A few themes emerged which generally came down to one question:

How would you roll out a community and encourage participation to see it grow?

Here’s what I offered to the conversation.

Be clear on what the value of participation is

Why will people participate? What are the compelling reasons to join in? What are the tangible benefits? People need motivation and incentive to participate, the more clearly you can articulate what this incentive is, the more likely you’ll be able to form an internal strategy that will lead to involvement.

If you don’t know where to start, start by listening

There’s a good chance your audience is already self-organizing itself online. Seek them out and get a sense of what conversations and interactions are happening, and use this as a starting point to decide how you might (or might not) participate in those spaces.

“Seed” the site prior to launch

See if there are any active communities that have already formed (whether it’s online communities, or maybe real-life communities that are looking for or would benefit from an online space) and approach these people to see if they would be interested in being “beta” users for your site. If they decline, it would be worth figuring out why, and that might point you in a direction for re-shaping your strategy for what you are offering.

Find a community manager who is a natural “champion” for the site

There is most definitely a need for a formal role to be given to someone who can help nurture and grow a community online. The best case scenario is to find someone internally who has deep organizational/institutional knowledge, who is already active in the different social media channels that exist, and who will gladly take on a community manager role with open arms. The last thing you want to do is force it onto anyone by making it a hard line in their job description.

Be open to the possibility that whatever you build and roll-out may become obsolete by this time next year

It’s tough for large institutions or organizations to deal with on all sorts of levels (much less-so for the small and nimble web startups), but we seem to be entering a stage in the web where there are so many new tools emerging, and so many changes to the overall landscape, that investing heavily in any one platform is risky. Trends in the industry are moving so quickly that investing too much time and money into any one application opens the potential that by the time you start getting rolled out, you will have already fallen behind the pack.

Invest in people and culture

My current thinking around this is to completely avoid that investment in software and instead invest in people. Rather than spending thousands of dollars on a software license or custom-development time, spend it on finding and hiring people who can participate in the spaces that are already available online. Invest in professional development, networking and learning opportunities so that eventually you have people in-house who can provide expertise that comes from first-hand experience. And then do what you can to support this culture within your organization so that you can keep up to speed with the changes as they happen.

But that’s just me, what about you?

Have you successfully launched an online community? What were the ingredients that led to success? Or even if you haven’t, what would you think are important keys to a successful online community? Experienced a failed launch? What went wrong? I’d love to hear your ideas!

If you’re interested in learning more about developing applications for the iPhone, the opportunities are out there if you’re a talented developer with an entrepreneurial bent and some tolerance for the risk that comes with selling iPhone apps in a closed market environment.

For starters, you’ll want to visit the iPhone Dev Center and sign up for the iPhone Developer Program and see if you have the chops on the programming side. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to access the online resource materials such as videos introducing you to iPhone development, as well as documentation, sample code, and a wealth of articles. As you’ll quickly find out, iPhone apps are developed in Objective-C – a superset of C that uses syntax from both C and Smalltalk. Objective-C isn’t for the faint of heart but luckily there seems to be a fair bit of documentation out there such as Apple’s own Introduction to the Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language.

You’ll also want to be sure to check out the process for distributing an iPhone app and then also think of creative ways to market and promote your app – after all, you’re going to be competing with thousands of iPhone apps. In all this, you’ll also want to become very familiar with the concept of micropayments because, contrary to early predictions that micropyament would fail as a business model, micropayments have played an integral role in the revenue model of successful iPhone application businesses.

Favourite iPhone Apps?

For our part, we’re going to start reviewing some of our favourite apps right here in the Midstride blog. If you have any favourite iPhone Apps, we’d love to hear about them – drop us a comment below and let us know which you love, which you hate, which you wish you made, or better yet which iPhone app you wish someone out there would make!

Buncholinks from this Article:

Woopra is a “real-time web tracking and analysis application”. The service is free, although currently in a private invitation beta. After inserting a snippet of code into your site and then downloading a desktop client, you can monitor the traffic on your site all in real-time. Other than the cool factor, a tool like this has some very practical uses.

Real-Time Web Stats Shortens the Reporting Lifecycle

The value of Woopra comes from its real-time reporting capabilities vs. other web stats tools like Google Analytics, Webalizer, WP-Stats which deliver once-daily data. This is particularly relevant for sites when:

1. Your website has a well-defined funnels/paths and you want to improve the “conversion rate”, AND
2. You want to improve this conversion rate under a shortened design/development lifecycle

1st Key Concept: Clickthrough Paths and Conversion Rates

The first key concept here is this idea of a clickthrough path or conversion rate. At its most basic: different sites have different goals, when the visitor completes that defined goal, it counts as a “conversion” for the site. For example:

Conversion Rates for Online Communities

In an online community, conversion could be any one of:

• signing up a user account and creating a profile
• adding a post to a discussion board
• adding “friends” to your profile

Conversion Rates for Blogs or News sites

Blogs or news/magazine-oriented websites may consider conversion as being the act of:

• adding a comment to a post
• signing up to receive email updates
• subscribing to an RSS feed

Conversion Rates for e-Commerce sites

• all the above
• filling a shopping cart and “checking out” / completing a purchase

2nd Key Concept: The Iterative Lifecycle

What constitutes a conversion is ultimately based on the primary goals of the site. But no matter what the final goals are, there are different paths people can take when visiting the site to ultimately end up at that final action – the more often your visitors complete that last step, the higher your conversion rate, and the more likely you are achieving the goals you’ve set for your site. So one of the primary reasons you would monitor webstats is to make informed changes to your site that improves the conversion rate.

Th second key concept here is the idea of the iterative lifecycle of data reporting/research -> design/development or to think of it another way: measuring performance -> improving performance: once you’ve gathered data reporting back on the performance of your current website, you can then make changes to your site to improve its performance. Most web analytics tools will provide a means to monitor the funnel to conversion – and while each tool may provide different ways of visualizing it, just about all will be providing the same core data.

The largest benefit offered by Woopra is that it shortens the reporting lifecycle. Traditional stats tools update the data one a day or periodically throughout the day. So if you make a change in response to that data, you need to wait at least one more day before you can see the impact. Woopra shortens this lifecycle by letting you immediately see the impact of making the changes, along with presumably giving you more data on variability throughout the day (vs. end-of-day totals).

Other Benefits and Uses for Woopra

Real-time data provides a whole new set of possibilities to web professionals.

For example, if you work in a web team that adopts an agile methodology to your development work, Woopra could be used to run quick tests of your work in progress. Guerilla usability tests could also be facilitated through Woopra – set it up on a staging server where you load up wireframes or run an A-B test and use the real-time data to get a dashboard view of how your users are running through the tests.

There are lots of possibilities with what you could do with real-time web analytics, and the key here like with many other aspects of working in the web is to be flexible, adaptable, and creative.

1. 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks for Wordpress – Smashingmagazine
   Great tips for any user of wordpress that relies on RSS for syndicating content.  Most of these tips show you how to gain more control over your RSS feeds.
2. 5 good programming habits in PHP
   General rules of thumbs for php programmers.   Some of the rules may make you think twice, like the rule of “Never copy and paste”.
3. What is More Important To Succeed Online:  Business or Technical Skills?
   A question for the ages, at least in the IT field, is it more important to be business or technical minded?  A very interesting article on how these skills have attributed to the success of several companies.
4. Firefox 3.1 beta news – web workers
   A CNET article on Firefox 3.1.  The interesting part is how “web workers” can process work in the background.  Background processing would push the RIA movement further and I’m sure would lead to some very novel ideas from early adopters.
5. How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for free – with Ubuntu
   A practical and useful article on how to setup a web server.  This is a very well written article that shows how far Linux has come in terms of ease of use.
6. How to use Twitter as a tool
   An article by Guy Kawasaki on how to use Twitter for productivity.  It’s a very detailed post and for those new to Twitter, it explains the utility factor of Twitter beyond just being a gossip tool.
7. Online Advertising and Its Impact on Web Design
   An excellent article from Smashing Magazine on how online advertising affects web design.  It’s an interesting topic as web advertising is a primary means of revenue for the majority of blogs.
8. Top 10 Web Dev Blunders of 2008
   A list of some of the biggest “mistakes” we’ve seen on the web this year.
9. Who Protects The Internet?
   Who does protect the Internet?  This article should be of interest to anyone who uses the Internet, so that’s a lot of people.  Techcrunch takes a go at reviewing where we are with the Internet.
10. Referrer Detector Wordpress Plugin
    A great wordpress tool to greet your users coming from specific sites.

