The Tumblr acquisition may give Yahoo the young, hip audience it’s always wanted — assuming it can keep them. Because Tumblr users aren’t happy, and they’re letting it all out. 

“Yahoo is buying Tumblr guys THIS IS NOT OKAY THEY’LL RUIN OUR HOME,” blogged one user in a sentiment repeatedly echoed on the #yahoo, #tumblr, and #yumblr tags on Tumblr, all of which are currently experiencing an overload of activity. 

Via the 5EXi Tumbr

Tumblr users’ greatest fear? Change, of any kind. Many have vowed to leave at the first sign of Yahoo involvement. One Tumblr user-generated photo shows a purple, spammy nightmare of what many bloggers fear Tumblr may soon become. 

Via the castielmalotovedlucifer Tumblr

These concerns aren’t exactly unfounded, either: Yahoo has a track record of botching its acquisitions. It’s telling that Yahoo’s press release on the acquisition notes that it “promises not to screw it up.” (You read that correctly — that's in the press release.)

Tumblr CEO David Karp assured users in an announcement that “We’re not turning purple.” (Of course, Tumblr has been purple before — back in 2010, it went purple for Pride Day. When it reverted to traditional blue, well, users complained about that, too.)

There are some obvious conflicts a-brewin'. Yahoo is a self-described family friendly brand while Tumblr is infamous for its uncensored pornographic content. As a result, some users worry about a culture clash. "Yahoo buying Tumblr is like having a house party supervised by your Grandma," one user blogged.

Yahoo is already working to defuse such fears, though it's far from clear how successfully. In addition to the company's promise "not to screw it up," CEO Marissa Mayer made a point of offering this reassurance on a call with analysts and press shortly after the acquisition announcement: "We really want to let Tumblr be Tumblr and let Yahoo be Yahoo."

Via thefrogman.me blog

Some of Tumblr's competitors say they smell blood in the water. WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg, for instance, wrote on his personal blog Sunday that “normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.” (Full disclosure, I’m currently a trial employee at WordPress.com.)

Of course, social-media outrage is often transitory. On Quit Facebook Day in 2010, organizers planned to lead a mass exodus from the site in protest of Facebook privacy policy. In the end, fewer than 2% of American users left after all.

Mayer has already begun addressing the culture clash on her brand new Tumblr, which spells “Mayr” without the “e” as a nod to Tumblr’s quirky spelling. Her latest post speaks Tumblr’s language — a spot-on GIF that depicts Mayer and Karp battling it out through netspeak. Mayer's rallying cry: WFH [Work From Home]. Karp's? NSFW [Not Safe For Work].

When Karp announced the acquisition, he signed it with a nod to one of Tumblr’s most viral (and NSFW) memes, “Fuck Yeah.” Even if Yahoo is planning to change an aspect of the site, Tumblr’s salty language and aversion to censorship don’t seem to be one of them.

Lead image via the tinsoftware Tumblr

The Bauhaus was active for a scant 14 years--from 1919 to its closing in 1933--but its influence continues to haunt design. An incubator for interdisciplinary design and study, the Bauhaus that we all know and shell out top currency for is the Bauhaus of the mid-1920s, when the curriculum adopted a technocratic bent that extolled the virtues of machine forms and of mechanical reproducibility. This shift corresponded to the school’s relocation to Walter Gropius’s new campus at Dessau, which employed rigid geometries, flat, overlapping planes, and mechanically operated windows.

The Bauhaus of today has been long institutionalized, meaning you can find hints of it in products from Vitra to Target. Still, the same abstractions and angled rectangles, when handled skillfully, produces a clarity and magnetism missing from most contemporary design. Just try to resist this series of “Bauhaus” food stylings, which make excellent use of simple rotated geometries, slanted lines, and, yes, cocoa powder.

The idea for the project was born soon after Nicola Walsh, the photography half of food stylist studio Nicky&Max, had moved to Berlin. There, at the Bauhaus Archive Museum, she was exposed to the “Bauhaus ethos,” as she puts it. Walsh excitedly discussed her initial thoughts to Max [Faber] for a photography project on the theme. “At that point we had not been working together long,” she tells Co. Design, “and I was really pushing for us to make work that had no commercial context.”

