September NewsletterSeptember Newsletter

What's New With Digital Immersion
New features and a lot more!

  • Portland Customers: A Free Drink (Latte, Mocha, Tea etc) from Southeast Grind coffee (next door) with a scheduled website consultation.  Come talk websites for 20-30 mins and get a free coffee drink!  Limit one per person.  Offer available to current customers and also interested potential customers.
  • New Tutorials
    The best thing about our tutorials is that as you go through the tutorial you are working on your site, so when you finish the tutorial you've completed the task.  We'll keep adding these tutorials for simple things like creating a page, setting up an audio player, or adding an item to your online store.  Remember, setting up an online store is as simple as putting in your paypal address to get payments at and adding a product.  Yes, really!
  • Experimental "easy" mode:
    Easy mode hides all but the essential options.  If you see 7 interface buttons instead of 22 yoou're in easy mode.  If you double click on the letters "easy mode" you will be taken to advanced mode and vice-versa. This mode also reduces the number of options in other areas of the interface and we think this will prevent many needless head explosions (grin).
  • New user?  Take the "Getting Started" tutorial. 
    This tutorial (available in the help section) wil lintroduce you to the first 7 buttons of the interface, the 7 buttons that are available in easy mode thatare all you need to create a website.  If you're new to Drupal start with this tutorial in easy mode. =)
  • Recurring billing (for subscription based websites) is now available through Drupal's ubercart.  Many thanks to Deborah for figuring this one out for all of us.  While we do not support this module (yet) it is installed for you and we can refer you to the documentation on it to get it configured. 
  • HTML email blasts:
    We think we finally have a good handle on this.  HTML emails work pretty well and can be viewed almost universally in user's email clients.  The emails look good, so no need to have a constant contact or icontact account although they do have excellent services.
  • Rad widgets:
    Our new favorite widget is Bannersnack, an animated banner maker.  It's easy to use and the watermarked version is free.  Of course, we also have a couple Drupal alternatives ready to go including the ability to add "Teaser slides" to a banner slideshow or the ability to put a photo gallery in a block... a block that automatically pulls images from one of your galleries and displays them as a slideshow in a block (region) on your page.
    Typekit is another neat widget that will allow you to change your fonts on your page to a custom font.  It's similar to Drupal's signwriter but a bit more complete.
  • If you are using a newer version of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera try out our new jquery interface enhancement (Avail approx Sept 23rd). This feature makes some areas of the interface much faster.  This option does not affect how your website looks or performs, it only makes the interface faster and smoother.  
  • We came across a neat new slideshow plugin the other day, if anybody wants to try it let us know!  We plan on eventually making it available to everybody.  Check out a demonstration here.  Perfect for art or photography related sites!


That's all for now, happy Drupaling!

The Digital Immersion Staff

September 2010
 
Drupal Modules:
The powerful Storm module for Drupal provides a robust set of powerful tools for businesses and organizations including time keeping, a knowledge base, and a lot more!  Available with your site now, check out more here.
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Drupal news:
Drupal Wins in CNET Webware 100 again
Drupal wins in cnet webware 100 again
"I think we can start to see a pattern emerging here. Drupal gets nominated for a Webware 100 award and goes on to win yet again in 2009.
I won't go on at length about this, but its worth mentioning that Drupal's peers in the award category included Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The majority of people out there still don't use Drupal and Facebook in the same sentence, but with more wins like this it won't be long until Drupal is universally recognized.
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