The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 3
Reader Level:

Welcome back to the Twenty Eleven Wordpress series! In this tutorial you will continue developing the graphics for the Safari African Adventures Wordpress site. Using the new CSS Properties panel you will also extract rules to put together a style guide that you will later use as the basis of the Wordpress CSS document. Finally, you will export a PDF for the client, as well as the graphics you will need for the production site.

The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series:
The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 1 - Introduction
The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 2
The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 3
The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 4
The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 5

The TwentyEleven WordPress Series: Introduction
Reader Level:

In this new series, you will experience the complete process of developing a WordPress site from graphics creation to custom coding to transferring a the site from localhost to live server. The Safari African Adventures web site will include a gallery of wild animals, a You Tube embedded video, a contact form, and a latest news page. Customization will start out slow and easy by clicking radio buttons in the WordPress graphical user interface, and then will move to the more adventurous as you code WordPress template tags, actions and filters into the functions.php, header.php, content.php, and footer.php files.

In this introduction to the series, you'll get an overview of the project, an introduction to the Twenty Eleven theme, and a look at the benefits of using a child theme.

The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series:
The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 1 - Introduction
The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 2
The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 3
The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 4
The TwentyEleven Wordpress Series: Part 5

Embed a 3-D CoolIris Image Wall in Your Site Using Media RSS Feeds
Reader Level:

I'm a huge fan of the awesome browser plugin known as CoolIris which can be used to browse news, video sites, and image collections in a 3-dimensional wall of thumbnails that you can zoom through using the scroll wheel on your mouse and navigate by dragging left or right. I find the interface to be one of the freshest new methods to come along in a long time for viewing information online, completely breaking with the familiar drill-down methods that most sites use. Even sites such as Flickr or YouTube look better when seen through the CoolIris interface and the plugin can even be used as a PowerPoint replacement to show a presentation in a dynamic new way, as I previously wrote about here at Community MX.

One of the more dynamic features of CoolIris are the developer tools that allow you to use the power of CoolIris to embed a wall of images on a page in your own site. In the first article of this series you learned how to embed a CoolIris wall of images in a page of your own site using the CoolIris developer sample embed code and a feed from Flickr.com. In this article you'll learn how to use the free PicLens Publisher program, to make your own media RSS file and display images that are on your web server.

Both of these methods allow you to embed a Flash movie on any page you wish and read an RSS feed from a service such as Flickr, or read from your own custom RSS file that points to any folder you choose on your site. And, while the idea of mucking around with a bunch of code and Flash variables (what?) to customize your CoolIris wall of images might seem daunting, you'll learn the process is quite simple.

The Embed a 3-D CoolIris Image Wall in Your Site Series:
Embed a 3-D CoolIris Image Wall in Your Site Using Flickr Feeds
Embed a 3-D CoolIris Image Wall in Your Site Using Media RSS Feeds

Embed a 3-D CoolIris Image Wall in Your Site Using Flickr Feeds
Reader Level:

I'm a huge fan of the awesome browser plugin known as CoolIris which can be used to browse news, video sites, and image collections in a 3-dimensional wall of thumbnails that you can zoom through using the scroll wheel on your mouse and navigate by dragging left or right. I find the interface to be one of the freshest new methods to come along in a long time for viewing information online, completely breaking with the familiar drill-down methods that most sites use. Even sites such as Flickr or YouTube look better when seen through the CoolIris interface. The plugin can even be used as a PowerPoint replacement to show a presentation in a dynamic new way, as I previously wrote about here at Community MX.

One of the more dynamic features of CoolIris are the developer tools that allow you to use the power of CoolIris to embed a wall of images in your own site. In this article you'll learn how to use the first of two methods for embedding images in a page of your own site using the CoolIris developer tools and a feed from Flickr.com.

In the next article of this mini-series you'll learn how to use the free PicLens Publisher program, to make your own media RSS file and display images that are on your web server.

Both of these methods allow you to embed a Flash movie on any page you wish and read an RSS feed from a service such as Flickr, or read from your own custom RSS file. While the idea of mucking around with a bunch of code and Flash variables (what?) to customize your CoolIris wall of images might seem daunting, as you'll learn the process is quite simple.