I hope you find these articles useful.  You can contribute your own links by visiting this buncholink which groups related links together in a useful manner.

Frameworks and libraries can speed up the development time and make code maintenance simpler, but it’s important you understand how they work.  It’s not just the framework itself but the entire footprint your application leaves when a user visits a specific page.  Ask yourself what’s involved from the database, to the code/framework, and then to the client through http requests.

After experiencing some issues with an application running the Zend Framework, I realized there were a lot of things I was not doing to optimize my application.  There are simple and more complex actions you can take to speed up your application.  Since time is precious, and developers with an expertise on optimization are not always available, I’ve split this post into two sections (simple and more advanced).  This post focuses on the simple part.

Simple tips and tools

1. Use Firebug with YSlow
   Firebug and YSlow are powerful tools to analyze the front end of your site.  Run the most common request on your site and see what YSlow says.  Expect a low grade, probably a D or lower.  If you can reach a level C or greater you’re doing really well as some of the requirements are not practical for most applications.

   How-to:
   Net: How many calls are there?  Try to minize these calls and definitely remove any 404 calls as they can eat up server resources.

   Console:  Do you have a lot of POST calls?  Some libraries, like dojo’s javascript framework, can make a lot of POST requests.  Reduce these if possible.

   YSlow: Rules I would pay attention to:
   1. Make fewer HTTP Requests
   3. Add an Expires Header
   4. Gzip components (server related)
   5. Put CSS at the top
   6. Put JS at the bottom (not always possible)
   7. Avoid CSS expressions
   10. Minify JS

   Resources:
   http://getfirebug.com/
   http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
   http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

2. Minify Javascript and CSS
   Minification is the process of compacting your scripts by removing extraneous content such as white space.   In addition, minification can make attempts at refactoring the code to remove redunancies.  If you want to play it safe, only remove white space to ensure your code is still running. The Yahoo compressor is one of the best minifiers out there and reduces both Javascript and CSS by a significant percentage.

   How-to:
   java -jar yuicompressor-x.y.z.jar -o style_minified.css style.css

   add the “–nomunge” to only do whitespace compressions.

   Resources:
   http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/
   http://dojotoolkit.org/docs/shrinksafe
   http://dean.edwards.name/packer/

3. Merge css and js http requests- manually or automated
   Reduce the amount of calls you make to various CSS and JS files by merging them to one URL.  This is more work but will reduce the overhead.

   How-to – manually:
   This is really easy, take your css and copy and paste them together into one file.  Make sure your preserve the order of your css.  The same applies to your Javascript files.

   How-to – Automated – google or your own custom:
   Google has a php script which can take various sources and return them as one.

   Resources:
   http://code.google.com/p/minify/
   http://reinholdweber.com/?p=37

4. CSS Background Images are bad – usually
   Using a div for all of your images with a background image is not that great for performance as it requires more calls.  I’ll be the first to admit it’s my favourite way to design, but you should try to avoid them where possible.  In addition, for hover states try using one large image with background-position calls to show specific parts.

   How to:
   Use background-position to select which portion of the large image you want to show.  There isn’t much more to explain.

5. GZip
   Gzipping files on the server side will reduce the amount of overhead significantly.  It adds a bit more on the server side, but generally the pay off should be well worth it.

