the AGGV page doesn’t mean it ain’t so.

But Cantos was just the start of the week — we went on to open Grand Theft Bicycle at the Stride Gallery on Friday night. I have some shots of the opening up on flickr, but they’re not the best quality. Hopefully some one will share their pictures on facebook or something. GTB will be showing at Stride until June 20th so if you live in Calgary get your ass off the couch and go try it out.

Upcoming Shows

May 22, 2009 – Art Crawl at VISA with Jackson 2bears
May 30, 2009 – Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable at Computational Aesthetics (the ‘Large Room’ at the  Delta Victoria Ocean Pointe hotel in Victoria)

Stride Gallery
http://www.stride.ab.ca

Cantos Foundation
http://www.cantos.ca

A Quick Start Guide for a Standard CMS Using Drupal 5

These are the basic steps I go through each time I make a Drupal site. They are not a secret. The very fact you’re reading it means it could not possibly be a secret. Nice try, though.

A Drupal site can be made in many different ways, the steps below will lay the ground work for a site that is user friendly and behaves itself. This guide is not intended for hardcore development geeks or first time users – it’s just a blueprint for creating a safe and solid CMS with Drupal.

I’ll be expanding this post and also creating another page for Drupal 6 sometime soon. Keep your pants on. Thanks to Amy Steen for her input on this guide!

PS. There are lots of ways to make a site with Drupal and if you think you have a way I’d love to hear about it.

s3cr3t formula

• Download and install the latest version of Drupal 5
  • Make sure to set the database collation to UTF8_General_ci
• Create some sub directories in sites/all directory (sites/all/modules and sites/all/themes)
• Register your admin account, pick a secure password
• Change user registration settings to “Only site administrators can create new user accounts” (user management > user settings)
• Create writeable files directory (follow alert box) – this directory will hold the files you’ll upload
• Run cron for the first time (follow alert box)
• Configure “clean-urls”, you might need to edit .htaccess (site config > clean urls)
• Install some base modules into sites/all/modules directory:

• Enable extra core modules like uploads, path alias, etc.
• Change default input to full html (site config > input formats) Note: if you’re intending your site to have many users you’ll want to leave the default input format as is
  
• Create “default” role (user management > roles)
• Configure “default” role for fck-editor

And that’s it, at least for now. There’s lots left to do on your way to making a fully functional site, but hopefully this will give you a headstart. I’ll be updating this guide as often as is necessary, please let me know if you’ve got suggestions.

Part of my job entails that I summarize parts of web development into client lingo. The other day I had to come up with a list of basic requirements for a CMS that will be built for the client by their internal IT department. Here’s what I came up with:

• Basic text editor
• Add pages, edit existing pages and delete pages
• Multiple templates for different kinds of pages
• Print pages and also export pages to .pdf format
• Ability to ‘archive’ content
• RSS publishing (so that other sites can publish your content)
• Upload, reference and store files (.doc, .pdf, etc)
• Add, edit, disable and delete menu links
• Automated site map of your web pages for search engine optimization
• Meta data management for search engine optimization
• Ability to create simple online forms and polls to collect information
• Contact form(s)
• Workflow capability for content approval (ie. draft)
• Automated logs changes and edits (versioning)
• Backup capability
• Online help documentation
• Website statistics
• Search function

Disclaimer: Of course, Drupal handles most of these things but Open Source isn’t always an option

zoe keating http://www.zoekeating.com

crystal castles http://www.myspace.com/crystalcastles

chemical brothers http://www.myspace.com/thechemicalbrothers

beach boys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_Boys

Sp0xx6 is the latest version of my Drupal UI. It’s a minimalist concept, great for populating sites with content quickly and for first-time users.
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Stratford Hall is a Drupal-based site I built while at Trapeze Communications.

Design by Neil Tran.