The Embed a 3-D CoolIris Image Wall in Your Site Series:
Embed a 3-D CoolIris Image Wall in Your Site Using Flickr Feeds
Embed a 3-D CoolIris Image Wall in Your Site Using Media RSS Feeds Coming Soon

Building Web Sites With Drupal – Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme
Reader Level:

In our last article, we began to look at themeing your Drupal site. We started with some basic settings that are available for the themes that come built into Drupal. In that article, I mentioned the ability to enable more than one theme and let your user select which theme they would like the site displayed in. Let’s look at exactly how that works.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites With Drupal – Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Reader Level:

It is time to begin to address one of the most requested topics in our Drupal series; theming your site. It is not necessary for your Drupal site to look like every other Drupal site. In fact, it does not need to look like a content management site at all. The Drupal framework can be skinned to just about any CSS design you can conceive of, which means that you can use Drupal to create many different kinds of sites.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites With Drupal – Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Reader Level:

Because a Drupal web site is entirely driven by the content that is in its database, there are very few actual pages in your site that are not a part of the core Drupal files. Save for any add-ons or themes that you install in the sites/all directory, your site is entirely reproducible (from an actual HTML and PHP page perspective) with a fresh install of the latest download from drupal.org.

This means, though, that in order to get an effective and ongoing backup of your site you need to understand how to export and import the database that is behind it. Fortunately this is a simple task using tools that your ISP likely already has in place.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 6: Using the Snapshot Technique for Editing WordPress Themes
Reader Level:

The goal of this series of articles is to show you how to take what is already an awesome package—including an almost limitless supply of free design themes—and customize the look and feel of a WordPress site to meet your goals. Through this series you'll be learning how to use some of the design tools from Adobe, such as Fireworks and Dreamweaver, as well as free open source browser plugins to modify the design of a WordPress installation.

In this, the sixth article in the series, you'll be learning another method for editing WordPress themes in Dreamweaver. Using the Snapshot technique shown in this article you'll be able to use Dreamweaver CS4 for editing your style sheet while using all of the design tools that Dreamweaver provides.

The Customizing a WordPress Blog Series:
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 1: Editing Header Images
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 2: Examining WordPress Themes with the Firebug Extension for FF
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 3: Examining WordPress Themes with the Web Developer's Extension
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 4: Creating a Testing Environment Using MAMP and Dreamweaver
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 5: Editing WordPress Themes in Dreamweaver CS4
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 6: Using the Snapshot Technique for Editing WordPress Themes
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 7: Editing the Themes with Fireworks CS4

Site Wide Contact Forms in Drupal
Reader Level:

Drupal 6 provides a powerful content management framework that, out of the box, enables any user to create pages, blog's, forums, and more. With many third-party modules that allow for even more functionality, we often overlook functionality that out of the box is already available, just waiting for you to enable it. Contact forms are one such module that with a few quick settings allows people to contact you.

In this quick tutorial we will go through the steps involved to enable and set up one to multiple contact forms quickly and easily.

Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 5: Editing WordPress Themes in Dreamweaver CS4
Reader Level:

There's little doubt that the fine, free, open source blogging package available from WordPress has enjoyed astounding success. With downloads of well over 50 million, the PHP, MySQL, and Apache powered WordPress package is currently the world's most popular blogging package and is in use by literally millions of designers and developers (and do-it-yourselfers)around the world.



The goal of this series of articles is to show you how to take what is already an awesome package—including an almost limitless supply of free design themes—and customize the look and feel of a WordPress site to meet your goals. Through this series you'll be learning how to use some of the design tools from Adobe, such as Fireworks and Dreamweaver, as well as free open source browser plugins to modify the design of a WordPress installation.

In this article we'll take a look at the incredible new dynamic design tools that are available in Dreamweaver CS4. Using the new Live View feature you can prepare a design environment for WordPress themes that not only allows you to take advantage of the visual editing environment in Dreamweaver, for the first time you can actually see the changes to linked CSS files take place right within the Dreamweaver design environment. These new features make it possible like never before for anyone to work with WordPress themes.

