This is the blog of Actualize Studio's development guru Michael Barnard. Here, Michael will share tips, snippets, experience, and downloads for all things development related....more

Yesterday was a big day for Actualize Studio, as we launched our new CMS based site. Notice that 'techie' buzzword, CMS? Over the past several years, the proliferation of Content Management Systems has changed the way most organizations deal with their web presence. Actualize had been touting our CMS expertise, as we had been fortunate enough to have been exposed to a variety of systems, and we have sought to push CMS solutions to our clients. Our own site, however, was not built in a CMS. Oops....more

I have been having some fun figuring out how to extend Graffiti CMS and Chalk for our site. When I am finished, I will post the source code of our Actualize extensions for others to use and improve upon. One of the challenges I was faced with in building the site was dealing with content dispursed in different sections of our layout. This is not a traditional site layout or blog type CMS template. So what I did was use customized .view files and some logic to determine which 'page' needed to be rendered...more

Recently, 'experts' released a list of the top 25 most dangerous programming errors . I suspected the list would consist of numerous esoteric gaffes that applied only to hardened C++ or Assembly veterans, and was pleasantly surprised to find that most involved the practical mistakes of typical day-to-day applications. I am consistently shocked by the amount of poorly written code I stumble upon. Since Actualize Studio does work with a number of clients, I suppose I am subjected to a lot of different...more

I am one of those guys that installs beta versions of Windows the day they come out. I believe it is referred to as 'bleeding edge' appropriately. I have suffered for the last 2 years with a buggy version of Vista, that no amount of tips, registry edits, updates, service packs, or even reinstalls seemed to fix. For example, my PC absolutely hated Microsoft Office. 2003 or 2007, didn't matter, although 2007 was so bad it was unusable. I know these are good products, I use them on other computers with...more

I have received several emails asking about a simple Breadcrumb snippet for Graffiti CMS template .view files. I hadn't jumped on it because I just figured it was simple to do. Then I had to implement one for a client, and I realized it could be a little tricky to do just with straight Chalk. I found this article on Google and posted a reply with a basic breadcrumb for sites that only require a Category > Subcategory > Post deep structure. About 5 minutes after replying, I realized I had been...more

Now that we have done a number of Graffiti installations for clients (and ourselves), I have become rather adept at extending Chalk. In the next few days, I will be uploading to CodePlex the Actualize Chalk Extensions project and source code (C#) to create a community and, hopefully, get other developers to contribute to this project in an effort to make a really powerful Chalk Extension library available for Graffiti. For example, some of the methods available currently: Accordian (int catID, string...more

TeleProductions International, Ltd. is a leading producer and distributor of television programs. Based near Washington, D.C., a major production center for reality-based programming, TPI provides television broadcasters around the world with the best in non-fiction programming. Actualize Studio chose to develop a CMS system in Drupal that is highly flexible offering an incredible library of modules that can be incorporated at any time. This makes the site incredibly durable in that functionality...more