Version 6 of the open source Content Management System, Drupal, was released last week. We are really excited about this release, as we specialize in Drupal and have been playing with the beta releases of this version for many months now. Version 6 represents a significant step forward for Drupal. You can see a breakdown of all the new features here.

Since The Bivings Group builds a lot of websites that feature multiple languages, we are particularly excited by advances in Drupal’s language support. In previous versions of Drupal, to run websites in multiple languages you pretty much had to hack into the Drupal code and make it work using duct tape. It wasn’t pretty. Drupal 6 is the first release to natively handle multiple languages. The new release allows for:

• On the fly creation of multiple versions of the site in different language, including custom URLs.
• The ability for site visitors to set language preferences themselves, so they can control what language the site is in when visiting.
• Support for both left to right and right to left languages out of the box.
• Most importantly, the ability to manage pieces of content in multiple languages.

This last point is particularly important. Below is a quick breakdown of how this works with screenshots taking from a video demo by birdmanx35.

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uTest is preparing to launch its pilot program for community-based software testing. Tester hopefuls can sign up now to be included in the first round of application testing. Tester profiles will include information on the tester’s education, experience, specialization, and available hardware.

Software vendors can use these criteria to hand-pick testers or release their product for the community to review. Companies pay only for unique, verified bugs which begs the question of how testers will avoid working out a bug only to find another tester has beat them to the report. Vendors who participate in the pilot will have those projects tested at 75% off uTest’s standard rates.

uTest has been putting its money where its mouth is by paying testers who report bugs in its own registration process. I made it halfway through the sign-up only to find that I could not complete the forms. Sadly, someone has already submitted the bug so I neither completed registration nor got paid for finding the error.

A social networking component of the system allows testers to rate each other’s performance, influencing the price-per-bug that testers can command and effectively allowing competitors to determine each other’s value.

This seems like a pretty clever application of crowd-sourcing, but the company’s site leaves many questions about implementation unanswered. How will vendors verify the resumés provided by the network of testers? Will testers spend valuable time testing applications only to find that others have already claimed the prize? How will honesty in the performance rating system be guaranteed? How do I finish my registration so that I can get paid?

Read more on uTest’s blog.

In the past we have praised those like Adrian Holovaty who use databases for news reporting.  Holovaty left his job at The Washington Post several months ago to work on a hyperlocal site called EveryBlock. 

It launched several days ago with database driven hyperlocal news and information reporting for Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco.  To report information about specific neighborhoods it culls data from other sources and presents it in a logical manner. 

For instance, it pulls pictures from flickr with geographical tagging and groups them by neighborhood.  Check out photos from Tribeca in New York.  In addition to photos it pulls data from sites like Yelp for restaurant reviews and local government sites for restaurant violation information.  Other information includes: crime reports, graffiti, lost and found listings, and news articles. 

You can see a screen shot below of a business review from Yelp on a map in New York.

Also, for those who use craigslist to find those missed connections (someone whom you saw on the train and are attracted to but didn't have a chance to even talk to), EveryBlock even collects this data and presents it in list or map form. 

The genius of the site is not that it collects this data, but it organizes it in a way that people should find useful.  People can search for multiple items by neighborhood for all this information in one place instead of having to visit multiple sites.  This is much more exciting and user friendly than your typical database.

Let’s face it… soccer has been a flop in the United States, especially when compared to, well, the rest of the known world, where it’s more-or-less religion. The country isn’t totally devoid of fans though. Those who do care seem to be pretty hardcore. Luckily for the Americans that do follow “the beautiful game,” the internet offers whatever you need to get your soccer, the real football (just kidding, I’m an NFL fanatic as well), fix.

ESPNsoccernet is the perfect resource if you’re into the usual (English Premier League, La Liga, Italian Serie A, and of course the UEFA Champions League). Goal.com is another staple in any soccer fan’s browser bookmarks, offering coverage of the game worldwide.

Some of the web’s best-kept secrets - if you’re not all about the European game – include BBC’s African football coverage. If Asian soccer is more to your taste, FootballAsia is the place to be. The site is currently being overhauled, but their homepage still links you to Asian soccer’s top competitions. And if features and breaking news aren’t enough for you, myp2p links you to live matches with a few mouse clicks, though you may need to download a few peer-to-peer applications like Sopcast. The myp2p homepage tells you all you need to know.

