YWAM Webmasters | Helping you design and build your website

Although still in Beta at the moment, DrupalGardens.com by Acquia has begun to offer Drupal websites as a service.

This will open the door for many people to use the powerful Drupal platform to build their own websites with the help of point and click web design tools.

Keep an eye on DrupalGardens.com for more exciting information.

Drupal project founder Dries Buytaert keeps a list of high profile companies, governments, and individuals using Drupal to design and build their websites. Check out these lists:

• http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites (All Drupal sites)
• http://buytaert.net/tag/fortune-500 (Just the Drupal sites by Fortune 500 companies)
• http://buytaert.net/tag/non-profit (Just the Drupal sites by non-profit organizations)

IE6 has long been a thorn in the side of many webmasters trying to design and build their websites due to the non-standard way that it handled HTML and CSS. I got this email in my inbox today from Google announcing that they will no longer support IE6 in 2010.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

In order to make your YWAM website more attractive (and standards compliant), you should design and build a favicon.ico icon.

The favicon.ico format is generally made up of one 16x16 pixel image, saved in the Microsoft Icon format. However, the .ico format supports multiple images allowing you to create images in several different resolutions and color depths. It is good practice to include at least 16x16 and a 32x32 pixel images, both of which are used in most web browsers.

In trying to design and build a favicon.ico icon for this and other YWAM websites that I maintain, I found the process not quite as straightforward as I expected. You can't simply create an image and call it favicon.ico.

I found several useful tools for creating your favicon online:

• Favicon.cc allows you to create your icon using your mouse, or by uploading your image.
• DynamicDrive.com allows you to create your icon in 16x16, 32x32, and 48x48 pixels all at once.

I ended up using Adobe Fireworks and a free plugin by John Dunning to create my favicon.ico icon.

After finishing my own icon, I found an article called Creating a multi-resolution favicon including transparency with the GIMP which explains what I believe to be the best method for creating your favicon.ico icon using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

I have attached a copy of the favicon.ico file that I created using the YWAM logo. I have not yet applied it to this site, since I plan to make a new one using GIMP, and apply it only after choosing a new theme for YWAM Webmasters.com.

Open source software like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress have grown in both popularity and functionality over the past few years, and now provide one of the best options for any YWAM base (Or any other non-profit organization) planning to build a new website.

My experience with open source Content Management Systems (CMS) is limited to Drupal. After a long comparison, I chose Drupal because of the features it offered, which have proven to be very useful to our YWAM Missions Center.

The most obvious advantage to using Drupal for our YWAM website is that it is completely free. This means that I can get our whole team involved in the project, and even teach other YWAM bases how to use Drupal for their own websites, without worrying about the cost. While developing the YWAM Russia website a few years ago using Dreamweaver and the companion program Contribute, I ran into numerous problems trying to implement collaboration with our other staff around the country. In then end, I was forced to abandon Dreamweaver and seek an open source server based CMS. Drupal, while a little challenging at first, has proven to be the best fit for our websites.

In the coming months, as I begin to develop the YWAM Webmasters website, I hope to share all that I have learned about using Drupal, and promote the use of open source software in YWAM.