The Customizing a WordPress Blog Series:
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 1: Editing Header Images
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 2: Examining WordPress Themes with the Firebug Extension for FF
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 3: Examining WordPress Themes with the Web Developer's Extension
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 4: Creating a Testing Environment Using MAMP and Dreamweaver
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 5: Editing WordPress Themes in Dreamweaver CS4
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 6: Using the Snapshot Technique for Editing WordPress Themes
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 7: Editing the Themes with Fireworks CS4

Building Web Sites With Drupal – Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Reader Level:

Drupal allows you to categorize content a number of different ways, as we have been seeing. One way is as blogs for the individual users of the site. Any user that is in a role that has permission to create blog entries can have their own blog where their personal content is displayed.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites With Drupal – Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Reader Level:

There Is a lot that you can do with the built-in content types in Drupal. So far in this series, we have looked at adding stories, pages, polls, and forums in Drupal. As you refine the purposes of your site, however, it is likely that you will discover other types of content that would make it easier to segment your content.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 4: Creating a Testing Environment Using MAMP and Dreamweaver
Reader Level:

There's little doubt that the fine, free, open source blogging package available from WordPress has enjoyed astounding success. With downloads of well over 50 million, the PHP, MySQL, and Apache powered WordPress package is currently the world's most popular blogging package and is in use by literally millions of designers and developers (and do-it-yourselfers)around the world.

The goal of this series of articles is to show you how to take what is already an awesome package—including an almost limitless supply of free design themes—and customize the look and feel of a WordPress site to meet your goals. Through this series you'll be learning how to use some of the design tools from Adobe, such as Fireworks and Dreamweaver, as well as free open source browser plugins to modify the design of a WordPress installation.

In this, the fourth article in the series, you'll be learning how to prepare to create a fully customized WordPress theme of your own. This time around the design tool is Dreamweaver CS4. In this article you'll see how to create a design environment for Dreamweaver that allows you to greatly streamline the process of customizing WordPress designs.

The Customizing a WordPress Blog Series:
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 1: Editing Header Images
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 2: Examining WordPress Themes with the Firebug Extension for FF
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 3: Examining WordPress Themes with the Web Developer's Extension
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 4: Creating a Testing Environment Using MAMP and Dreamweaver
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 5: Editing WordPress Themes in Dreamweaver CS4
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 6: Using the Snapshot Technique for Editing WordPress Themes
Customizing a WordPress Blog - Part 7: Editing the Themes with Fireworks CS4

Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Reader Level:

Throughout this series we have made reference to running the cron job for your Drupal site to make sure that changes that you have made are recognized. It is a pain, though, to have to run cron manually all the time so let’s look at how you can automate the process.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Reader Level:

Since I started this Drupal series, I have gotten a lot of positive comments and a lot of questions. Thank you for the comments, and I promise to get to as many of the questions as I can, whether in email or as parts of this series.

A common question has to do with theming a Drupal site. How do you do it? Is it easy? Can anyone create a theme? With this article, we are going to start looking at theming in Drupal, but slowly at first.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites with Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Reader Level:

There are as many ways to build a web site as there are customers out there. What that usually means is that, as developers, we end up recreating the wheel over and over again. In reality, though, 80% of the customers you come across could likely be serviced quite nicely with relatively minor modifications to a basic site structure that includes the most common functionality. That is the concept behind a Content Management System like Drupal.

Drupal is a framework for creating web applications. As such, it has a wealth of advanced abilities like forums, newsletters, and RSS syndication. But it is also well suited for the building of simpler websites that just need to update their content on a regular basis. If you build sites for clients, chances are there is a portion of your business that could be handled more quickly and more profitably using Drupal.

In our last article, we looked at some unique things that came up while building a site for my son's Cub Scout Pack. Another requirement for this site (in my mind) was to restrict access to only pack members. This site will deal with information that affects kids from 6 – 11 years old. No need to have anyone outside our group with access to information about where they will be on a given Saturday.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites with Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Reader Level:

There are as many ways to build a web site as there are customers out there. What that usually means is that, as developers, we end up recreating the wheel over and over again. In reality, though, 80% of the customers you come across could likely be serviced quite nicely with relatively minor modifications to a basic site structure that includes the most common functionality. That is the concept behind a Content Management System like Drupal.

