Welcome to our Laboratory

At Magicspark we are committed to exploring and refining our processes.

The Magicspark Lab is not about experiments and science projects but the opportunity to share and dialog about this thing called website design and development. Here you will find our tutorials and presentations, features and reviews, and development tips, tricks, and techniques.

We encourage participation!

Screencast: WYSIWYG & Inline Images

Submitted by magicspark on Mon, 08/10/2009 - 16:59
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From Drupal Camp LA, August 9 2009

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Screencast: Theming with Zen

Submitted by magicspark on Mon, 08/10/2009 - 16:56
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From Drupal Camp LA, August 8 2009

http://2009.drupalcampla.com/…/theming-zen

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What is the Zen Theme

Submitted by magicspark on Sat, 06/06/2009 - 01:59
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The zen theme system http://drupal.org/project/zen is an excellent base to create new unique designs for Drupal. What is so powerful about this system is what it provides out of the box. New designs are made by creating sub-themes that override the core architecture provided with the zen theme system. All you have to understand is how to design and write pure CSS.

– Excellent clean base to create with
 – Garland is Garland for a reason, it is not where a new theme should be built from.

  • Have resources similar to what larger shops use
  • Standardization of Workflow

What is theming and a theme

Submitted by magicspark on Sat, 06/06/2009 - 01:57
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Anatomy of a Drupal 6 theme: http://drupal.org/node/171194

  • theme defines your presentation. header, sidebar, regions, body, etc.
  • theme defines how it looks to a device
  • elements of a theme
    • files: .info = stylsheets, javascript, regions defined here
    • supporting: template.php, template files, css files
    • subthemes: inherit from parent
    • logo / screen shot keep things nice
    • zen includes theme-settings.php

Theming with Zen

Submitted by jason on Mon, 01/12/2009 - 14:42
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A hands on demonstration on how to leverage the zen theme and sub-theme system to create websites with ease that do not look like hacked Garland. We will cover the general setup of the Zen system and how to create a sub-theme. Next we will review how to best override the existing CSS and if needed minimally tweak page.tpl.php.

Adobe DNG Converter 5.2

Submitted by jason on Mon, 12/29/2008 - 17:12
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Recently I have become the proud owner of a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. I only shoot in RAW mode and I was frustrated to find that there is currently no support for the CR2 files my camera creates for Adobe Photoshop CS3. Retouching a JPEG is not a solution and I am not ready to upgrade to CS4 where there currently is support. Canon does provide an application to open RAW files but I prefer to use Photoshop.

ecoAmerica.org

Submitted by jason on Wed, 11/26/2008 - 18:52
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In collaboration with creative:MINT magicspark re-launched http://ecoAmerica.org. Drupal 5×, CCK, Views, and jQuery Interface Sortable are used to create one of our best back-end content management systems.

iPhone Tech Talk San Francisco

Submitted by jason on Wed, 10/22/2008 - 14:07
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http://developer.apple.com/…e/techtalks/

Using Advanced Web Technologies on iPhone

  • Home screen icons
  • Full screen mode
  • Detect orientation changes
  • CSS transforms
  • Store data locally and even fully function offline, mysql

Notes Coming Soon

Links

These require authentication, sorry.

Conditional Comments for Internet Explorer

Submitted by jason on Fri, 10/17/2008 - 12:34
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As you may know Internet Explorer is notorious for poorly rendering web content. Additionally designers and developers are becoming spoiled with new tools and are not developing and testing with IE as much.

Personally, I have to force myself to review my work with IE more frequently as it makes resolving display bugs a lot faster.