Open Source Software

I ran into this particularly pesky limitation on a recent project and, as in all IE6 related matters, became intensely irritated and angry. It turns out, that for both IE6 and IE7, only the first 30 <style></style> and < link type="text/css" ... /> are parsed. On Drupal, you can easily reach this limit between the core style sheets, module contributed style sheets, and your own theme's stylesheet.

Using Drupal's Views module, You have created a View that aggregates the Teasers for some collection of nodes, that is the type of view is set to Teasers. You want to them the teasers, but there are two stumbling blocks. Currently (8/7/08), the theme wizard for views only generates the code to theme views of type List. Also, in Drupal 5, Teaser and Full Node views do not pass on to your theming function the values of the fields that you have defined in your view. The latter, I would consider a bug.

Calais is a free webservice that allows developers to add meta-information to their content (e.g. articles, blog posts). Behind the scenes, Calais essentially adds keyword summaries to content, making it easier for computers to "understand" what that content is about.

Calais does a fairly decent job of tagging content.

We've been using Drupal more and more here at Forum One. One of its nicer aspects is a web interface to some functionality we had for programmers in SyntaxCMS: the ability to set up a "view" of a content type, so that you only got, say, all blog posts tagged with "Environment." This is pretty powerful; it lets a savvy Internet user with no specific programming skills to set up lots of functionality by clicking a few widgets.

Looking at some recent licensing boo-boos, we came up with a nifty little tool to help you find the right license for your open source software. Any feedback would be appreciated, whether involving data correction or other features / categories you'd like added.