   How to:
   It depends on your server situation, but here’s a snippet:
   mod_gzip_on Yes
   mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript$

   Refer to http://snipplr.com/view/9017/gzip-your-components/ for details

   Resources:
   http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip
   http://snipplr.com/view/9017/gzip-your-components/

Conclusion
That wraps up the simple part of this tutorial… really, that’s it!  The focus of these posts is to keep them simple and easy to use.  You may be surprised at how much faster your application runs when you apply these techniques.  I hope you found these useful or at least agree that these are good practices to apply.  In the next part I will examine more advanced methods of optimizing your application.

Feedback
Your feedback is always appreciated.  In addition to commenting, if you have more resources, please add them to my growing list of links through this buncholink

It’s a simple way to organize a group of links together.

At work the other day, I was forwarded an email with a co-worker asking for my thoughts to a question. The question went along the lines of: “How many emails in a defined time period should we be sending to our customers? How many emails is too many?” My answer? One!

But really, how many emails is too many?

Here were my thoughts on the matter.

When people sign up for a mail-out, it’s likely because they are:

• curious as to what they’re going to receive
• interested in something they saw from a related communication
• enticed by some sort of incentive, or
• doing a competitive analysis to see what other organizations are doing with their mailouts, or trying to get their hands on an HTML email template they can use as a basis for designing one for themselves

As long as that person gets something valuable out of the mailing, they’ll stay subscribed.

When do they unsubscribe? Anyone read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell? I think people unsubscribe when a series of things happen that tips them over the edge:

1. They receive a message that doesn’t have any content that speaks directly to their interests, and
2. They receive similar messages from other sources (either from you or from completely different lists they’ve signed up for), and
3. They look in their inbox and suddenly see it’s getting full of emails that they don’t need or want or have any useful need for

Once those 3 things happen, they’ll be on the verge of unsubscribing and all it will take to push them over the edge is one more email from you on a day when their inbox is already really full. So to answer, “How many emails is too many?” in this case it really is just one!

The Key to Email is VALUE

Often a company will be sending out regularly scheduled emails – for example a monthly newsletter or a weekly update of recent discussions in their online forums. In general, these will be well-received provided the recipients signed up to receive the mailings.

In many other cases, though, people will still sign up to receive e-newsletters, not know for sure how often or when they’ll receive the email.

In general, when you send an email to someone and they aren’t expecting it (for example, they didn’t sign up to receive a regularly-scheduled mail-out or they didn’t first send you an email expecting a reply), it stands to reason that they’ll be surprised when they receive your message. People like surprises when they get something. People don’t like surprises when they are asked for something.

So following this line of thought, if you’re sending mail-outs that people aren’t expecting, you’ll want to make sure you are giving people something that is of value to them (i.e. something that’s meaningful, relevant, generally interesting to them, or has actual monetary value).

But what about the “should” from a marketer’s standpoint?

On the flip side of all this is the perspective of what you “should” do to help build your business and your brand. And on this side of the communications, you “should” be sending out as many emails as it takes to keep your existence in people’s minds.

You’re competing for their attention and need to do what you can to keep it when you get it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to send a lot of emails – it could just mean you have to send them one or two a month that will grab enough of their attention to get them to visit the website.

Provided you then have something of value on the website, that will be enough to keep them coming back or it will at least be enough to stop them from going away the next time you send them another message.

What about email marketing usability?

As far as usability goes, Jakob Nielsen is talked about a lot in circles of usability. The guy drives me nuts sometimes, but he also often has useful (or at least thought provoking) info on emails, for example check out these links:

What do you think?

There’s no place for unsolicited email, but what about semi-unsolicited email? What kind of emails do you like to receive? What do you value when it comes to email offers or promotions? What drives you up the wall and prompts you to unsubscribe?