Drupal is a framework for creating web applications. As such, it has a wealth of advanced abilities like forums, newsletters, and RSS syndication. But it is also well suited for the building of simpler websites that just need to update their content on a regular basis. If you build sites for clients, chances are there is a portion of your business that could be handled more quickly and more profitably using Drupal.

Last night I created a website for my son's new cub scout pack. Not a page, a whole site, in under two hours. That is the power of Drupal.

While we have been using the Old Time Radio site for most of these articles, I thought I would show you a couple of unique things about this Cub Scout site, that I built... in two hours.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Reader Level:

There are as many ways to build a web site as there are customers out there. What that usually means is that, as developers, we end up recreating the wheel over and over again. In reality, though, 80% of the customers you come across could likely be serviced quite nicely with relatively minor modifications to a basic site structure that includes the most common functionality. That is the concept behind a Content Management System like Drupal.

Drupal is a framework for creating web applications. As such, it has a wealth of advanced abilities like forums, newsletters, and RSS syndication. But it is also well suited for the building of simpler websites that just need to update their content on a regular basis. If you build sites for clients, chances are there is a portion of your business that could be handled more quickly and more profitably using Drupal.

One of the best things about Drupal is the great flexibility you have in tagging and categorizing your content. Taxonoy is the science of classification, and the Drupal Taxonomy module allows you to create complex classification systems to organize your site. While some CMSs provide a limited number of tag layers, Drupal allows you a virtually unlimited hierarchy of tags.

In this article, we will get take a look at some basic tagging methods in Drupal. As you might expect, Drupal handles a lot of the heavy-lifting for you. All you need to do is create a structure of tags to be used by you and other authors at your site.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites With Drupal – Part 7: Adding Polls
Reader Level:

There are as many ways to build a web site as there are customers out there. What that usually means is that, as developers, we end up recreating the wheel over and over again. In reality, though, 80% of the customers you come across could likely be serviced quite nicely with relatively minor modifications to a basic site structure that includes the most common functionality. That is the concept behind a Content Management System like Drupal.

Drupal is a framework for creating web applications. As such, it has a wealth of advanced abilities like forums, newsletters, and RSS syndication. But it is also well suited for the building of simpler websites that just need to update their content on a regular basis. If you build sites for clients, chances are there is a portion of your business that could be handled more quickly and more profitably using Drupal.

One of the great things about Drupal is all of its features that allow you to build rich community and social networking sites. Not every website needs a poll, but if you have fun or interesting things to query your users about, Drupal offers an easy way to set up, display and manage polls.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites With Drupal – Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Reader Level:

There are as many ways to build a web site as there are customers out there. What that usually means is that, as developers, we end up recreating the wheel over and over again. In reality, though, 80% of the customers you come across could likely be serviced quite nicely with relatively minor modifications to a basic site structure that includes the most common functionality. That is the concept behind a Content Management System like Drupal.

Drupal is a framework for creating web applications. As such, it has a wealth of advanced abilities like forums, newsletters, and RSS syndication. But it is also well suited for the building of simpler websites that just need to update their content on a regular basis. If you build sites for clients, chances are there is a portion of your business that could be handled more quickly and more profitably using Drupal.

In the last Drupal article, we covered adding some basic content to your site in the form of Stories and Pages. One of the shortcomings we noticed was the basic text area used to input the body area of the content. You are either expected to enter only plain text, or to hand code the HTML tags that will display your content. It would be nice if the body input area allowed a rich text editor to allow you to enter and format text more like a word processor.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites With Drupal – Part 5: Creating Content
Reader Level:

Now that you have a basic Drupal site set up and have even added a forum, it is time to learn about the basic content types that you can add to your site. Out of the box, Drupal has two types of content available: Story and Page. These two content types allow you to create many of the types of information you will want your site to convey.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Web Sites With Drupal – Part 4: Adding a Forum
Reader Level:

There are as many ways to build a web site as there are customers out there. What that usually means is that, as developers, we end up recreating the wheel over and over again. In reality, though, 80% of the customers you come across could likely be serviced quite nicely with relatively minor modifications to a basic site structure that includes the most common functionality. That is the concept behind a Content Management System like Drupal.

