I was recently work­ing on a site project that com­bines the power of both Drupal and CiviCRM. The site con­sists of a cus­tom theme (based on Fusion Core) that uses a lit­tle bit of jQuery good­ness to enhance the user inter­face. The site is designed to allow users to cre­ate their own user accounts and set up pro­files, and I keep that in mind as I theme the site. Everything was fine until I upgraded to CiviCRM 3.1.3.
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WordPress 2.9 has been offi­cially released and can be down­load from WordPress.org. I have already updated my WordPress install to the lat­est release within the Dashboard. The upgrade itself was auto­matic with the need for me to update and re-enable plu­g­ins to get the lat­est ver­sion of every­thing. The entire process took about two min­utes. The upgrade process for WordPress is suburb.

For a under­stand­ing of what is new in WordPress…

I have recently com­mit­ted to a project where the client is in need for a site that allows the man­age­ment of its mem­bers. The needed func­tion­al­ity includes the abil­ity to send mass emails, cre­ate events, and main­tain con­tacts for the site’s mem­bers. This in con­junc­tion with stan­dard fea­tures such as main­tain­ing mes­sage boards, blogs, and mem­ber pro­files. After some research and plan­ning, I have decided that a Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) sys­tem is a good fit to han­dle the bulk of this required functionality.

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Recently I was look­ing around for a more stream­lined way to do web devel­op­ment, and I stum­bled upon Aptana Studio. Built on the Eclipse plat­form, Aptana is an all-in-one swiss army knife for web devel­op­ment. Aptana pro­vides hun­dreds of fea­tures, sup­ports mul­ti­ple file for­mats (HTML, CSS, JS), and is easy to set up. Anyone with Eclipse expe­ri­ence devel­op­ing in Java or oth­er­wise, will feel com­fort­able using Aptana.
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CSS 3 is bring­ing some excit­ing enhance­ments to web devel­op­ment. One enhance­ment that I am excited about is the abil­ity to add drop shad­ows to the box model. In order to add drop shad­ows, one must use the browser-specific CSS exten­sion prop­er­ties since the adop­tion of of these enhance­ments is not yet stan­dard. Browser-specific exten­sions begin with a “-” fol­lowed by “browser iden­ti­fier” end­ing with “box-shadow.” For instance, Mozilla-based browsers would be “-moz-box-shadow:”, KHTML-based browsers are “-khtml-box-shadow:” and Safari and Chrome are “-webkit-box-shadow:”. Opera should be “-o-box-shadow” but cur­rently does not work. Whenever the box-sahdow prop­erty becomes a stan­dard, then we can just rely on “box-shadow:” to do the trick.
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Here is a list of some of a few web­sites I go to on a reg­u­lar basis to gain more knowl­edge on the lat­est web-dev trends.

1. Smashing Magazine
2. DevListing
3. WebDesignerWall
4. CSS3.info