Indeed, the photographs are a long cry from the duo’s typical work, which wouldn’t be out of place in an artisanal foodie blog or magazine, minus the perfunctory gloss. “It was very much an experiment, to see how far we could push the idea of food photography,” Walsh explains. The project also gave Walsh the chance to rediscover her art and design past, which she did through the intricate plating arrangements. The bold, Constructivist colors and shapes, borrowed from Bauhaus instructor and artist László Moholy-Nagy, are reverentially handled and make for surprisingly good vehicles for the tasty morsels. As for Faber, a professional cook who runs a food and recipe site, he was focused on making the food bits appealing and fresh-looking--perfect sight bites.

Asked if there were any future experiments in the works, Walsh tentatively answers yes. But the positive response the project has received, she says, has emboldened the partners to push their “commercial” work in new directions. “It’s good to do something like this once or twice a year, with a passion to make something for no other reason other than you want to.”

Google Maps offers many benefits over its crinkly paper predecessors, one being the simple fact that you never have to wrestle with an app to get it folded back up properly when you’re done using it. But buried just beneath the surfaces of those old physical maps are ample reserves of beauty and meaning, and by slicing, folding, and rearranging them into new forms, Shannon Rankin unlocks both.

Rankin was born in California but grew up in Vermont, and she says a series of early cross-country trips were formative to her work today. "The views from the airplane window are what initially sparked my interest in the macro and micro quality of the landscape," she explains. She first made use of maps as an art student nearly 15 years ago, when she was coping with the loss of a close friend. In those early works, Rankin recalls, she used maps that her grandfather had given her as a child, employing them as "a metaphor for searching and understanding."

Since then, the Maine-based artist has worked with many materials, but she’s returned to maps again and again. The pieces seen here come from two different collections, Map Series and Anatomy Series. In the former, Rankin transforms maps into compelling geometric patterns and architectural collages; in the latter, she repurposes cartographic elements to represent parts of the human body, showing a network of roads as a complex mesh of synapses, for example.

Still, Rankin thinks there’s more to uncover. "I have yet to tire of the inherent beauty and potential meaning that emerges from working with them," she explains. "Maps are subjective. Every map is an interpretation. We bring our own personal meaning when we view them. They can reference the physical and psychological simultaneously. They elicit our memories and become a metaphor of life and personal cosmologies."

In other words, maps can bridge the macro and micro concerns of our own lives, linking personal voyages to the greater world in which they transpire. And while the documents themselves may be authoritative, our readings of them are always prone to error. That human element--that ability to misinterpret or misread a map--is part of what makes Rankin’s reworkings so potent. They’re a reminder, in an age when our navigation is increasingly administered by a cool synthesized voice on a turn-by-turn basis, that maps can still be open to interpretation.

See more of Rankin’s work here.

Hoppit is designed to give users a variety of dining options based on their moods. For example, someone may be heading out with a group of friends and they’re looking for something trendy and hipster with a lot of hustle and bustle. The app can provide a list of interesting eateries in a given area that meet these very requirements. Users simply select a location, choose the vibe they’re looking for and describe who they’re with (friends, family, kids, a significant other etc) to refine their search according to the kind of evening out they’re looking for. They can detail their search even further by adding the distance they want to travel, the price range they would prefer, the type of venue, specific cuisine and even noise level. The application then provides a selection of top restaurant matches along with maps, detailed information on the venues and high resolution restaurant photography.

The Hoppit API gives developers access to the data used by this award-winning application, allowing them to integrate it with other applications. In order to access data and further information on the API, developers can register and create an account on Hoppit’s website.