Drupal is a framework for creating web applications. As such, it has a wealth of advanced abilities like forums, newsletters, and RSS syndication. But it is also well suited for the building of simpler websites that just need to update their content on a regular basis. If you build sites for clients, chances are there is a portion of your business that could be handled more quickly and more profitably using Drupal.

In this installment of the Drupal series, we will cover adding a forum to your site. This will not only provide you with great functionality with very little effort, but it will teach you the basics of adding or enabling a module to your site. We can build on that later for more advanced things.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Building Websites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Reader Level:

There are as many ways to build a web site as there are customers out there. What that usually means is that, as developers, we end up recreating the wheel over and over again. In reality, though, 80% of the customers you come across could likely be serviced quite nicely with relatively minor modifications to a basic site structure that includes the most common functionality. That is the concept behind a Content Management System like Drupal.

Drupal is a framework for creating web applications. As such, it has a wealth of advanced abilities like forums, newsletters, and RSS syndication. But it is also well suited for the building of simpler websites that just need to update their content on a regular basis. If you build sites for clients, chances are there is a portion of your business that could be handled more quickly and more profitably using Drupal.

Once your initial Drupal site is set up, you will have a number of options available in the administration section that allow you to customize the way your site works. Over the next few articles we will cover many of the things that you may want to address in your site.

The Building Web Sites With Drupal Series:
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 1: Introduction
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 2: Installation
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 3: Setting Initial Roles and Permissions
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 4: Adding a Forum
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 5: Creating Content
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 6: Installing a Rich Text Editor
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 7: Adding Polls
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 8: Personalizing Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 9: Taxonomy 101
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 10: Adding an Event Calendar
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 11: Customizing the Front Page
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 12: Getting Started With Themes
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 13: Cron Jobs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 14: Taxonomy 201
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 15: Creating a Moderated User Group
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 16: Creating New Content Types
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 17: Setting Up User Blogs
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 18: Backing Up Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19a: Theming Your Site
Building Web Sites With Drupal - Part 19b: Allowing Users To Select Their Own Theme

Triple Threat III: Tri-Platform Perfection
Reader Level:

Although VMware Fusion is not as well known as Parallels, it gives you -- together with Apple's Boot Camp -- the smoothest, most polished way to run a killer three-platform developer machine.

The Triple Threat Series:
Triple Threat: Adding a Third OS to Your Dual-Boot Mac
Triple Threat II: Tiger, Vista & Ubuntu
Triple Threat III: Tri-Platform Perfection

Yahoo! Pipes: Create a Persistent News Search with Web Services
Reader Level:

Yahoo Pipes has been on my personal radar since it was announced in February of this year. At the time of its rollout there was a great deal of interest in Pipes around the web design world. Yahoo provided what appeared to be an easy way for anyone (even non-developers like myself) to mash-up RSS feeds into new web services. While that may seem like no big deal, my own experiences and research into current trends indicates that there is a growing demand for data that has been customized and repurposed to fit particular audiences. If you're developing web sites for customers, the ability to provide them with live data that can be displayed on their site will be a valuable service that just may set you apart from your competition. You don't even have to tell anyone how easy Yahoo makes this.

In this series of articles we'll be looking at the world of Yahoo Pipes from both exploratory and practical viewpoints. We'll start out by looking at the Pipes design environment and previewing feeds developed and shared by others in the Pipes community. From there you'll build your first customized feed and finish things up with a look at how feeds published using the Pipes service can be consumed in different ways on your own sites.

In this article you'll learn a little how persistent searches can be created in both Google News and Yahoo News services. Since both of these giants of web indexing also provide the capacity to output a feed as structured RSS you can pull the results into Yahoo Pipes and mash them together into one, deep-searching, consolidated feed. You'll also find out how individual feeds are created and how some simple modules in the Yahoo Pipes environment are used to combine, aggregate, filter, and limit the results that are returned. This is an incredibly powerful piece of technology that you can use to your advantage, or provide as a service to your clients.

