Weekly update #10

[Total days this week: 3.5 ] - had to swiftly get design elements together for a bus advert for the school.

A change I actually made last week (thanks to a tip in my recent training session) was to use the 'Flexible' layout in Panels, which I've now converted my pages to use. This is good for themeing in CSS as it allows me to set each item on the page to be in a different region, and therefore gives me CSS IDs for each of these regions. One place this has come in handy is the 'Events' section on the Home page. In Panels this is two separate components (the calendar, and the next 5 events, underneath it). Using the flexible Panels layout, I can group these two components into the same region, which then means I can use the CSS ID Drupal creates for this to add a rounded box around the two components as if they are just one component.

- Working on CSS and the Views surrounding News items, to make these look a bit nicer (both the summaries of News items and the page you're taken to with the full item).

- As I've been told that setting up video streaming in Drupal (and in general) is a tricky things to do, and something that some hosting providers don't allow, I've been investigating blip.tv, a free video hosting and streaming service. The wikipedia page about blip.tv provides some useful information including the following points. Generally it sounds pretty good:

• Allows Creative Commons licenses to be set for each video
  
• It's free (you can opt in to advertising, of which you share 50% of the revenue with them, but this whacks an ad on top of your video, which we won't be doing)
• Uploaders retain all copyright of their videos
• It doesn't place a 'blip.tv' logo with on top of your video (like YouTube does when you're viewing an embedded video in a site other than YouTube)
• Allows high quality videos, at high resolutions
• Includes options to automatically post links to videos on Facebook/Twitter/iTunes, etc. if you choose to do so
• You can choose whether to allow comments on your video posts (I've turned these off)
  
• Allows people to download your videos by default (I haven't yet worked out whether this can be disabled)
• It converts everything to Flash video, so video is viewable by pretty much anyone

- Upgraded Drupal core to version 6.13

- The CSS for hiding bullets in an unordered list doesn't seem to work very well (i'm not sure if this is something I was doing wrong, or Drupal being picky). There's a solution for it on the Drupal site, which suggests it was the latter!

- CSS work on getting the Mathematics page to look like the design. Once this is done (which I've used Panels for), I can copy the Panel Page for many of the other pages on the site and remove elements not needed from it.