• Organizing Wordcamp Twin Cities 2009
• Converting rocking HTML Designs into rocking WordPress Templates
• WordPress Overview for Beginners
• WordPress as a CMS

Details:

We have a thriving interactive community that presumably should be interested in things WordPress. Any takers?

Email jmyers at visi dot com or @jaymyers

Below is a quick run-down of what I’ve seen out there. What are you using?

Zen-Cart
Well-known and well used, with years of development behind it and an active community of developers and supporters. Powerful features, integrates with any number of payment gateways, and plenty of free add-ons/modules available, but still very old school looking. Will it ever get to Zen Cart 2.0?

UberCart
 Due to its integration with Drupal, UberCart seems to be taking off with a lot of developers. Allows for custom product fields, anonymous checkout, and one-page checkout.

VirtueMart
All the standard features you’d expect, but like UberCart and Drupal, VirtueMart’s main virtue seems to be its integration with Joomla and Mambo.

Magento
One of the most attractive packages out of the box, with the ability to manage multiple stores under one admin. Paid support available. Still very new, just out of beta, I’ve heard mixed reviews of how ready-for-primetime this software is yet.

PrestaShop
Just ran across this European offering, with a neat, easy-to-understand backend admin. Doesn’t seem to have a lot of payment gateways supported as of yet.

Next month we have a slight twist to our meetups — Lynn Smith, local IA/IxD pro, will be presenting a demo of a very creative, non-facilitated “discount” usability test/heuristic evaluation, followed by open discussion about the methodology used, its rigor and validity — basically, “Is this a good way to gather feedback?” Lynn and her partners created an Axure prototype, sent out an email survey to 3 distinct audiences — UX practitioners, friends familiar with Zamby, and others not familiar with Zamby — and used the data to iterate the design and get another round of feedback. It was CHEAP and RAPID usability test at its best.

I anticipate a VERY lively, dynamic and rich discussion! Come share your thoughts and questions, and be prepared to be inspired!

Here are details of the meeting:

If you have questions, please feel free to contact either myself or Garrick (email@garrickvanburen.com).

Happy December!

Kristi Olson

http://www.kolson7.com

They’re $599 each, and if you’re interested, sign up at http://axuretraining.eventbrite.com/

Where does this experience come from?
From my perspective, the fastest, safest way to get the experience is working for an established player. Then once you gain enough experience, maybe you want to try something different – you leave and start your own thing. In the design world locally – Target is a great example of this. Larsen Design also comes to mind. Less of an industry or community, more of an ecosystem.

This combination of established players and fresh startups has made Minnesota’s design community one of the strongest and most reputable in the country. And it factored highly into my move here a few years back.

Dan Grigsby says, it’s time to do the same for the software business. I agree. There are a few players here as Dan mentions; Adobe, Dow Jones, and others, with Microsoft on the way.

There’s room for quite a few more.

“All in, fully loaded, it costs less than half as much to build software here as on the coasts.” – Dan Grigsby

“onshore work is often qualitatively higher, is created faster and innovation is higher.” – Steve Borsch

“By encouraging startups on the small end as well as trying to bring more established companies to the state, both ends of the spectrum are covered.” – Luke Francl

http://dean.edwards.name/weblog/2008/01/ie7-2/

This is a script that Dean created several years ago to make IE6 more standards compliant. It was interesting at the time, but I never got around to using it.

This past week I’ve been dealing with some very annoying IE6 issues, and I’m thinking this is really the way to go from now on. You don’t even need to download the .js file, as you can now link directly to it from Google Code:

http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/

This is also a major update and Dean did something fairly ingenious, IMHO. The IE7 script is a script that fixes all the bugs in IE6 that IE7 (the browser) fixes. That will make IE6 and IE7 about as close as one can get. But then there’s also the IE8 script, which does everything IE7 (the script) does, but adds some other fixes that even IE7 (the browser) didn’t get around to fixing.

That missing feature was being open source. With that checked off, I expect adoption to pick up and for Connector development to pick up rapidly.