The Yahoo! Pipes Series:
Yahoo! Pipes: An Introduction
Yahoo! Pipes: Mash-up a Customized News Feed
Yahoo! Pipes: Create a Persistent News Search with Web Services
Yahoo! Pipes: Options for Publishing a Customized RSS Feed Coming Soon

Triple Threat II: Tiger, Vista & Ubuntu
Reader Level:

Are you using Parallels to run Windows on your Mac, or thinking about it? Then why not a Linux virtual machine as well?

The Triple Threat Series:
Triple Threat: Adding a Third OS to Your Dual-Boot Mac
Triple Threat II: Tiger, Vista & Ubuntu

Implementing a Real-Time Chat Application
Reader Level:

When you look around the internet you will find a multitude of community-style sites that offer their visitors the opportunity communicate via a real-time chat application. Many of those applications are cumbersome and rely on terrible page refreshes every few seconds.

The fact that chatting online is a very important part of building friendship and communication within a community web site makes it no surprise that a frequently asked question on web development forums is "How do I add live chat to my web site?". It's a common question with so many possible answers.

In this tutorial I will introduce you to a free PHP chat application that works in modern browsers and degrades gracefully in the not so modern browsers that some people still persist in using.

This application is special for a number of reasons. To find out just how special it is please read on.

Content Control with .htaccess - Part 2
Reader Level:

In the first part of this article we looked at how a rather unique feature of the Apache web server, called the .htaccess file, could be used to grant and deny permission to content based on a variety of conditions (IP address, etc).

In this article we'll see how we can take those access conditions and apply them to specific files and file groups on our site to make things more secure and easier to manage.

The Content Control with .htaccess Series
Content Control with .htaccess - Part 1
Content Control with .htaccess - Part 2

Content Control with .htaccess - Part 1
Reader Level:

There are many different ways to approach access control on web sites; although the most common idea is to protect content based on user names and passwords, this is certainly not the only criteria that can be used. In this article we'll explore some of the other options that you can use to control who is allowed to access different types of content on your site.

The Content Control with .htaccess Series
Content Control with .htaccess - Part 1
Content Control with .htaccess - Part 2

Create Dynamic Charts & Graphs with PHP/SWF Charts
Reader Level:

PHP/SWF Charts is a PHP-based tool to generate Flash charts and graphs from dynamic data. With it, you can create charts that update in real time, right on the same page. This tutorial will show you how to use the free version of PHP/SWF charts (along with PHP and MySQL) to create an opinion poll page where poll results are charted in real time.

Spell Checking HTML Forms with JavaScript and PHP
Reader Level:

Have you ever had to write a large amount of text into a field on an HTML form and been uncertain of just how reliable your spelling skills are? Wouldn't it be nice if HTML forms, like most other applications, had one of those handy little "Spell Check" buttons? In this article we'll look at how easy it is to implement this functionality using a PHP/JavaScript solution called Speller Pages.

Geolocating IP Addresses with PHP
Reader Level:

Have you ever wondered just where in the world the visitors of your website are comming from? Whether to satisfy your own curiosity or to automatically deliver localized information, Geocoding can open a whole new set of possibilites for a web site. In this article we'll take a look at what Geocoding is and how a community-based project can help to provide an accurate and affordable geocoding solution.

PHP and the Filesystem - Part 3: File Contents
Reader Level:

PHP provides a wide variety of ways to work with the filesystem of the server upon which it is running. In the third part of this series, File Content , we'll explore how to read and write information to files using a PHP script.

The PHP and the Filesystem Series:
PHP and the Filesystem - Part 1: Directories
PHP and the Filesystem - Part 2: Basic File Control
PHP and the Filesystem - Part 3: File Contents

Running Your Own DNS Server: Understanding the Domain Name System
Reader Level:

This is the first in a series of articles showing you how to run your own Domain Name Server. We start by looking at the fundamental concepts of DNS.

The Running Your Own DNS Server Series:
Running Your Own DNS Server: Understanding the Domain Name System
Running Your Own DNS Server: Setting Up a Bind Name Server
Running Your Own DNS Server: Setting up a Zone File

Laszlo: Part 5 -- Managing Layouts
Reader Level:

In the fifth in our series on Laszlo, we look at the methods provided to automate the layout of elements in your applications. Using layouts you create complex layouts that without explicitly defining the width, height and placement of every element. Instead, your layouts can be intelligent and take into account the size of the canvas and items' relationships with each other.