Since Todd and Tom have recently critiqued Barack Obama's presidential website — apparently in its Blue Period — I was also thinking about the design of 2008 presidential candidate sites.

As someone with a search engine optimization (SEO) background, I probably focus a little bit more on title tags and anchor link text when evaluating a site than a someone who looks at the pretty pictures (or the lack thereof).

Well, I'm not alone.  Li Evans of the Search Marketing Gurus blog does as well, and has done some interesting campaign site evaluations from an SEO's perspective.  You can find them in the Political Internet Marketing category of the blog.

In these posts she discusses various SEO topics like page titles, keyword usage, and the actual content found on a site.  Further, she does look at a campaign's search marketing efforts, if any, and use of social media.  Her posts are worth a read.

So far, here are the candidate (or former ones) sites that she's reviewed:

• Joe Biden
• Chris Dodd
• Duncan Hunter
• Dennis Kucinich
• John McCain
• Barack Obama
• Ron Paul
• Bill Richardson
• Fred Thompson

Disclosure.

Barack Obama’s team has redesigned his website just prior to the Iowa Caucus and, well, I hope you like the color blue. I do.

I also think this redesign puts his web design effort at the top of the heap.

Starting at the top…

The over the top photoshopping of the clouds and lens flare as a background is so dramatically piled-on that you have to give the designers a lot of credit for even submitting it. The fact that it works is a testament to not only the designers but also whoever approved this thing. An extra cloud here, a ray of sunshine there and this effort is a parody. The photo used of the candidate is also pretty gutsy, with him staring into the future or whatever, but again in this new setting works just fine for me. The tone of the site now is one of confidence. No blaring headlines or screaming calls to action. Even the illustration used to announce his victory in Iowa is tasteful.

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In the summer I wrote a post vaguely complaining about the deterioration in the design of Barack Obama’s campaign website.

Here is the site when it first launched early in 2007:

I liked this. The design was clean and the site was really easy to navigate. After initially launching this version, the campaign spent a few months developing tons of great new features which they didn’t really have a place to put.

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Cyberjournalist has the scoop on the BBC launching a beta version of their redesigned homepage. You can view the beta site here and the current version here. Note that this redesign affects only the main BBC homepage and not the BBC News homepage, which is where I spend most of my time.

A quick perusal of the new homepage shows that the BBC is trying to turn its homepage into an Ajax style start page like Netvibes or Pageflakes. I’m not opposed to the idea, but the execution here is pretty poor. The whole thing is clunky, but what really jumps out is how poorly designed the customization options are.

Here is what it looks like out of the box:

I’m not a fan of magenta, so I immediately clicked on the Display Option link at the top to try to make a magenta-free version. After clicking that you are given the options to select from eight preset color schemes or create your own. Sounds great. The problem is that all the preset options look absolutely terrible. (more…)

I became aware of the term tumblelog around a year ago and have been running across examples of tumblelogs with greater and greater frequency lately. According to Wikipedia, a tumblelog “is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary.” This site has a list of examples.

After circling around the concept for awhile, I set up a test tumblelog for myself using the Tumblr service. Here are my impressions of tumblelogging generally and Tumblr specifically:

Things I Like

(1) The interface is dead simple and slick. As you’ll see from the screenshot below, all you do is click on the content type you want to post and your off.

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On Saturday, MSNBC launched a redesigned version of its website (via Cyberjournalist). You can view some reader reaction here and take a tour of the new site here.

I’ve never been a fan of the MSNBC website. While I think the new design is an improvement from a design perspective, the site has a long way to go before I’ll be converted into a regular visitors. Here are my specific criticisms of the new design and the overall site strategy.

(1) The navigation on the new site isn’t very user friendly. For me, the banner at the top of the page is useless from a navigation perspective. Instead of just providing me with a nice breakdown of the content of the site in the header, MSNBC uses the entire thing to advertise the sites of the Today Show and Dateline. The actual site navigation has been de-emphasized and placed at the bottom left area of the page, meaning many, many users will be scrolling to find the Health and Weather sections on the homepage. (more…)

Startup Weekend is a project founded by Andrew Hyde, who came up with the idea to connect a "highly motivated group of small business entrepreneurs to build a community and company in a weekend."  Basically, Startup Weekend groups together web developers, designers, marketers, and entrepreneurs for a weekend to see what kind of Internet company they can come up with.  Groups have a weekend to complete their project from start to finish, which includes deciding on a concept and launching the actual project. 

