OpenID is an open decentralized identity framework where you can get your own identity and re-use it across the internet. The first application is single sign on which means you can login onto many websites and web applications and services (more being added daily! And all Bryght Basic sites can now support OpenId) using just one id (a URL) and one password rather than multiple passwords and multiple identities which is the case today.
To explain OpenID single sign on, we have two new screencasts for OpenID which has been included in Bryght Basic since July 31, 2007:
Our latest screencast: Tabs with arguments and taxonomies
Check out our latest screencast: creating tabs with CCK and Views.
You will have a dynamic, easily updatable, search engine optimised 'Web 2.0' website (including RSS feeds so that you get the automatic high search engine rank that blogs enjoy assuming you create compelling content constantly):
Note that this is only one common configuration for a Bryght site. Bryght sites are flexible and can be set up in many ways. See Types of Sites for other common configurations.
If you understand the concept of podcasting, then you can get started right now with your Bryght site. For a more in depth treatment, see "Setting Up Podcasts-Only Feeds" below.
For more detailed instructions, including how to set upload size limits, skip down to the section "Setting Up Podcasts-Only Feeds".
In late 2004, people looking for an easier way to create and host their own personal radio shows and/or daily rants in audio form in MP3 format came up with the idea to use the RSS syndication format to ease distribution and discovery of others' shows. They also wanted an easy way for listeners to transfer their shows from the Internet to their portable digital music player. Since the Apple iPod was the most popular digital music player at the time—and at this writing still is—and the new way of distributing shows is a lot like broadcasting but in a more distributed fashion, the innovators around the phenomenon dubbed it "podcasting". Note that you do not need an Apple iPod to listen to podcasts: the sound files should work on any computer or MP3 player.
What a podcast can be:
It's not limited to the above things: podcasting is truly the unedited voice of the individual, meaning anybody with a microphone and a line-in can record their voice to their computer, upload the file to their site, and create a podcast.
Bryght sites come out of the box ready for podcasting: whenever you attach an MP3 (or any file) to a post, the RSS feed for that post contains an enclosure element with the URL of the first file listed as the attachment to that post. The following are some ideas to create your own podcasting site using the Drupal-powered Bryght platform.
What makes podcasting different than, say, just uploading an MP3 and linking to it from your weblog are RSS feeds with the enclosure element. That's a technical way of saying that some programs can get a machine-readable file that tells the program to download the MP3 at a time you specify, rather than having to check the site and download the file yourself.
Bryght sites will automatically create a URL for the MP3 you upload, plus it will place that URL in the enclosure element of the RSS feed without you having to learn the RSS format. Having a separate RSS feed for podcasts will let your listeners get only pointers to MP3 files, plus whatever notes you write out for the podcast.
http:// and the domain. If your taxonomy URL looks like http://www.example.com/taxonomy/term/42/0/feed then you would remove the http://www.example.com/ part. In the alias box you can put something like podcast-rss. In this case, the URL of the podcast feed ends up being http://www.example.com/podcast-rssAfter you've setup a category for your podcasts, it's time to start recording and posting it to your site!
Roland Tanglao contributed in writing this article. He podcasts for Urban Vancouver, Dogma Radio and, of course, Bryght.
In node.tpl.php, the following code shows links to all categories to a node, regardless of what kind of categories they are.
If all you want are to list the tags, use the following PHP snippet in place of the code that displays categories. You will need to know which vocabulary you've set as "free tagging", that is, which vocabulary ID. Change the first line to reflect your settings. If you don't yet have a vocabulary set to free-tagging, click administer » categories » add vocabulary tab and check the box next to "Free tagging" after you've filled in the other required fields.
So using the in-browser theme editor (see our instructions on setting up the theme editor and using it), replace the code in node.tpl.php above with the code below, and it will show a comma-separated list of tags linked to their individual taxonomy pages.
<?php
$vid = 1;
$result = db_query("SELECT t.tid, t.name FROM {term_data} t, {term_node} r WHERE r.tid = t.tid AND r.nid = %d AND t.vid = %d ORDER BY weight, name", array($node->nid, $vid));
while ($term = db_fetch_object($result)) {
$tags[] = l($term->name, 'taxonomy/term/' . $term->tid);
}
if ($tags) {
print t("Tags: ") . implode(', ', $tags);
}
?>
With some knowledge of PHP and a PHPTemplate-compatible theme—all Bryght themes are PHPTemplate-compatible—you can replace the 
icon with one you've made yourself (and not just on the sidebar block but when it appears at the bottom of a page as well) by following the instructions below. It is based on the instructions on how to override a theme function at Drupal.org.
function phptemplate_xml_icon ($url) {
$icon_url = 'path/to/new/icon';
if ($image = '<img src="'. $icon_url . '" alt="'. t('XML feed') . '" />') {
return '<span class="xml-icon"><a href="'. check_url($url) .'">'. $image. '</a></span>';
}
}"Hyper-local media" and "citizen journalism" are buzzwords that are getting lots of attention these days. Why? Of course, I don't know the whole answer but part of it is that under 35s don't read newspapers and this is seen as an effective way of getting their attention and engaging them by letting them blog their own news and contextualizing news to where they live instead of the big media hubs like London, New York, Washington, Ottawa, Toronto, etc.
Urban Vancouver (henceforth called UV) is one example of a hyper-local/citizen journalism site. It's news for Vancouverites (that's BC, Canada not Washington, USA) by Vancouverites. There's no barrier to entry (or more accurately, the barriers to entry are much lower). Anybody with a Vancouver connection can join for free and blog for free (including photos and soon, audio and video) and their blog posts show up automatically on the front page.