The Laszlo Series:
Laszlo: Part 1 - Overview
Laszlo: Part 2 - Installation
Laszlo: Part 3 - Hello World
Laszlo: Part 4 - Laszlo Widgets and Elements
Laszlo: Part 5 - Managing Layouts
Laszlo: Part 6 - Working With Data Coming Soon

Learning PHP - Part 3: Basic Content Management
Reader Level:

In Part 3 of the Learning PHP series, you'll learn how to use PHP and MySQL to build a basic, working content management system that you can customize for any site.

The Learning PHP Series:
Learning PHP - Part 1: A Gentle Introduction
Learning PHP - Part 2: All About Arrays
Learning PHP - Part 3: Basic Content Management
Learning PHP - Part 4: Focus on Functions

Creating a Search Engine with iSearch
Reader Level:

If you have always wanted to add a search engine to your site, and didn't know how to program one yourself, you might want to download and install iSearch, a ready-made PHP and MySQL driven application that performs searches right on your own server. This tutorial will take you through the installation and the customization (of the style sheet and header and footer includes) of iSearch.

Learning PHP - Part 2: All About Arrays
Reader Level:

Everyone knows PHP offers a wide array of web development possibilities. In Part 2 of our Learning PHP series, we'll see just how wide: this installment is all about arrays, and how to use them.

The Learning PHP Series:
Learning PHP - Part 1: A Gentle Introduction
Learning PHP - Part 2: All About Arrays
Learning PHP - Part 3: Basic Content Management
Learning PHP - Part 4: Focus on Functions

Laszlo: Part 2 - Installation
Reader Level:

OpenLaszlo is an open-source, Java-based application server which can be used to deliver Flash-based Web sites entirely built with a server-side tagging language. This installment in our series on Laszlo covers the installation of the server on Mac OS X and Windows.

The Laszlo Series:
Laszlo: Part 1 - Overview
Laszlo: Part 2 - Installation
Laszlo: Part 3 - Hello World
Laszlo: Part 4 - Laszlo Widgets and Elements
Laszlo: Part 5 - Managing Layouts
Laszlo: Part 6 - Working With Data Coming Soon

Run Dreamweaver on Linux
Reader Level:

Will Macromedia ever release Linux-native versions of its Studio MX applications? Who knows? Meanwhile, if you want to try Linux but don't want to leave Dreamweaver behind, this article will show you how to get your favorite web editor up and running on Linux, with CodeWeavers CrossOver Office.

A Clean Start: The New PHP 5 SOAP Extension
Reader Level:

PHP 5 now comes with its own SOAP extension, and that makes implementing cross-platform web services solutions easier than ever. This article will show you how to enable and use the new extension to create a basic web service client that taps the power of Google's Search API.

Parallel PHP: Running PHP 4 and PHP 5 on the Same Computer - Part 2
Reader Level:

The advances in PHP 5 take the language to a new level, yet most of the world is still running PHP 4. Here's how to have the best of both worlds on one development machine. Part 1 of this article showed you how to add PHP 5 to an existing PHP 4 installation on OS X, and seamlessly switch between the two. Now, Part 2 shows you how to do the same on Windows.

Parallel PHP: Running PHP 4 and PHP 5 on the Same Computer - Part 1
Reader Level:

The advances in PHP 5 take the language to a new level, yet most of the world is still running PHP 4. Here's how to have the best of both worlds on one development machine. Part 1 of this article shows you how to add PHP 5 to an existing PHP 4 installation on OS X, and seamlessly switch between the two. Part 2 will show you how to do the same on Windows.

Fun With Fink
Reader Level:

Fink is a powerful package manager for Linux and Unix open-source software on Mac OS X/X11. Using Fink, you can install more than 1700 flexible (and free) open-source packages — including valuable web development tools — from binaries or source. This tutorial will show you how to get Fink installed on your Mac, and then show you how to install and configure Bluefish, a popular Linux-based text editor for programmers. You'll learn how to run Linux programs side-by-side with your OS X favorites, via X11.