This has been a crazy year. A whole lot of client work, a new arrangement with lynda.com, some unreleased projects that I can't quite talk about yet, and that's just in the ShooFlyDesign part of life!

I'm delighted to announce that my new course, JavaScript for Web Designers, is now available in the lynda.com online training library.

If you're a web designer comfortable with HTML and CSS, and want to learn how to add interactivity to your projects, this course will help you do that. You're not going to master the entire language and everything it can do in three hours, but it will get you rolling in a hurry, developing your intuition and understanding of using JavaScript on the web. Using this course as a foundation, you can move further into the world of writing code for web browsers, and making all kinds of cool stuff on the web.

There are many free videos available, so you can listen to the melodious sound of my voice and get a feel for the examples and teaching style. Check it out!

Last night, I spoke at a joint meetup of Hollywood WordPress and LA WordPress 101. I called it "Everything I Always Wanted to Know About WordPress (but only learned through experience)", but the main point was to give people who are new (or newish) to WordPress some tips and tricks on how to use it, and ways to proceed when they need to start customizing it.

This is my recording of the talk itself, basically a screencast of the slides. The organizers also shot video where you can see me, and if I get my hands on it, I'll update this post.

Download the slides here

This is Part 1 in a series of posts on migrating a site from Squarespace 5 into Drupal 7. This is an overview of what we're doing and why, mostly discussing the format of the Squarespace 5 XML file, which is undocumented. My hope is to make the process of importing Squarespace data easier for everyone else.

The Mission

I'm working on a fairly large site (ApertureExpert.com), currently running on Squarespace 5, migrating to Drupal 7. Squarespace is an excellent platform with many virtues, but it doesn't allow the level of customization that my client is looking for, so we're moving the site to Drupal. Now, of course you lose the built-in, high-availability hosting, and some of the very good polished UI that Squarespace gives you, so this move is not for everyone. But if you want control, and to have your blog, forums, and e-commerce wrapped up in a single package, Drupal is your friend. One example: my client wants users to have all their purchased products, forum posts, and comments available through their user profile. Squarespace can't do that, Drupal can.

This site has been active for several years now, and has a very active community of users, so the first big task was to import all of those items into Drupal. Fortunately, Squarespace 5 will let you export your entire website as XML. Note: it doesn't look like Squarespace 6 (the current version) supports full site export. There is a WordPress-compatible export that you could import into Drupal using WordPress Migrate (or, obviously, into WordPress), but it seems to cover only blog posts. This site is older, running Squarespace 5, so we can get everything.

Now that we have exported data, what can we do with it?