First, It Was the iPhone

A handful of things have changed in the handheld landscape in the last few years. For one, Apple introduced the iPhone that rolled out with Safari installed on the phone. To the average consumer, having a web browser on their mobile phone gave it a nice “oooo ahhh” touch (pun intended). Suddenly you could browse around websites and it would actually look similar to what you would see on your computer. For web designers and developers, this is a much more monumental change than we, as a community, have given it credit for.

With a full-fledged web browser now installed on something like an iPhone, the barrier of entry has just been significantly lowered to offer web-based services for small-screen, portable devices. While the iPhone still has relatively small market penetration, it’s the first push towards truly leveraging the community of web developers and entrepreneurs into the handheld world.

And Then Came the GPhone (Android and Chrome)

The next big step is coming from Google – and it’s actually two or three smaller steps. The first step started with the work happening around Android – Google’s open source operating system for handheld devices. Starting with their acquisition of the Android team back in 2005, Google has clearly been planning a move into the wireless/handheld device world for at least a few years. Rumours surrounded this move, with many suggesting that Google would be unveiling a “GPhone”. It may have taken a few years, but sure enough, Google will be unveiling a phone, running off of Android, in the coming weeks.

The other big step is one that has garnered a lot of attention – the release of Chrome, Google’s web browser. While the attention around Chrome was largely surrounding the new features that would make Chrome stick out from today’s standard of web browsers like FireFox, IE, Safari, and Opera, little attention has been given to the potential impact and perhaps the real value of all this for Google.

By first rolling out an open source OS for mobile devices, and then also rolling out an open source browser, and now packaging it all into their own phones, Google will be making a strong push to establish itself in the world of mobile devices.

iPhone, Android, Chrome – What Does This Mean For Web Professionals?

Here are some thoughts and suggestions:

Learn How to Design for Small Screen Interfaces

A good place to start would be to do some Googling on “designing for handheld devices” or “designing for small screen interfaces”. There has been a lot of talk in this space for a number of years now, and even though earlier discussions would tend to revolve around the challenge of designing for 100 different versions of handheld web browsers, the underlying principles of design will hold true now as much as they did then.

For example, you might want to check out this buncholinks on designing for small screen interfaces:

Make Sure Your Current Websites Render Properly in Chrome and Safari (as well as FireFox, Opera and…well, ok…IE too)

Even though both Safari and Chrome are developed using WebKit – an open source web browser engine – sites are reportedly being rendered differently in each. As web designers, we aren’t in the clear yet – you’ll still need to do cross-browser testing. But at least now when you do it for Chrome or Safari, you’ll know what your website will look like in a handheld device as well.

Look for New Business Opportunities in Mobile Devices

Think about what opportunities are out there to merge the types of things you’re building on the web, with the types of things you already personally do on your own mobile device. Think about the things you could start doing now with near ubiquitous access to the web. For example, have you heard of Tagga?

Rethink How Your Website Is Going to be Used

As the Google phone and the iPhone gain more market share, there will inevitably be more people browsing the web through small screens. Take a look at your website right now (through an actual iPhone if you can), and do a quick assessment of how your website is going to perform for your visitors. If you’re about to embark on a new site redesign, you may even want to consider factoring in design for small screen interfaces as one of the requirements (even if it’s a secondary or “nice to have” requirement).

Keep A Close Eye on Your Web Stats

We’ve already started to see the first hints of web visitors peering at our websites through the eyes of tiny interfaces. In the stats, these show up as screen resolutions somewhere in the neighbourhood of 320×240. Keep an eye on the relative percentage of visitors you have that are checking out your site through these small eyes. Most right now are probably just curious what your website looks like on their shiny new phone, but soon enough these people will be legitimately trying to use your website through that small screen, they’ll also soon be expecting to see the same standards on that small screen as what they see on their 15.4″ monitor, and eventually the bigger players in the web will be catering to this – so you don’t want to get left behind!

The Bottom Line

The world wide web is about to get an awful lot wider – and it’ll be in large part thanks to the true arrival of the web onto smaller and smaller interfaces. With web2.0 apps that bring software-like functionality in byte-size packages, all processed through the power of cloud computing, it won’t be long before the power we now see on traditional computers gets leveraged through mobile devices. The change is coming – the question is what are you going to do about it?…And are you ready?

