ventanazul

That's a freaking lot of time, really, but as anybody who does web development for a living knows it's sometimes difficult to find the time for your own projects when you are working in clients' gigs. Besides, I wanted to theme my site according to a very specific set of rules that kept changing over time, common problem, I know.

First, I decided to move Ventanazul from a simple blog format to a more niche community site, a site for people working in professional web development, that meant I had to enable account registrations, forget about vBulletin and rethink about the quality of new content and the profile of users to approve (users have to be manually approved and all comments are moderated).

Defining the goals and information architecture of the new Ventanazul took a few months while I gathered ideas from a lot of sources, like sites I enjoyed and projects I was working on. That led me, after many hours with Gimp, to the final mockups of the new design. In the meantime Drupal 6 was out and I had to invest time on learning a few new tricks.

It was the perfect timing as I started working on projects for a couple of clients that required moving to Drupal 6 and using my upgraded theming skills. For Ventanazul's redesign I used many of the new nice features of Drupal, I found the preprocess functions very helpful for separating comments and their form from node content, they usually come as a whole in the $content variable of the page.tpl.php template.

The theme can be considered as a 0.9 version and I know there may be a few small bugs around that I'll fix on the road but I wanted to release and start getting feedback as soon as possible, well, two years is not really soon but you know what I mean. I have a small set of additional features cooking for a future release and may come with some other ideas. As should be the norm in 2009 the markup was built thinking in modern web browsers that respect web standards so I didn't waste time on Internet Explorer 6 bugs or horrible hacks.

Yep, I can confirm the new design is finally progressing. I have a total of ten mockups planned, with three already done. The concept is complete and all wireframes are in place.

This week I'm on the final touches with Gimp and should start hacking HTML and CSS next week to later move everything to Drupal 6. I don't want to throw a release date yet but I'm pretty sure it will be before leaving to Cancún.

I'm documenting all the process and will have some interesting articles about it when the site is launched.

I can't, well, I don't want really, tell you more but here's a small preview.

Well, I don't know, but if not then I'm expecting to have it between January and February 2008.

The new design and relaunch of Ventanazul's site, in English and Spanish, should position it better as the webzine for web developers, with sections for articles, news, podcasts (yeah, I'm preparing for my first English episodes) and a much more active community.

Oh, and speaking of community: even if it's more work I've removed the new users moderation from the forum, there are lots of those horrible spammers that we have to manually remove everyday but more real, and very cool, people are registering and posting, and that's good, we have a lot to talk about: online businesses, Internet marketing, ideas for code and design, music, movies, books, well, a lot, so, don't forget to visit and post in the forum.

Come on!, what you think? Crazy ideas are welcomed as well as suggestions, invitations to speak anywhere on the world and coffee, lots of coffee.

There's nothing better than a good network to find the perfect match for a job position or the right place and time to show your skills.

That's why I'd like to invite you to participate in the Services Marketplace at Forums Ventanazul.

There are many good web developers and Internet entrepreneurs visiting the forum every day and you could find that door-opening connection just by being a part of the community. And you will have fun too.

The marketplace is a moderated space so please be professional and polite. No spam, MLM or get-rich-quick schemes will be tolerated.

So, let's get that job done.

I've launched a new experiment, yes, I know, how many more? uhmm.. around 15875, ok?

I've installed a points system at Forums Ventanazul and because "points" is not that catchy I called them vChips.

Every action on the forum gives you vChips, from registering to creating a new thread, from replying to uploading a picture for your profile.

Each forum pays more or less vChips and you can save them (we even got a bank!), play the lotto or donate them to other members.

And, this will be fun, you'll be able to buy prizes with your hard-earned vChips later. We're still thinking what these prizes could be, ideas?

Wait no more, register at Forums Ventanazul and start counting those little golden vChips.