Du Vien Trang is a Freelance Web Designer / Developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. This is his portfolio, blog and digital playground.

Today, i've had some free time to start a new Drupal 6 theme which i'm quite excited about because it uses the colour module so the template colour can be changed on the fly without needing to mess around with too much CSS.

Part of the reason to use the colour module was that i didn't fine a lot of templates out there for Drupal that harness the power of the colour module. As i was building the template and trying to integrate the colour module, i realise reason why the colour module isn't used too much, possibly because it is time consuming creating those transparency images needed.  read more »

Talk from The So. Cal. Linux Expo, Febuary 8-10, 2008 in Los Angeles, CA - Roy Rubin - Building an Ecommerce Site with Open Source Tools / An Overview of Open Source Commerce Solutions.

The talk isn't just about Magento, the first half of the session covers other popular open source ecommerce product in the present market.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook could go open source possibly as early as next week.

Not sure if this pressure is put on them when Google announced OpenSocial which allows users to share data between many different popular social network sites.

This could prove to be a very smart move by Zuckerberg if each social networks build using Facebook open source code allows them to setup networks of small private/public groups that could form an array of interconnected networks around the official Facebook site.

However, it is not clear how much of the open source code will be made available to the general public, or if the story is even true at this point?.

Via Dries Buytaert, Rob Purdie is announcing the relaunch of Amnesty International’s site. The new site was built using Drupal and Alfresco. It is interesting to see how many people have commented on both posts who are craving more information about Drupal and Alfresco integration and it is no wonder. As I mentioned last year in this post, Optaros sees the two offerings as highly complementary–they aren’t (yet) competitors.  read more »

What can i say, Dennis Liu the creator behind this music video (or viral marketing) is an absolute genius. 11 days after the video was released, he's already been offered jobs from high profile companies, not surprising at all.

You can read more of this story at Cult of Mac.

Oh! don't miss out the one created for Microsoft Windows as well. :)

As you know Internet Explorer does not support PNG transparency and there are many javascripts out there to fix this problem. Many of them work really well but seems to require more effort and at time difficult to implement especially when dealing with developing on a CMS.  read more »

Today, while developing a new site with Magento 1.0, i ran into a severe problem. The admin menu no longer worked anymore.

After searching high and low i came over a forum post to resolve this js issue. However, the Head.php file did not do the trick. Only when i slightly modified the code taken from the following page on that the same forum post that it resolved the issue.

I've post it up here as well in case some Magento users may have ran into the same problem.

Download the file - Head.php and unzip the file. Replace app/code/core/Mage/Page/Block/Html/Head.php with attached file. Please backup your old Head.php file before you apply this one.

Developing new modules for Drupal 6? Porting older modules? Packt Publishing has just released a new book, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development, by Matt Butcher. This book is targeted toward PHP programmers interested in Drupal 6 module development.

The book takes a hands-on approach. Each chapter walks through the development of a module, theme, or installation profile. As the reader progresses through the book, she or he will be able to create increasingly sophisticated Drupal modules.

If you're new to Drupal development (but have PHP development experience), this book will get you developing modules right away. Are you a more seasoned Drupal developer just looking to get some modules updated? This book focuses on many of the new features, changes, and improvements made in Drupal 6. Check out the sample chapter Creating Our First Module (1.3M PDF) to get a feel for how the book is written.

Read full article: New Drupal Book: Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

If you have started with Drupal and want to expand your knowledge, you either need to sit and spend time on Drupal Handbooks or buy some Drupal books.

Here I am giving some good collection of PDFs available on the web, which can be used for beginner or intermediate developers.  read more »

Congratulations to my good friend Muslim and Ilse who are getting married in June. As part of the announcement, they have kindly asked me to develop a website for only friends and families to view.

The website is at: muslimandilseswedding.co.uk and is a private site for invites only. It was built using Drupal 6 and allows only them to edit the contents while guest visitors can only view the site.

Once the wedding is over, there will be a gallery section added to the site which will allow everyone who attended the wedding to upload their wonderful photos.

I can't wait to be at the wonderful wedding day to finally see Muslim and Ilse tie the knot.

This is a short video that shows how to use Drupal's advanced search feature on Drupal.org. Many people find searching on d.o overwhelming and often overlook a few easy ways to narrow down searches. This is the second video in a series about getting involved with Drupal and utilizing community resources that started with getting an account on Drupal.org.

View Video clip at Lullabot

HTML Emails can be a nightmare when there are so many different email services, and all seems to operate and render emails quite differently from each other.

Here is an article that should help ease the process

Read the Article - HTML Emails - Taming the Beast

Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).  read more »

PHP's next edition, V6, includes new features and syntax improvements that will make it easier to use from an object-oriented standpoint. Other important features, such as Unicode support in many of the core functions, mean that PHP V6 is positioned for better international support and robustness.

IBM has written an interesting article on this.

Dan from Inigo has kindly emailed me a link for a Drupal alternative admin panel called Rootcandy by Sotak. It is a customisable admin template that tries to tackle usability issues by rearranging the admin panel interface. Latest version now integrates with colour module (as used on the Garland theme) so users can change the colour of the admin panel to whatever suits them.  read more »

It has been almost three years since the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0. During that time we've seen community fragmentation and frustration resulting from Sun's heavy involvement with the office suite's development, and even a third-party online version that provides editing and collaboration features. Now, the open-source office suite is back with a new 3.0 beta release, ushering in a handful of major enhancements, broader file format support, and a solid batch of evolutionary new features. Ars Technica takes the new beta for a spin to see if our productivity increases.

Read full article