I’ve always thought Connector would make a great extended family address book. It’s just about time to find out.

[1] I still want to use my trusted iCal, Mail, Address Book, Finder combo – with Connector synching things up in the background. I prefer to use Connector – and all browser-based productivity apps as a point of reference, not a point of origin.

Microsoft SharePoint seems to be penetrating all areas of the web as of late. It’s been around for quite a while, but the latest version seems to have built a good amount of momentum and anyone in moderately sized organization has likely at least heard of it, if not faced it in person.

My new role is now SharePoint admin. I have mixed feelings about it, to say the least. On the plus side, I am learning something new that appears to be a highly marketable skill set. It’s just that I’m not sure if I want that particular skill set on my resume. It’s like having your boss at the ad agency find out that you know Powerpoint. Soon enough, you end up just doing Powerpoint presentations all day long for clients. ;0)

I thought I’d give a quick SharePoint primer and then point out a few links that have recently sprung up specifically about SharePoint and web standards and accessibility, since that’s typically the first question we web developer have about a given CMS.

What is SharePoint?

The biggest drawback is a lack of real documentation and whitepaper/case studies. Even talking with MS themselves gave me the impression that even they aren’t fully aware of what SharePoint really is. Not that that surprises me, as it is a rather large, versatile application and, well, this is MS we’re talking about anyways.

In my words, SharePoint is Duct Tape. It’s rarely the BEST solution for a particular need, but it’s certainly usable and you’ll find all sorts of uses for it if you have it laying around, even if it’s slightly ugly. That’s the good.

At its core, SharePoint is an excellent tool for making lists. Task lists. Lists of links. Document lists. Lists of people. Etc. This makes it a great utility for centrally organizing, sharing, and collaborating on information within your organization. It’s (of course) highly integrated with MS Office. You save documents directly to SharePoint. People can email information to SharePoint. You can subscribe to information updated on SharePoint via email or RSS. For us, out of the box, SharePoint will ultimately be a replacement for cluttered email in boxes full of attachments, shared network drives, and multiple copies of outdated documents scattered across individidual hard drives. For that alone, SharePoint seems to be a worthy purchase.

Beyond that, SharePoint can do quite a bit more. Microsoft Content Management Server is now integrated (and updated) into SharePoint. There are extensive workflow options with SharePoint to route data automatically through your organization. The Search server is quite powerful, letting you index SharePoint content, content in documents, content on your network, content in other business applications, and even content on other web sites.

At this point, I should make a quick aside and quickly explain the product line. It is confusing, to say the least:

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) – this is the free framework that allows you to easily set up SharePoint team sites. You will need a Windows server with IIS, and then you can install this. You can use the free MS SQL ‘lite’ DB as your back-end database as well. This is a good product and if you are running Windows Servers, you might as well give this a shot.
• Microsoft Offfice Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS) – this is the expensive add-on (likely 6-figures for most orgs) that provides you with the enterprise level features, namely: site-wide navigation tools, site-wide searching tools, CMS features and advanced business intelligence tools. Prior to this version, these features were found in two separate applications: SharePoint Portal 2003 and Microsoft CMS (now discontinued).
• MOSS comes in a variety of licensed flavours. The key thing to understand is that there is only one MOSS application. The differences as far as what you can/can’t do with your particular install are all based on whatever licensing agreement you come up with with Microsoft.
• If you want to run MOSS for any mission-critical purposes, realize that it is best to run it on a farm of at least 4 servers (2 redundant front-end servers, a search indexing server, and a back end DB cluster).

The Bad? Well, it’s expensive if you want the full set of features in Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. Your 10 person non-profit is not going to want to purchase MOSS. It’s also highly tied into Microsoft Office, Microsoft Active Directory, and Microsoft SQL Server. Not a big deal if you are already a MS shop, but something to consider if you are not.