Sponsored by

Earlier this year, online media was abuzz with the latest bit of strange news coming out of China, one involving cultural forgery on a scale yet seen. Or so it seemed. It was discovered that an in-progress building project in the Western Chinese city of Chongqing bore a considerable, if not exact, likeness to a high-profile shopping center in Beijing, which was still under construction. The latter was designed by none other than Zaha Hadid, who could arguably be called the world’s most famous architect. The identity of the so-called copycat architects was never revealed, though the developers behind the counterfeit denied culpability in duplicating Hadid’s patented curve-laden, wind-swept architecture.

The episode, which has yet to reach a definitive conclusion, sparked web chatter and numerous op-ed creeds for the days that followed, much of which revolved around China’s counterfeit culture and the role of intellectual property rights therein. Along with token mentions of contraband iPads and even entire Apple stores, there resurfaced images and news reports of theme parks, resorts, and neighborhoods that have popped up all over the country in the last several years.

There was a 108-meter tall replica of the Eiffel Tower crowning Tiandechung, a gated community of Mansard roof-clad immeubles just outside of Shanghai. Nearby, in a different development, rows of mock-Tudors lined winding streets that coursed through Thames Town. Then, in the most famous (i.e., “reblogged”) example, a wholesale clone of Hallstatt, a fairytale Austrian lakeside hamlet, was erected on the outskirts of Guangzhou, complete with the requisite lake. All these sites and more figure in a new photography and video project about China’s “copy towns.”

Conceived by London-based artists Sebastian Acker and Phil Thompson, the project combines the pair’s interests in digital copy culture, architectural reproductions, and, yes, that oh-so-elusive thing called authenticity. The work is split into two components: One half consists of documenting the originals and their Chinese reconstructions through new photographs, sculptures, and a book; the other, to tour those materials in all their affiliated locations. It’s an ambitious program, with all sorts of complications, namely, travel and budget obstacles. Now, Thompson and Acker have launched an Indiegogo campaign for help in realizing the work.

Luckily, they already have a head start. After reading an article about “Hallstatt 2” and other similar developments, the partners successively applied for a traveling grant to travel to China to hunt down the urban facsimiles. “We deliberately went to the copies before having seen the original places. In a way they became our personal originals,” Acker tells Co. Design. Their pictures and video of the trip capture the doppelganger cities in vivid detail--in the case of Hallstatt, everything from the town’s white church and steeple to the stone-wrought fountain in the central square had been accurately re-created, right down to the edelweiss.

Yet they found the places devoid of urban life, their streets mostly filled with maintenance workers or real estate agents. Chinese visitors would walk by in small clusters, snapping pictures of the curious English tourists surveying the Alpine ornament that graces the facades of buildings. But on the whole, the towns felt very much out of time. As Acker explains, “Most copy towns we visited were half empty, but this is something we have experienced in many of the recent building developments in China, whether copied or not. The Chinese government supports building projects on a massive scale, even if there isn’t enough demand or people can’t afford it yet.”

Those who can afford it? China’s emerging upper classes, toward whom places like Tianducheng are geared. Most of the copy towns, Acker says, are appealing to a new slate of Chinese that “looks to the West for models to showcase their newly found fortunes.” That sentiment echoes a similar argument--just one of many--put forth by author and tech writer Bianca Bosker that tries to understand capitalist China’s embrace of “duplitecture.” Halfway through her compelling book, Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, Bosker opines that China’s increasingly wealthy, whether intentionally or not, may “have turned themselves into a tourist attraction for China’s 1.3 billion citizens.” This homegrown tourism industry, something that Mao even supported, encourages Chinese nationals to travel within the borders of their sprawling country. In addition to traditional Chinese tourist spots, Thames Town and others give visitors who aren’t able to travel to the West the chance to experience their most iconic sites.

But what does this mean for the future of architecture, in China and elsewhere? Well, that’s what Acker and Thompson are hoping to find out. One thing’s for sure: Copying is nothing new to the study and production of buildings and cities, and it’s only getting a lot easier. As Ai Weiwei put it to them when they showed up at his front door: “Now architecture speaks the language of computers--which have three buttons: copy, paste, delete.”

See more of Acker and Thompson’s Indiegogo campaign here.

