Useful Links and Resources

Master Drupal for Free with NodeOne Video Tutorials

I thought I would take a minute today, take a little detour, and share a resource I’ve discovered recently that is an absolute MUST for anyone who wants to learn and master Drupal. NodeOne is a Scandinavian Drupal shop and they have the most amazing collection of free video and written Drupal tutorials prepared by Johan Falk. Johan is a skilled Drupal-er and an excellent teacher who explains concepts clearly and systematically, and even though I’m quite comfortable working with Drupal I still find myself learning from him. He’s also written a Drupal 7 book – Drupal 7: the Essentials.

So check out the NodeOne Drupal learning library. For the best results, filter by the version of Drupal that you’re interested in and see what pops up. The screencasts are arranged in sets by topic. Here’s a partial list:

Learn Drupal 7 with NodeOne
Taming the Beast – Learn Views with NodeOne
Learn Page Manager
Learn Flag with NodeOne
Learn Content Access
Learn Rules with NodeOne
and more…

Thanks Johan for taking the time to share your knowledge! You should also follow Johan on twitter.

Enjoy 🙂

Grab the Free HTML/CSS Template of the Month for your MODx Site

If you’ve been following my MODx Revolution for Complete Beginners series you know that I’m using a premium template from Themeforest (affiliate link). Every month Envato gives away free files from their various market places to their members. In this month’s package is the beautiful Xero Portfolio & Business HTML/CSS Site Template. You have to be a member to get this but membership is free!

I will be porting this template to MODx soon, either through a written or video tutorial, so if you hurry and grab it now you can follow along with that tut or even just use it for your site. Make sure to read the license agreement. 🙂

Opening .uif files on a Mac

I recently acquired a used macbook and have been trying to acclimate myself to it. So far so good, but it’s taking some getting used to, especially on the software side of things. I guess I have been spoiled by the seemingly limitless availability of programs for PCs, and especially free/open source programs. I was digging through one of my external hard drives for a disc image that I had downloaded some weeks ago and now wanted to burn onto a disc. I realized that all I had was the .uif image, not the standard ISO. I didn’t want to wait till I got home to use MagicISO on my PC so I decided to see if I could find something for the mac.

One tool for the job is uif2iso for mac – http://vafer.org/projects/uif2iso4mac/. It’s free (please make sure to give a donation), it’s small, and it works like a charm. There’s no installation process involved, simply download and unpack the archive, open the uif2iso app file, and drag our uif image onto the uif2iso icon to mount it, and it converts it to standard ISO image which mounts perfectly on your mac.

You can then burn the resulting ISO disk image using the inbuilt Disk Utility program.

Easy and sweet.

November 2009 on Mary’s Corner – MODx Basics

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently writing a column for the HostColor web hosting blog called Mary’s Corner. HostColor a Web Hosting company that sponsors the MODx CMS project and they offer a variety of hosting plans including a specific MODx Hosting plan. Below is a roundup of the posts you can find there for November.

These topics might look pretty familiar to readers of the Coding Pad, but it might be nice to look them over because in this series I start my install fresh from the latest version of MODx Evolution 1.0.2. So it might be a nice complement to the MODx Beginners series here on the Coding Pad.

Introduction to the CMS Journey
MODx CMS Introduction
How to Install MODx CMS on your HostColor Account
Exploring the MODx Evolution Backend Manager
Creating and Editing Pages on your MODx Website

In future posts on Mary’s Corner I will be tackling different CMSs in addition to MODx, and will post monthly roundups here so that you can keep up with the posts.

HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions – Book Review

I’ve been spending some time in the recent past revisiting my knowledge of (X)HTML/CSS, and one of the big things I’ve discovered is that I have more I need to unlearn than to learn. I learned everything I know about building websites on the internet, by experimenting, searching w3c schools for syntax rules and tags, and learning by looking at other people’s source code. This is the first time I’ve actually bought and gone through a book on this stuff, and I am so glad I did – wish I has done so earlier! If you’re just starting out, or like me feel like you need to learn the right way, or just want a nice (X)HTML/CSS book for your collection, I have just the book for you, it’s HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions – A Web Standardistas’ Approach by Christopher Murphy and Niklas Person. This post is a review of the book.

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