The blog

Views on technology, Open Source and the rest.

Avoid WYSIWYG Editors

Y U NO LIKE WYSIWYG?

A few years back, I would probably have not thought twice about this; shipping a site with a WYSIWYG editor seemed then as natural as ensuring Google Analytics is set. It was a feature that many clients would just assume you'd add. Over the past few years however, I and my colleagues grew tired of WYSIWYG editors; mentioning TinyMCE or CKEditor would probably earn you a squint of disapproval from the team.

Cultivation Grant for Community Outreach in China

DrupliCon going to China

A few weeks ago, the Drupal Association announced its second round of Drupal Community Cultivation Grants; this pilot program is dedicated to funding various initiatives from within the Drupal community, focusing on events (meetups, sprints, DrupalCamps...) as well as various community outreach and evangelization projects.

Hacker News Shanghai Meetup #4

HN Shanghai

The next edition of the Hacker News Shanghai meetup will be held on October 27, 2011 at Abbey Road starting 7:00 PM; as usual, look for the table with a "招财猫" ("Lucky Cat"). First round of beers will be on us, along with some snacks.

Open Source meetups in Shanghai

Some of us have been organizing Open Source related events in Shanghai since 2008; BarCamp, Drupal meetups, Geek Out... Somehow we feel that Shanghai still lack of regular events for the tech crowd. We've tried to grow local Open Source communities in the past and recently stepped down from leading the local Drupal meetups to focus on preparing alternative events. We'll still be attending these meetups, and others such as the SHLUG for example, but we will spend our resources organizing events for the Open Source and tech audiences at large.

Why We Advise Against Most Starter and Base Themes

Drupal theming with Tao

I recently gave a presentation about performance and scalability at one of our local Drupal meetups here in Shanghai, an got confronted with questions on Drupal theming and more particularly the type of starter theme we use here at Wiredcraft. Well, the answer is quite simple; basically, we don't, at least not the major ones. No Zen, Omega or Fusion, no custom base theme either or CSS framework such as 960 Grid. What we do systematically use though is Tao; let me explain...

Productivity Tools: Harvest Gmail Labs Features

We saw last time a couple plugins to help improve your productivity with Gmail. Today we're going to see a couple more ways to tweak Gmail that should help you get things done; Gmail labs is a great repository of tweaks and extensions that can greatly improve your day to day experience.

Drush make and install profiles with Drupal 7

Packaging Drupal

Install profiles are core to our development process; everything from the data structure down to the smallest module settings are captured in code, using Features, Context and Strongarm and packaging everything using our beloved Drush make and install profiles. This approach has significantly helped us improve the quality and speed of our developments.

Productivity tools: Pimping up your Gmail

One of the things we need to deal with daily, being a digital agency and all, is to juggle with a good deal of emails; we have people contacting us from Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Paris, Brussels, Geneva, New York, San Francisco, Washington DC... Keeping track of all of these conversations and making sure you get the maximum of what you send over takes a bit of organization; we've learned to rely on a couple of tools to get the job done.

Week in SH Tech: June 13th

With the temperature rising every days, we can feel the heat crushing summer coming. As number of people in the street is increasing, the number of events is decreasing; here is our pick for this month.

Shanghai Open Source Meetup; let's get started

Open Source logoSeveral of our team members have been involved in one way or another in some of the tech events that are taking place in Shanghai, helping organizing Barcamp and DrupalCamp as early as 2008. We have been helding regular meetups in Shanghai (and even held one in Beijing) for the past 3 years and have been considering for a while now extending these meetups to all Open Source technologies; we feel that by doing so we will be in a much better position to leverage the local scene and foster initiatives.