Like most content management systems, PyroCMS uses front-end themes. Though PyroCMS themes are built a bit differently than what you might be used to from other systems, they’re still quite easy to create. They’re so easy, in fact, that very little PHP experience is required to assemble them!

The Folder Structure

PyroCMS themes consist of HTML, images, CSS, and JavaScript, arranged into the following supported folders:

• css
• img
• js
• views
• views/layouts
• views/partials
• views/modules

While these folders will no doubt look familiar to you, the "views" folder makes the most sense within the context of MVC. When building a theme for PyroCMS, you are really building the views (including assets) of a MVC patterned application. These views consist of a master layout file and multiple partial files (i.e. a header.html or footer.html) that shares presentation logic between different layouts. We’ll discuss this more shortly.

Getting Started

To get started building your first PyroCMS theme, create the supported folder structure in one of the two places that themes may reside within an instance of PyroCMS:

addons/shared_addons/themes (for themes available to all sites)

Or:

addons/[site-name]/themes (for themes available to only one specific site)

Once you have the base theme folder containing the supported folder structure created, the first file that you'll want to add to your theme is theme.php.

addons/shared_addons/themes/[my-theme-name]/theme.php

This theme.php file contains all essential details for your theme, including its name, author, version, etc. In a way, this file is similar to the comment block found at the top of a WordPress theme's style.css file. Here’s a basic example of a theme.php file for your PyroCMS theme:

<?php defined('BASEPATH') OR exit('No direct script access allowed');

class Theme_Foo extends Theme
{
    public $name = 'Foo';
    public $author = 'Zac Vineyard';
    public $author_website = 'http://zacvineyard.com';
    public $website = 'http://example.com/themes/foo';
    public $description = 'The antithesis theme to your Bar theme.';
    public $version = '1.0';
}

 /* End of file theme.php */

Please take note that this file extends a PyroCMS class, called Theme. Also, because you are declaring a PHP class in this file, you'll need to make sure that the name of the folder containing your theme is used in the class declaration. So, if the folder housing your theme is called, "foo," the class created in your theme.php should be named, Theme_Foo (instead of Theme_Custom, as shown in the example within PyroCMS' documentation).

Once you have created your theme.php file, you can login to your PyroCMS control panel and view your theme listed in the Themes module.

Layouts

All layouts files for a PyroCMS theme exist in one of two locations:

addons/[site-ref]/themes/[my-theme-name]/views/layouts/

Or:

addons/shared_addons/themes/[my-theme-name]/views/layouts/

Every theme should have a layout file, named "default.html" in one of the locations listed above. Additional layout files are optional; I'll show you how to add more layout files in a moment. First, it’s important to review the contents of a layout file.

Layout files in PyroCMS are built using HTML and a tag parser, referred to as the Lex Tag Parser. This is what a very basic PyroCMS layout file looks like:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>{{ template:title }}</title>
    {{ template:metadata }}
</head>
<body>
    <h1>{{ template:title }}</h1>
    {{ template:body }}
</body>
</html>

The special tags you see in this bit of HTML are Lex parser tags. If you've ever used Smarty templates in PHP, these may look somewhat familiar. The primary benefit to using Lex parser tags in your layout files is that you don't have to put PHP directly in your views (remember, we're using MVC), which gives you the best chance of creating PyroCMS themes that follow the don’t repeat yourself pattern.

The example that I've given above is simple, of course, but Lex parser tags are quite powerful. They can loop through data, work with attributes, and more. Learn more about the Lex Parser in the PyroCMS documentation.

A more complex PyroCMS layout file looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>{{ template:title }}</title>
    {{ template:metadata }}
    {{ theme:favicon file="favicon.png" }}
    {{ theme:css file="style.css" }}
    {{ theme:js file="site.js" }}
</head>
<body>
    <div class="header">
        <div class="logo">
            {{ theme:image file="logo.jpg" alt="Your Cool Logo" }}
        </div>
        <div class="nav">
            {{ navigation:links group="header" }}
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="content">
        <h1>{{ template:title }}</h1>
        {{ template:body }}
    </div>
</body>
</html>

You'll notice that this layout file, using Lex, includes assets, like CSS, JavaScript, and images. Using Lex tags and HTML allows PyroCMS developers to build layout files very quickly.

