Smart Ideas Web Site

About Content

Smart Ideas (www.ideas-smart.com) is a community Web site for sharing smart ideas. Here are several examples of type of content that is welcome to be shared.

• Doing things better, faster and/or more effectively by leveraging certain laws of physics, chemistry etc. For example, the article Perfect beef steak advises to warm up the beef to 60ºC in the oven and then fry quickly. This way, the beef remains much more juicy and tender than when cooking it the traditional way.
• Certain “hidden” knowledge that might be helpful sometimes. The article Defense against overbilling lawyers gives advice what you can do if you receive bloated invoice from a lawyer.
• Grandma’s good ideas about how to do things simply just utilizing stuff we have in house. The article about repelling mosquitoes tells you how to keep mosquitoes out of your house just using clover.

Preferably, the contributed articles should explain the principles behind the smart ideas. The readers can then adopt them more easily to their situation.

If you have clever ideas in other areas than Web site design and implementation, you are welcome to publish them on Smart Ideas.

About Technology

I evaluated Joomla, TikiWiki and Drupal for this project. Drupal impressed me pretty quickly. It had almost everything out of the box what I needed to start building the Web site. I was also impressed by extensibility using various contributed modules, granularity of user privileges and database API that allows plugging into different database brands easily.

The following contributed modules are used on Smart Ideas: FAQ, Fivestar, Integrated Metatags, QuickTabs, ShareThis, Tagadelic and VotingAPI. Amadou theme was the starting point for the Smart Ideas theme.

I implemented several modules of my own. They implement Question content type and linking of questions to articles, which answer these questions. I also changed some of the default behavior. The biggest change is the way how the list of forum topics is presented. On Articles page, it is just a list of categories without additional data (e.g. number of comments). I like simplicity and I believe this presentation is more appropriate for the broad audience that this site is supposed to attract.

About Future

Regarding the future improvements. I’m thinking about adding a gallery so that users can upload pictures, which illustrate their smart ideas. I would also like to use Hierarchical Select for selection of categories once a stable version is available.