Reason 1 – Planning for Usability Testing Helps Keep Your Project On Track

Even if it only gets one row in the GANTT chart, having usability testing as a step in your overall project plan will give you a tangible goal to work towards that will help you move forward on your overall project.

In order to run any form of usability test, you will need to come up with mockups or prototypes of some form – be it crude Photoshop mockups or paper prototypes, or functional wireframes with a bare bones design – you need to have something to run the test on.

In this respect, having usability testing as part of your project plan helps break your big project down into smaller, more manageable chunks, which in turn helps you keep on top of your progress.

Reason 2 – Usability Testing Will Teach You Things You Didn’t Know Before

If you get a chance to do usability testing with a good variety of your targeted end-users, you may be surprised at what you find. Quite often, new insights come from watching someone use your website. What was natural and intuitive to you and your team suddenly doesn’t seem so logical when 4 out 5 of your testers can’t complete the task you originally set out for them to do.

Usability testing also gives your site a fresh set of eyes to help uncover new ideas and even possibly new features to add to your site. Sometimes it’s just a passing comment from one of your testers that might spawn the idea for a new core feature that you would never have thought of on your own.

You and your team probably also have some hunches on what will work with your target audience – maybe it’s something like a colour scheme to something more complex like the steps required to recover your username and password. Usability testing gives you that feedback to confirm your hunches.

Reason 3 – Usability Testing Gives You Data to Back Your Decisions

Unless you’re working on a personal project without any real accountability to another stakeholder or client, odds are the website or application you are working on will have to go through some levels of approval and sign off. In this process, you will be questioned about a design decision or asked to squeeze something else in. For example:

• Why is the font so small?
• Is there a reason why we can’t use the full width of the page?
• We have another 12 links that need to get into the sub navigation. Where can we put them in?
• That link down there needs to go into the top row of links on the homepage. Why isn’t it there?
• The photo on the homepage needs to be bigger. Like, way bigger. Like, ten times bigger than it is right now.

Usability testing has the potential to give you instant data to help back your design decisions. Armed with information gleaned from watching real people actually use your site (or working prototype), you will have greater credibility and more to stand on than just your opinion. Usability testing will give you real metrics you can use to support your position.

Reason 4 – Usability Testing Gives You Documentation that You Can Re-use for Future Projects

If you do a good job of documenting the findings from your usability testing, that whole process itself will serve as a valuable start the next go-around. Depending on the type of project and work being done, you may even be able to use the findings from previous tests to help get you and your team off on the right foot moving forward on your next project.

Similar to how usability testing gives you data to help defend your decisions to clients and stakeholders, that same data arms you with some information that you can use yourself. This is particularly useful when you’re confronted with making a seemingly arbitrary decision during your design phase.

Having a completely blank slate with endless possibilities and no constraints can actually be a very challenging and even frustrating space to design in – this is when arbitrary decisions are at their worst. It’s much easier to make a design decision when you have some form of constraint or guideline, really anything that can set you in one direction. And this is exactly what previous usability testing results can sometimes provide. With some baseline information on what worked and what didn’t work in the last design, you now have a starting point for this next design.

Reason 5 – Usability Testing Gives You an Opportunity to Field Test New Ideas

Usability testing doesn’t have to always be about testing something you’ve created. In fact, quite often, you could use the same exercise to test something that is, at this stage, nothing more than an idea.

In sales they would call this something like the foot in the door technique where you get someone to agree to a large request by first having them agree to a smaller one. What you’d want to do here is a little less sinister and more along the lines of trying to make the most of this valuable time you have with and end-user of your site.

Run your usability test and get your data, but then also try running some of your as-of-yet-unproven ideas and see what sort of feedback you get.

Face it, there’s definitely some administrative overhead that comes with running usability tests. If nothing else, there’s the simple task of scheduling and taking the time from people’s days to get them into the sessions. You might as well make the best use of this time and use it as a real opportunity to uncover some of the most valuable information you’ll get.