Partials

Partials in PyroCMS, which stands for partial layouts, allows you to break layouts into reusable parts or sections. These sections can then be loaded by different layout files. This keeps you from typing the same code (header, footer, etc.) into multiple layout files.

Depending on where you've placed your theme files, partials are created in one of two locations:

addons/[site-ref]/themes/[my-theme-name]/views/partials/

Or:

addons/shared_addons/themes/[my-theme-name]/views/partials/

Partials are loaded into layouts using this Lex tag:

{{ theme:partial name="partialname" }}

This Lex tag operates exactly like a PHP include statement – similar to one that you would find in WordPress or other themes. The code below is a simple example of a PyroCMS layout that takes advantage of partials.

{{ theme:partial name="header" }}

    <div class="content">
        <h1>{{ template:title }}</h1>
        {{ template:body }}
    </div>

{{ theme:partial name="footer" }}

The contents of the header.html partial and footer.html files are, of course, the HTML we'll need to reuse from the template in our previous code example above. One quick pointer: there is no limit to the number of partials that you can use in one layout. Additionally, partial files may contain any combination of valid HTML and Lex.

Multiple Layout Files

To add another layout to your instance of PyroCMS, create one more layout file in your theme's views/layouts/ directory. This file may receive any name, but it’s a good idea to name it as descriptively as possible – like about.html.

For added flexibility, you can make use of as many layout files as you'd like. When you edit or create a Page Type in your PyroCMS control panel (Control Panel→Pages→Page Types) and select your desired file from the dropdown, all the layouts in your theme's layout file will be available to use.

Mobile Layouts

PyroCMS is able to easily display separate layouts for mobile and desktops. To use this feature, move your layout files into a folder, called "web" within the views folder, so that your default layout will be located here:

[your-theme]/views/web/layouts/default.html

When a user accesses your site using a desktop browser, the primary layout files in this location will be used. If the user accesses your site using a mobile device browser, users will be supplied with the mobile layouts that you've created in this location:

[your-theme]/views/mobile/layouts/default.html

This feature works with multiple layout files.

Please take note of this warning found in the PyroCMS documentation: "PyroCMS does not consider the iPad a mobile device, so it will not load your mobile layouts if the user is accessing your site using an iPad." If, however, on your site, you'd like to make an iPad recognized as a mobile device, you can change the "user_agent.php" file within the config/ directory to make the iPad recognized a mobile device.

Finished!

Using this article as a guide, you can see how easy it is to create a theme in PyroCMS. The code examples provided are quite simple, so I encourage you to explore the PyroCMS documentation to become more experienced with layouts, mobile layouts, partials, and the Lex Parser in PyroCMS. Have fun!

Getting called out by the Obama administration wasn't enough of a deterrent for Unit 61398, the cyberattack unit of the People's Liberation Army of China, because apparently they're at it again, working to pilfer information from private company and public government data stores.

The New York Times is reporting that Unit 61398 has resumed operations and is actively engaged in hacking into any U.S. systems that might hold information considered to be of use for the People's Republic of China.

Security firm Mandiant told the Times "that the Chinese hackers had stopped their attacks after they were exposed in February and removed their spying tools from the organizations they had infiltrated. But over the past two months, they have gradually begun attacking the same victims from new servers and have reinserted many of the tools that enable them to seek out data without detection.

"They are now operating at 60 percent to 70 percent of the level they were working at before, according to a study by Mandiant requested by The New York Times," the article reported.

If accurate, then it's clear that the U.S. is going to have to step up its game when it comes to cybersecurity, particularly organizations that have data related to trade secrets or, more disturbingly, infrastructure plans - both targets of Chinese hackers.

Even if this isn't the PLA, someone is hacking these systems, and it's time to stop treating cybersecurity like a game.