Agaric

The primary goal for the new hastac.org is to be simple and flexible. We are an organization that is always changing, and we expect our web site to be able to evolve along with us as we expand, experiment, and learn together. In our request for proposals we outline a number of specific approaches that we think will help us accomplish our mission effectively, but no single feature is as important as the need to keep the site easy to manage and simple to change in the future.

Agaric considers it best practice (meaning we do it occasionally) to keep a logo (the user-uploaded logo), so that the site principal can have its logo swapped out by an administrator, and not only by a developer or themer. Practically, some designs will have the logo so integrated that it should not be swappable, but note that one additional advantage of having a clean and separate logo file is that people can swipe it and display their brand loyalty while linking to you. Or maybe add devil horns to it in MS Paint.

I couldn't find a way to do this in straight CSS3.

Also, note that by using CSS3, we are oh-so-subtly telling Internet Explorer users (before IE9, anyway) that we don't care that the site doesn't look as pretty as it does to people sensible enough to use good web browsers.

First, let's get the extra HTML out of the way.

[This should be on its way to being obsoleted by drush, but i'm using it for Drupal 7 alpha so thought i'd finally make sure it was shared.]

Download this and other useful scripts from their public repository on gitorious.

(Please use the code from the repository, the below may be out of date.)

By clicking the wrong Add terms link, i managed to add a couple terms to the wrong vocabulary.

One of the powerful things about taxonomy is that all terms are really equals under the hood, no matter what vocabulary they belong to. Unfortunately, Drupal does not make this power available through the UI. We can, however,

cd drupal
wget http://drupal.org/files/issues/book-589440-38.patch
patch -p0 < book-589440-38.patch
drush dl devel

Tip: The patch command needs the angle bracket (alligator mouth) to eat the patch file!

admin/modules

The cron jobs for each web site are created as the user associated with that web site: the user accesses it with the crontab command

For instance:

su exampleuser
crontab -l

To see what cron jobs that user has, which should contain the "drush -r /var/local/drupal/exampleuser/web cron", where exampleuser is the site project name (which may or may not be identical to the username, but is in any case owned by the user).

The admin (root) can see them all in /var/spool/cron/crontabs

grep -h \* /var/spool/cron/crontabs/*

Access to Agaric test sites, issue tracking queues, and other admin tools are handled by kerberos.

ssh simone.mayfirst.org

Add users to groups here:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/groups

Make sure you refer to the user as the username you provided (should be lowercase) followed by @MAYFIRST.ORG (all of this must be in uppercase, so for project example with username example you would add a line like this:

example: example@MAYFIRST.ORG

Proposed for the 2010 Boston Skillshare, http://www.bostonskillshare.org/2010

workshop title Start and grow an online presence
short name Working the Web

Benjamin Melançon and others from Agaric Design Collective

Learn how to start a free, cheap, or expensive web site; learn how to increase what you can do on the web; learn basic online strategy and resources available.

Two whole words were too much for me for the commonly used git commands, so i created three-letter aliases.

Maybe if we share, we won't be utterly useless if we are lucky enough to work on one another's machines when we are forced, unready to fly with our stubby three-letter wings, out of our own nests.