But Wait, There’s More!

This is all fine and dandy, but let’s bring this back full circle – what if you’re under a tight timeline, or don’t have the budget to get a robust usability test into your project cycle? All this is a lot of fluff if you can’t actually run the tests.

Well, usability testing doesn’t have to be that hard, and it can be done at any time in your development lifecycle – even after you’ve launched. You probably already engage in some form of usability testing yourself when you’re building your websites or applications, probably without even realizing it. We’ll go into these and other topics in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, let me know what you think! Why else would you do usability testing? Or why shouldn’t you do usability testing? If you’ve wanted to do usability testing before, why haven’t you? What’s holding you back?

Without a doubt there are at least two faces to any open source publishing platform. There is the elegance of the code, and then elegance in the visual design. Sometimes it’s this difference between the ease of working with the source code vs. the ease of designing a visual interface that will account for why one boutique shop will roll out websites with online-community-type features in, say, Joomla, while another will roll out websites that do more or less the same things, but in another tool, say, Drupal.

Coming up with a sharp new design for a website is one thing, and implementing it into a working website is another – this is particularly true when it comes to taking a Photoshop mock-up and splicing it up to fit the markup and code generated by open source software. And unfortunately, there is no good way to get a good feel for this other than getting your hands dirty yourself, or talking to someone else who has (and whose skill level you know and trust).

When it comes to the design aspect of open source software, not all products were created equal – some open source products are easier to design for than others.

Drupal, for example, is infamous for offering incredibly powerful programming possibilities, but sometimes to the point where designing beautiful interfaces becomes a real challenge for even the best designers. Now that being said, there are some amazing sites out there that are driven by Drupal.

The other alternative that will be available to you is to turn back to the “source” and make use of some community-created templates (for example: Drupal Themes, or WordPress Themes). This is an excellent alternative, especially if you’re really under the gun to churn out a hot-looking site pronto. This can also be an incredibly helpful way to learn more about what’s involved in customizing the designs for the open source tool.

Key Design Skills for Customizing Themes and Templates

There are a few key skills that you’ll absolutely need to have “in-house” if you’re going to tackle any design work that touches the source code:

1. Expert Knowledge of CSS

Any open source software you download worth its lick will have templates that rely heavily on CSS for its overall look and feel. Knowing how to edit someone else’s CSS can sometimes be trickier than starting from a blank slate and creating a completely fresh stylesheet. Either way, you’ll need to have someone on your team who knows their CSS.

2. Familiarity with Templating engines

By “templating engines” I’m referring to things like Smarty or the overall framework for how Drupal or WordPress pieces together what becomes the template of your site. While it would be ideal to have the in-house knowledge of the exact platform you’re using, the reality is that different platforms have their own methods for creating the overall look and feel of their sites, so you’ll be just as well off with a generalist who is able to figure out how a particular platform pieces together the programming logic, markup, and styles. Just because you know one, doesn’t mean you’ll automatically know them all. But if you get the gist of how a template engine/system works, you should be able to adapt to figure out the others.

3. Past Experience Customizing a Design

Ok, this one’s admittedly a vicious circle – how do you leverage past experience if you don’t have any? Well this is where it comes back to how the only way you’ll REALLY learn what’s involved in customizing the design of an open source platform is to get your hands dirty and start trying it.

The point here, though, is that if, for example, you already have one or two people with past experience modifying a WordPress template whereas no one has yet tackled a Drupal theme, this should really weigh in on your overall decision-making process of what tool to use. It’s nice if you have the time to learn the new tools, but if you’re pressed for time and need to roll out what you can by the deadline, go with what you know.

4. Past Experience Implementing & Modifying Extended Themes/Templates/Plugins

There are a lot of really good – and freely available – templates that others in the community have created and shared. And what you may quickly find out is that your time will be better spent taking one of these extensions of the core templates, and then making the customizations on these rather than the original default templates.

