The CiviCRM folks recently had a book-writing spree, and have turned out an online book about CiviCRM.  You can read it online, or download it as a PDF.  This is a big step in the right direction for CiviCRM documentation.  Take a look .

We've been playing around with a new product called Artisteer .It claims to be the #1 Drupal Theme Generator software package, which I guess is a fair bet considering it's the only one I know of.  

Basically it's an interesting piece of software, and lets you generate themes for Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress.  The good news is that it generates nice-looking basic themes, and is actually quite flexible in many different ways.  

The bad news is that the themes are fairly basic - so they're really handy if you want to do some simple prototyping, color visualization, menuing, etc.  You can build different sorts of block types, fonts, coloring, backgrounds, etc. all day long.

The bad news is that in the current incarnation you can't really do several fairly important things - or at least things that are important to most Drupal designers -

This includes:

• Liquid layout themes
• inserting new block regions - it only supports the very basic left and right sidebars, footer, and content regions
• Any sort of specific theming that is not part of it's repertoire.
• Panels just plain doesn't behave in the themes generated by Artisteer - this is a deal-breaker for most of my sites.

I'll have a more thorough review after I've had a chance to work with it more - but for now, all I can say is that it's a good tool for maybe the first 80% of a theming project, or for a theming project with very simple requirements.  But after that it's going to be time to whip out your PHP and CSS skills.

One of the truly great things that has happened in the world of web is the proliferation of widgets.  Yup, those neat little thingy-doos that you can sprinkle all over your page the automatically suck in content from other sites.  We all use 'em.  They're great -

So it's like this -

We keep having people in our lives who are having trouble getting the hang of using Drupal as an end user.  And we keep covering the same ground with individuals - how do I add content, how do I edit my site, how do I handle blocks, how do I write a simple view?  So we're thinking - hey, let's do this on-line and see if we can't help out a whole slug of people at once.