Patrick's Midterm
My project for the last 7 weeks has more or less been a website for an organization called Solidarity! in Lawrence, KS. The website is powered by
Drupal and
OpenBiblio. Both are free, open-source programs. I'm using Drupal as a general CMS and OpenBiblio for the library catalog. It's important to note that I configured and implemented OpenBiblio previous to this semester, although this semester I toyed around with its template to match up with the rest of the site.
Summary
The first two weeks of this semester I dedicated to brushing up on XHTML and CSS. I decided to build a website from the ground up using just html and css--humbly titled "Patrick's Effing Awesome Website." My goal was to make a simple, standards-compliant site that was easy to navigate and not too sore on the eyes. In
week 1, I came up with a layout that I was happy with. I stayed away from styling beyond positioning elements because I wanted to focus first on content and second on presentation.
For
week 2, I finished the site, complete with colors and a cool-looking octopus. Since I focused first on layout of content, I freed up a lot of time to toy around with colors, fonts, and other little trills. Being very happy with the end product, I decided to move onto creating a website for Solidarity.
Since the Solidarity website looked to be a more complicated project, I decided to follow the same process as with Patrick's Effing Awesome Website. For
week 3, I designed a template with just xhtml and css.
With a template in place, I installed drupal onto port 8080 with the intention of creating a test version of the site. I ran into installation problems with drupal (cookie-related issues that occur when installing on a port), but I got around them and was able to successfully transfer the xhtml and css for into a drupal theme.
In
weeks 4-7, I worked off the organization's webspace. I installed Drupal a second time (with no problems!), and easily transferred the theme I had previously created. In these weeks, I spent most of my time configuring modules for a working calendar. I also spent a lot of time with the
views module. I used it for several different content displays, such as the upcoming events and meetings blocks, the
past events page,
about section, and
front page. It's an amazing tool for organizing and displaying node content.
In week 7, the site was able to go live, pretty much on schedule. It turned out to be a larger project than I originally anticipated, but that has been my experience with Drupal and other CMSs so far.
Patrick's Thought's
Here's a short list of important things I've learned from my work so far:
- Know what you're doing . CSS/XHTML, standards-compliant templates are terribly important, but also terrible to learn and debug. Standards aren't really that standard anyway. There's a million different ways to create a good website. You should learn how to create sites with CSS/XHTML, but relying on premade templates won't totally disestablish your cred and will save you a lot of time.
- Less is more. People spend very little time looking at all the content on a site. Put the most important stuff up front, and make sure the important stuff sticks out.
- Hierarchies! I hate them politically, but in IT they're pretty important. A site's hierarchy should be immediately apparent and easy to understand. As in TITLE > NAVIGATION > SUBNAVIGATION > CONTENT.
- Drupal is not the only CMS. While I do have a soft spot for it, Drupal is not a universal solution for all web apps. I believe using Drupal for the solidarity site was a good choice, but I'm glad to know there are other, just-as-credible options out there that could be better under different circumstances.
![[paper clip]](/courses/source/wiki_images/paper_clip_tilt.png)
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