This, again, is an area where past experience will do you well – you really won’t know (and can’t appreciate) how hard or easy it will be to implement and then modify an extended theme or template until you’ve gone ahead and tried it.

Similar to how you should be selective of which plugins and modules to use, you can apply the same measures to help you be selective of the themes and templates you set up for your site – how active is the template designer? What sorts of questions are being asked by others who are using the template? Is the original template creator still using the template themselves?

These are just some thoughts, tips, suggestions. What do you think? What else would you be looking for in a designer? What would you want to know before diving into redesigning an open source template?

In this post, I will discuss 5 tips and tools that the php community has provided to speed up development time and improve code quality.  These should help you out if you don’t already know them, but if you do I would like to hear what you use to speed up your development time.

1. Framework with the Model View Controller (MVC):
   This is old news, the MVC pattern is an industry accepted pattern to improve the organization and overall quality of your code.  Put your database code in the model layer, visual UI code in the view, and business application logic in the controller.  If you don’t know the MVC layer, you really should.

   My choice: Zend Framework
   Why?  Easy to pick and choose what you want to use; strong momentum behind it; good documentation.

   Resources:
   http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.controller.html
   http://www.cakephp.org
   http://www.symfony-project.org
   http://codeigniter.com/

2. AJAX Frameworks:
   Also old news, you should become familiar with a common AJAX framework.  Scriptaculous, mootools, jquery, and dojo to name a few… these frameworks can all do similar things and will make your clients go ooh and ahh.  Actually, these days AJAX interaction is become standard.  Being a Zend developer, I would suggest acquainting yourself with the Dojo framework.  It’s probably the largest and most complex of them all but is very powerful.

   My choice: Dojo
   Why?  Zend has adopted it into the zend framework; easy to extend; large resource of reusable widgets to use.

   Resources:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_framework
   http://www.phpframeworks.com/
   http://mootools.net/
   http://jquery.com/
   http://script.aculo.us/
   http://www.prototypejs.org/
   http://dojotoolkit.org/

3. Integrated Development Environment (IDE):
   I won’t go into much detail here, if you’re developing objected oriented code or using a lot of libraries you should get a good IDE.  Eclipse PDT is my favourite because it’s free and has some very useful plugins to extend it.  My basic requiremnts are resource/file management of libraries, auto completion, basic syntax validation, and basic debugging tools.

   My choice:  Eclipse PDT
   Why?  It’s free and provides all the basic features an IDE should have.

   Resources:
   http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/
   http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/
   http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-ide/index.html

4. Database Creation/Management Software:
   Managing a database schema can become tedious error prone thing to do.  If you don’t have a dedicated database team, and in many cases are the web and database developer, then you should be doing more than handling your schema in mysql (or your database of choice).  MySql has recently released workbench, a database management software that is really powerful.  I prefer DBDesigner 4 right now because it’s simple to use and feeds into propel db well.  But I plan on moving over to workbench in the near future as it’s really the continuation of DBDesigner.

   My choice:  DBDesigner, but not for long.
   Why?  It’s simple to manage your database schema visually and exports well.

   Resources:
   http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/
   http://fabforce.net/dbdesigner4/

5. Object Relational Mapping (ORM):
   If you don’t know what this is, it’s basically a way of mapping your database tables to objects.  It’s so you don’t have to think about how to connect your logic/business code to the database.  Also, if you use tools like Propel DB you don’t have to code this as it generates it all for you.  While your application may not perform as well as with straight SQL, you will code faster and you can find ways to tweak bottle neck cases.

   My choice:  Propel DB
   Why?  It’s easy to use and integrate into the zend framework; There aren’t many other options.

   Resources:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-relational_mapping
   http://propel.tigris.org/

Wrap Up / Further thoughts

I hope this was useful for you.  Everyone has their own combination that works for them, and in a lot of cases the company forces you to use one.  Where I work, we can use whatever combination we want and I know there are many.  I would like to hear what your setup is like, what IDE, framework, and OS works for you and why?

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