Before Bryght, creating your own Urban Vancouver (which is a Bryght site) was imposssible for non technical people. With Bryght, you can create your own UV in a matter or hours or days whether you are technical or not.
Your own "UV-like" site (to pretentiously name drop European places that I have lived, how about Friedrichshafen Heute, Belsize Park Today, Hadley Common Today or for a Vancouver example how about Cedar Cottage Today?) with blogs automagically published to the front page.
You won't have a cool "Bright Creative Dave Shea" look like Urban Vancouver, but that can be arranged. Contact us and we can put you in touch with a reseller (or do it yourself if you know modern, table-less CSS/HTML design) who can get you a fantastic look and feel.
Note that this is only one possible configuration for a Bryght site. Bryght sites are flexible and can be set up in other many ways e.g. brochure sites. See Types of Sites for other common configurations.
This is a UV specific version of Boris' most excellent new site checklist.
More info on configuring admin settings
More info on default workflow for various content (also called node) types
Allow people to create accounts without approval, and add user pictures:
Enable blogs, comments and image galleries for registered users and comments for non-registered users:
More info on user roles and permissions
For your own personal UV, you wouldn't use the Vancouver geographic categories (Chinatown, Commercial Drive, Downtown, Eastside, Gastown, Kitsilano, Main Street, etc.). Instead, you would use the ones applicable to your community. For this example let's pretend our community is called 'Bedrock' :-) and the neighbourhoods are called 'China Rock', "Commercial Rock', 'Down Rock', 'East Stone', and 'Gas Rock':
For the newspaper style categories, we looked at the local papers and came up with our own set of categories (General, Arts & Entertainment, Business, Environment, Fashion, Food & Dining, Health & Fitness, Media, Music, Politics, Real Estate, Recreation, Society, Sports, Technology, Travel) for UV. Feel free to use your own of course! For this example we will use the same ones as UV.
Click Administer » Site configuration. Underneath you will see a list of modules whose settings you can change.
A few modules (like image) require you to access their settings in order to set them up:
Other modules have settings that you may want to change.
By default, Bryght allows only a very small set of HTML tags to be entered by users using the "Filtered HTML filter". Like UV, you may want to let the user enter tags for bold, italic, paragraph and block quotes, here's how:
More info on Input Formats and Filters
UV's RSS aggregator is configured to subscribe to every single RSS feed related to Vancouver that we know about which is several hundred. These feeds are grouped into one or more categories that make sense for Vancouver. The categories are Vancouver blogs, food, business, technology, etc. For example, a food blog would be categorized into the Vancouver blogs and food categories and about a technology business would be categorized into Vancouver blogs, business and technology.
This provides a portal for Vancouver blogs as well as helps improve UV's search engine rank for Vancouver related keywords.
For this example, we will use the categories Bedrock blogs, food, business, and technology but of course you can use whatever categories you wish.
Make the left sidebar contain popular content
Make the right sidebar contain the latest update blog posts from the RSS aggregator with Upcoming Events below:
More info on enabling and setting the order of sidebar blocks and for those who wish to make money via ads, check out How to add a Javascript (e.g. Google Adsense, SiteMeter, Blogrolling.com, etc.) Block to the Sidebar
Two options:
More info about pointing your domain to Bryght's servers.
Actually, that was the easy part and you don't have everything that UV has (e.g. discussion forums. It depends on your particular community as to whether you need forums or not. Each blog post has threaded comments which are very similar to forum topics. The only difference is that you have to be a member to create a blog post whereas you can set up forums so that non members can create forum topics.). That said, you definitely deserve a pat on the back and chocolate or mohnkuchen! Technology is easy. Creating and growing a living community where people actually create content (by blogging, posting pictures,sand comments) is not technology. It's sociology!
Speaking of sociology, people who are not bloggers don't usually like a very long scrolling "River of News"/"Conveyor Belt Sushi" front page such as the front page on Urban Vancouver. You may want to have a front page with minimal scrolling like the most excellent Bluffton Today.
Of course, you will need a customized look and feel at some point. As we said at the start, contact us and we can put you in touch with a reseller (or do it yourself if you know modern, table-less CSS/HTML design) who can get you a fantastic look and feel.
Again, the hardest part of any online community is enabling people to create compelling content constantly. Based on our experience, you really need a "conversation coordinator"/"site dad/site mom" who administers the site on a daily basis (watching for spam and other objectionable content) and fosters and nurtures the community and helps out beginners. This person doesn't have to be technical; he or she just has to know how to build community and how to use Bryght. Again, contact us if you need to find somebody like this but really it would be best if this person was a member of the community you are covering and not an outsider.
In order to have a way to recover in case of emergency. For example, if you are writing a new theme, it is possible to have an error in the theme that causes the site NOT to render. (Newer sites can only customize the CSS of a theme, but this recommendation still holds.) In this case, if you are using an alternate admin id and the primary administrator account is using a working theme (which is what you should do!), you can just login in as admin and fix up things there.
This is an introduction on how to convert a modern CSS/HTML design to PHPTemplate, the Bryght template language (In addition to PHPTemplate, Drupal has lots of other templating languages; Bryght only offers PHPTemplate because we think it is the most flexible and the best and of course, a Bryght guy :-) wrote it!). It is an introduction and it is therefore not exhaustive in its treatment of PHPTemplate. But, together with the the official PHPTemplate documentation, you should have enough information to convert basic CSS/HTML designs to PHPTemplate and after reading this, you should have a solid foundation for more advanced conversions.
Click on "read more" for the full details!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. This license applies to all text written by Bryght. All others retain full copyright to their text.