From the various Startup Weekends that have been held throughout the country recently, it seems that the answer to my initial question, "Can an Internet Company be Built in a Weekend?", the answer is yes.  Most Some of the Startup Weekends have resulted in the launching of a website.  The more important question might be, "Can a viable business be built in a weekend?", to which the answer, judging from the sites launched by Startup Weekend, is probably no.

Here's a list of some of Startup Weekend's results:

VoSnap -Boulder team
Favoreats -NYC team
TipDish -Houston team
ScrollTalk -West Lafayette team
DeskHappy -Boston Team
Hola Neighbor -DC team
WorkPerch -Chapel Hill team 

These websites range from confusing without a clear purpose (TipDish and ScrollTalk) to founded on good ideas, but lacking in capabilities (HolaNeighbor), to just plain bizarre (DeskHappy).   

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Newsweek unveiled a redesigned site yesterday.  The new site looks nice; although it still crams a bit too much information on the page than I would like, it does so in a much more organized manner than it did.

One of the new features that really caught my attention is the homepage header that can appear on any page.  It is, of course, on the index page, but is also available on individual story pages.  This is an interesting way to better coax a person who has come to the site through a link to a specific page to other pages.

All one needs to do is to click on a arrow button that lies between the site's main navigation and the headline of the article — in a box with a Top Story, Latest News item, and Video item — on the page.  Once this is done, the homepage header is unfurled in all of its grandeur: a rotating image centric box that scrolls through six items on the left, the latest headlines above a tidbit from the magazine's Conventional Wisdom column in the middle, and access to multimedia items on the right. 

This is a lot of content to present in one feature, but the site lists it in an attractive manner.  If one doesn't want to see this section, they can simply close it by hitting on the same arrow button to close it; there is a corresponding text tab on the lower right of header that one can use to open or close it.

Perhaps the best thing I can report about the homepage header feature is that, at least for me, opening and closing it has not noticeably affected the site's performance. 

Great job, Newsweek.

Overnight, FoxBusiness.com launched to preview Rupert Murdoch's long awaited answer to CNBC — the Fox Business Network, which launches in two weeks.  The site is in promo phase and looks nice. 

It claims to have blogs for each featured on-air personality, but I'm not sure if that is the case.  I don't see any place for site visitors to comment, link to an individual post, or subscribe to RSS feeds. 

Granted, I don't want to claim the right to define blogs as a feature that require easy access to individual post links, commenting, and RSS feeds, but those seem very common features. Further, I understand that while the site is in its promo stage, and the site may not want to enable these features yet.  Most blog CMS products enable users to control these features at the post level. 

However, right now the "blogs" are just a place for the on-air talent to introduce themselves in their own voices.  Site visitors, on the other hand, cannot easily provide feedback, link to, or subscribe to them.  Hopefully, the blogs will get these features soon.

What do think are the standard features of a blog?  Do features define this term or not?  

In my article last week on Wordpress vs Drupal, I gave some examples of sites built using those tools. Frankly, most of the examples I gave were sites we’d worked on. I figured I’d loop back and give examples of some exceptional sites I’ve come across (and didn’t work on) using each toolset. The goal is to show just how far you can push things using Drupal and Wordpress.

Drupal

(1) New York Observer

A full on newspaper website built using Drupal. (more…)

Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) recently launched a new campaign website that I find vaguely fascinating.  The site doesn’t look like any campaign site I’ve seen before and relies heavily on video.  Campaign sites have a tendency to all look the same and I applaud Chambliss for not being afraid to try something different. 

However, two things:

(1) On my laptop I actually have to scroll down on the homepage to find a Contribute or Join link and access the main site navigation.  Call me old school, but I think this stuff needs to be more prominent.  Design conventions exist because they help people navigate your website and quickly find what they are looking for.  Usability matters.

(2) Video is great, but you have to back it up with text.  The site features Chambliss talking about a variety of issues via web video, but nowhere on the site is there text expanding on the videos points.  Web developers should always remember that not everyone wants to watch your video and that the web is still primarily about reading good old fashioned text.  There is also this little site called Google that does much better with text than FLV files. 

Regardless, I would like to thank Chambliss for taking the road less traveled with his site.

<Via TechRepublican>