Now, the ugly. Our first major project here is going to be migrating our intranet to MOSS 2007 using a UI and IA created by an outside vendor. Fortunately, SharePoint is based on ASP.net 2.0 features such as MasterPages which will make custom UI design a lot easier than it was before. The problem is that while MS has improved the HTML output in ASP.net 2.0, it’s still quite poor relying on lots and lots of tables and still containing more than a few parsing errors. Example: “A SharePoint Server 2007 home page out of the box, has 154 HTML validation errors” This makes me sad.

As such, I’ve been doing more and more research and this past week has seen several blog posts sprout up about accessibility and standards with SP. I thought I’d compile them here for some afternoon reading for any of you looking at wrangling SharePoint yourselves.

• http://www.sharepoint2007.com/Default.aspx?tabid=23 – an article on SP’s accessibility limitations (ironically on a site using SharePoint and, as such, has a site menu that is not accessible)
• http://alastairc.ac/2007/03/sharepoint-2007-accessibility/ – Alastair Cambell shares some frustrations with SP accessibility and offers some useful links including…
  • …a link to a SP accessibility presentation by the UK SP users group.
  • …and a link to Molly.com and her quest to spread accessibility information throughout Redmond
• http://cameronmoll.com/archives/2007/05/skinning_ms_sharepoint_with_st/ – Cameron Moll shares his experiences with applying a standards based template to SP and includes many useful links, some of which are…
  • How To Create a Minimal Master Page
  • How to Override default CSS
  • A great CSS chart by Heather Soloman that that explains what all of the crazy class names refer to in Sharepoint and where to locate the style declaration to modify them.

Are you using SharePoint? If so, what do you think?

• Adobe Illustrator. Of course, this is the one Adobe is trying to hook us all up with. “AI has a great personality” they say. I’m not buying it*. It’s just the ugly, mean step-sister of Freehand, IMHO. (* And by that, I mean, yea, I probably will buy it at some point. Can’t live with out the CS suite, right?)
• Inkscape. Open source! I want to love this one, and have been fooling around with it on the side even while I was committed to Freehand. It has a lot of potential. It’s no where near Freehand’s level at this point, but seems to have a lot of momentum–some great features on the horizon based on the Inkscape Roadmap include: PDF export, AI import, CorelDraw import, CMYK support (!!), multi-page (not sure what that means, but hope it’s like Freehands multi-page support), and some tech-drawing enhancements.
• LineForm. LineForm is a new player on the field, and seems to have a lot of Buzz and a robust feature set (according to their handy chart). OSX only.
• Stone Works’ Create. Stone Design was one of the first companies to offer OSX-native DTP applications. Alas, I’ve never heard much about their programs. They do suffer from some horrendous application icons, but the promise of ‘free upgrades for life’ seem to outweigh that minor issue.
• Corel Draw. Corel Draw was always the 3rd place finisher behind AI and FH. That said, it seems to have a very loyal fan base. They no longer offer OSX versions (maybe the death of FH will get them to reconsider?) but it’s definitely a mature product. It also comes with a large font library, which is always nice. It also seems to have a little-mentioned ability to create fonts. Huh.
• Xara Xtreme. I don’t know a lot about Xara, other than I hear it suggested often when the topic of alternatives to Freehand pop-up. Windows only.
• Canvas. Another application I don’t know much about, but hear mentioned quite a bit. Comes in both OSX and Windows flavors. It also appears to have custom feature sets targetting cartographers and tech illustrators.

If you’ve used any of the above, please share your thoughts. If I’ve missed any, please mention them!

Update:  Thanks for the comments thus far. I have a few more potential options to add:

• Cenon. Jesse mentioned this open source option in the comments below. It appears to be a bit more CAD/CAM centric moreso than DTP centric, but, that said, it does have a Desktop Publishing module, so it’s likely worth a look-see. Interestingly, it also has a dedicated Astrology tool. I imagine that’s fairly unique in the vector illustration world. ;o)
• Microsoft Expression Design. I had completely forgotten about Microsoft new weapon in the Adobe vs. Microsoft wars. The Expression line of products is based on software MS aquired about 2 years ago. It comes in a couple of flavors (‘Web’ being DreamWeaver’s opponent) and Design is the one focused on vector illustration (amongst other features).