New to Drupal… Lets get started!

As I told in the previous post on this subject, the best way to learn Drupal is installing and playing around with it!

But before we start, how about creating an account at drupal.org? I think that’s a pretty good idea!

Let’s go then…

Installing Drupal (version 6.6 at posting time)

In won’t go into details about how to install Drupal, all you need is PHP (I’m with PHP 5, MySQL or SQLite, and of course, a web-server). If you are thinking about running Drupal in localhost you’ll be more than happy with the amount of videos and tutorials on how to do this installation (WAMP on a windows Machine, MAMP on a Mac and LAMP if you’re with Linux. (never mind if all the links are leading you to the Lullabot website… It’s just that I like them a lot )

In my case I have Drupal running with WAMP on my local machine.

New to Drupal… Where to go? How to start?

If being a newbie is so much (not) fun where should I start?

Websites:

1. drupal.org (I won’t even try to describe this website… )
2. lullabot.com (Well, Lullabot was my starting point… You wouldn’t wanna miss the Lullabot Podcast series…)
3. drupalmodules.com | drupal.org/project/Modules (Both your Drupal modules bibles!)
4. drupalmuseum.com (View and experience the power of Drupal!)
5. mustardseedmedia.com (Another source of inspiration! Bob’s video podcast series is a must see…)
6. drupaldojo.com (Yep… it’s really a dojo )
7. drupaltherapy.com (Another very good source!)

First Steps Within Drupal

Today was my 3rd day using Drupal…

As you might know, Drupal is an Open Source Content Management System… Well, Open Source AND Free (very important) and with this very active community (my first drupal install was version 6.2 just a few months ago while my current version is 6.6 (by few months I mean no more than four!).

First of all… My first steps:

AJAX and .NET 2.0 platform

I’ve been without posting for a little time. Meanwhile I started (and finished) reading Daniel Woolston’s “Pro Ajax and the .net 2.0 platform” book.

In the end I’ve learned quite a lot about ASP .net 2.0, but most important, I was quite impressed with chapter 7 (well, not the chapter itself, but with the different set of libraries and frameworks for implementing AJAX in ASP.net 2.0).

From all the different libraries, maybe, Michael Schwarz’s Ajax.NET is the most famous. But there are also Jason Diamond’s Anthem (I’ll be covering it on this post), Daniel Zeiss’s ComfortASP.NET, MagicAjax.NET and Microsoft’s Atlas (especially useful for those wanting to bring some of the Ajax’s magic to the former ASP websites (please note that I’m not calling them ASP applications).

Sparklines in Flex

My last project was to build a dashboard where the main goal was to prove that it was possible to build Decision Support System using sparklines as the main data visualization component.
So I went searching for sparkline implementations and I found it on several programming languages such as PHP, Ruby and even VB.net. Here is what I consider a good implementation in PHP. Nonetheless, I had to build then using Flex 2 or Flash 9, so I went Flex 2 + Flex Charting API.
Just before getting in more details about the implementation there are a few issues that must be kept in mind when building Sparklines: