Kurt Rademaekers's blog

TinyMCE provides two tools to facilitate cut & paste of text from a Microsoft Word document or web page into a web page with the Drupal content management system.

In TinyMCE 3.4.9, the “Paste from Word” feature will preserve basic Word document formatting while removing special Word-specific code that transparently accompanies a paste from Word which typically messes up the display of a web page.  The “Paste as Plain Text” feature, like Windows Notepad or Mac TextEdit, will strip out all formatting that accompanies content from a Word document or web page.

A website or web system may have various reasons to communicate with website users or with Drupal CMS users via email. This article provides an overview of Drupal modules required to support the following features:

• Create a contact form
• Notify administrator when a comment is submitted
• Notify subscribed users of content updates
• Comment by email; Create site content by email
• Enable HTML formatting in email message

Create a contact form

A picture can be worth several thousand words

Documentation, of course, is critical to defining and confirming your client’s needs, and it’s critical for providing direction to your design and development teams.  As part of your documentation, wireframes provide visual conceptualization that cannot be captured in a text-only document.

I recently had the privilege of leading the project to re-engineer the extensive Los Angeles County Museum of Art website using Drupal 6 as the new platform. LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection extending from ancient times to the present. The Drupal content management system (CMS) has dramatically streamlined content production and management of the LACMA website by:

Open Atrium is a pre-assembled distribution of Drupal whose purpose is to provide a collaborative online working environment and file sharing. It is produced by Phase2 Technology and is freely downloadable at openatrium.com.

[Note: The issues identified in this article specific to Atrium 1.0-beta 8 were resolved in the 18 Jul 2011 release of Atrium 1.0.]

As an out-of-the-box solution, Open Atrium provides a standard set of collaborative tools which are pre-themed, pre-configured and ready for use.

One of the key ingredients to obtaining a great website is being a great client. This involves doing your homework and having a good manager for your organization.

When you select a development group to produce your organization’s website you become half of a team. Your development group—the other half of the team—is depending on your careful and considerate involvement for the success of the project.

There are a number of free web services that let you easily share large files with other users. This article discusses three free services you might use to provide download access to large files intended for presentation purposes--such as video files, PowerPoint presentations or large PDFs.

The service you select should be based largely on:

I recently had the opportunity to migrate a client company's email system from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail within their new Google Apps account.
The company users love the Gmail email environment, and the company loves the cost savings gained by migrating from Exchange/Outlook to Gmail.

The biggest—but not only—challenges for this particular migration included overcoming connectivity issues with the Exchange installation.

Summary of key findings and recommendations: