Just launched our first Drupal site over at http://www.ConcreteIdeas.com.
After using Drupal once we are definitely converts and will likely make this our CMS of choice for all projects going forward. As this was our first foray into the world of Drupal we had a lot of help from a few key people (whom I'll mention in a follow-up post) that helped us ramp up the learning curve.
We've got a whole host of modules running on the site with a few custom (ahem, *hacks*) that make it all run nice and smooth...
The trickiest part was definitely the e-commerce component and that warrants an entire post (coming soon...) explaining all the twists and turns we followed before finally coming up with a very comprehensive (we think) solution. We used http://www.aMember.com plugged into the Cybersource gateway as we needed to support recurring credit card billing.
We're still tweaking a few of the design elements and will be adding some additional functionality in the coming weeks, in the meantime, check it out and let us know what you think.
Thanks.
:Dean
Comments
ConcreteIdeas.com.
Wow, that's a very professional looking site. Good work! I really like the colors too.
-theo
http://www.uberjobs.com/location
http://www.stokblogs.com
Very nice work!
Very nice work!
Nice site! It's amazing that
Nice site! It's amazing that this is your first time! Will really be interested in knowing the modules you've used.
I'm also looking into Drupal for a new site. But have a tough time deciding on the modules. I've seen your path's and it looks great. I tried pathauto which works well only when I start editing the titles of the content it doesn't update the paths.
It will really be nice if you could give us a listing of what modules you used for achieving certain parts of the site. I'm so eager to learn. :)
nice looking theme
just wonder, where did you get your theme from? Did you create it yourself? It is a nice/clean theme
Congrats on the site...
Congrats on the site... looks great!
I think the best Drupal sites don't look anything like Drupal at all.
Nice first site
I think you've done a great job and I look forward to you're ecommerce post/
Thanks!
Thanks for all the positive feedback.
One of the key advantages I've found to working with drupal is how (relatively) easy it is to work in a collaborative fashion, with multiple development streams going on simultaneously. We had a number of key contributers to the project so I also wanted to give credit where credit was due:
http://drupal.org/user/27810 - john did some great work with the video uploader with auto-thumb grabs and management of video tutorials (this component of the site will be launched shortly), john also helped with the suppliers search which nicely leverages the location module.
http://drupal.org/user/45890 - steve did some slick work with the articles and image cache, very flexible for client to manage, and the expand-o image blow-ups are super fun, steve's work with the professional search and profile theme's was instrumental
http://drupal.org/user/57130 - julaboy did some great work with the image gallery (users love it) and technical data
http://drupal.org/user/55379 - cathy was instrumental in getting us to use drupal in the first place and got us started with some excellent specs for the sites information architecture
I'd still like to add a post outlining our discoveries and conclusions regarding drupal e-commerce - coming soon...
Memory limit?
Congrats
Just curious, did you guys set certain memory limit, or you have php.ini settings for large traffic
My site e-tekun.com (E-Commerce Drupal 4.7) was set at 40 MB in settings.php, after it just went blank, now it's ok, but persistently showing white blank screen when admin doing some work (got to refresh web browser to get back to content)
Strange ... No memory limit
Strange, I see no memory_limit directive in the phpinfo() of my newer php 4.4.4-based and php5 based enviroments. I tried to search - and it might be that the default for newer versions is NO LIMIT. I don't know for sure, but it seems to work with no memory_limit var. There was some security fix regarding memory_limit on PHP 64bit systems so maybe that's the reason.
Amnon
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Drupal Focused Search Engine | Drupal Israel | Organic Web Strategy Consulting
Well done
Nice site, even better if its the first drupal one!
Can I ask how you do the map stuff at http://www.concreteideas.com/find_a_pro
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http://www.AnfieldRed.co.uk
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Managed Drupal hosting from Ixis IT
Fantastic
The Map section... very nice, how did you do that? I really like the site very professional looking. Would like to know what modules you used as well, looking forward to your follow up posts and your next site!
ahhh zee maps.
ahhh zee maps.
how i did this..
first off i was given the markup and graphics with the maps and they already had the simple js to make the province / state highlighted with the text at the bottom..
so i copied and pasted that pretty much into a custom module.
then in this module, i simply did some custom queries which inner joined a few tables together like the roles table and also the profiles table... professionals listed have to have a certain role.
so i set up a field with profile module for state or province, and then we just simply check on that.
thats why the links are so nice like ..
http://www.concreteideas.com/find_a_pro/canada/british_columbia
we know the country is canada,
we know the province is british columbia
oooh and always remember when doing custom queries.. should you be checking if status = 1 ? (both the users table and node table have a status column)
Sweet site bud, keep
Sweet site bud, keep rolling. Doesn't even look very much like drual at all. For you first site I'm pretty impressed.
Criticalsole.com rolls on Drupal!
Very nice layout and theme
how long did it take to set up, how many people on it ?
Its a great job.
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world experts tag cloud
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GiorgosK
Web Development
nice site
great to see another professional looking drupal site
but. errors displayed on this page!!
http://www.concreteideas.com/concrete_ideas/epoxies_and_coatings/epoxy_s...
click on an image and then click on 'epoxy stone flooring' under recent articles
* warning: Division by zero in /var/www/vhosts/concreteideas.com/httpdocs/cms/includes/image.inc on line 125.
* warning: imagecreatetruecolor(): Invalid image dimensions in /var/www/vhosts/concreteideas.com/httpdocs/cms/includes/image.inc on line 225.
* warning: imagecopyresampled(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /var/www/vhosts/concreteideas.com/httpdocs/cms/includes/image.inc on line 226.
* warning: imagejpeg(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /var/www/vhosts/concreteideas.com/httpdocs/cms/includes/image.inc on line 300.
* warning: imagedestroy(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /var/www/vhosts/concreteideas.com/httpdocs/cms/includes/image.inc on line 229.
* warning: Cannot use a scalar value as an array in /var/www/vhosts/concreteideas.com/httpdocs/cms/modules/imagecache/imagecache.module on line 114.
( firefox 1.5, macOs 10.4.8)
Very professional-looking site with great functionality
Wow, I'm very impressed with your site!
The overall look and feel, the maps, the images ... it all looks great!
Again, I'm very impressed with your site and look forward to reading the upcoming posting on e-commerce you mentioned earlier. If you could post which modules you used, that would be an added bonus.
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Neat
Great site. Very informative. Just happens that I am a concrete floor fan :)
Concrete never looked so sweet!
I was wondering why some rookie concrete site was on the front page of drupal.org. Now I know - holy smokes guys, what a fabulous site! Was this a awdd media job? Man, there's a lot of fantastic Drupal design/development coming out of Vancouver...
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Gus Austin
Director of Chaos and Confusion
PepperAlley Productions
What am I trying to do with Drupal?
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Gus Austin
Great, but cybersource + amember?
Hey,
great to see you are also on the path to use amember with drupal,
but I cannot find Cyber Source on the paysystems list
here http://www.amember.com/paysystems.php
nor Amember on the solution list
here http://www.cybersource.com/partners/shopping_carts/solutions/
Does Cybersource require a merchant account?
Does Cybersource work with Euro merchants?
thanks,
Christoph
Contact aMember via helpdesk and they will implement CyberSource
Try this link - http://www.amember.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5247
Good luck!
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
That's a nice, well-designed site
You've managed to consolidate and organize a lot of information into a very attractive package. The design is clean and clear and you have made excellent use of photos and subtle design touches. However it has the standard complement of usability no-nos that Drupal imposes on site developers "out of the box":
1. The topmost links give no indication of which particular context the user happens to be in.
2. Even though there is directory-like sectioning in the way the site is organized, there is no subnavigation to go with it. So if I'm on a page in say, interior floors, I have to go back to the jump page for that section to see anything else in it.
3. There are two entirely unrelated menus on every page. What, thematically, distinguishes the left menu from the top menu?
I'm quite sure none of this is your fault and that's why I intend no insult by saying it. Among Drupal's many fine qualities, coherent, usable navigation schemes is not one. It's apparently not feasible without hacking the code and potentially doing things that confuse end users. I just read the feature list for Drupal 5 and am disappointed that nothing has been done to improve Drupal's menu-ing options. Am I the only one that sees this as a major stumbling block to world domination?
I am evaluating Drupal against an expensive and truly horrible commerical system that has been proposed for my employer, which would be a large and prestigious user group. I regret that the menu-ing in Drupal if I understand its potential fully, will kill it in this evaluation. Please somebody -- tell me how to achieve structure context sensitivity and fundamental usability in Drupal navigation.
good point, brooklynwebguy
brooklynwebguy, that's one element I am looking for as well. I'm redeveloping several sites for non-profits, and they all definitely need context-sensitive menu and tabbed navigation. These are all sites with tons of existing hierarchical and interrelated content.
Wordpress has plugins for breadcrumbs and contextual submenus... how can this be done in Drupal?
Breadcrumbs
The breadcrumbs, I'm happy to say are there by default.
The context-sensitive menus: I'm still looking. My impression is you can get some of what we're looking for with either the book module or the category module. Generally I don't like gaming things intended for one use, like the book module, into another. It makes things hackish and creates naming and conceptual wierdness. I found the category_module hard to to understand, particularly as it pertains to navigation.
Also, generally, it seems that the code that renders just about any menu has to be hacked if you want to meet the basic usability feature of disabling the link for the active page. It is possible at least to reformat the link corresponding to the active page except in the primary navigation. which strikes me as a major oversight.
Suggestions...
I'm all for improved navigation!
You might consider submitting your issue to one or more of the following Drupal groups to see if a solution exists. Please note that if you subscribe to multiple Drupal groups such as those below, you can easily "check" a box while drafting a submission in order to post your submission to your selected groups all at once; this helps avoid having to write up and submit multiple submissions.
http://groups.drupal.org/issue-tracking-and-software-releases
http://groups.drupal.org/theme-development
http://groups.drupal.org/theming-design-in-drupal
http://groups.drupal.org/usability
Also, please check the issue queue to see if your issue is already known. If it is not, consider submitting a bug report, feature or support request.
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Really great site! Can't
Really great site! Can't wait until you share some of how this was put together with everyone. I'm new here so if I should already know that by looking at his site I don't so help me out with telling me where to get the tools to make a site that's of this quality.
aMember for Managing Paid Memberships
For those that are interested, I've created a separate post for questions/comments regarding using aMember with Drupal:
http://drupal.org/node/104513
www.awdd.ca
congratulations
congratulations
It's good to see an amember installation on the frontpage.
Marcel
New and used cars for sale in Trinidad and Tobago
http://01wholesale.com
Hi, really professional job,
Hi,
really professional job, love the use of maps and the user/company homepages!
just wondering what newsletter system you're using here http://www.concreteideas.com/industry_ideas_newsletter_sign_up_for_archi... i believe drupal still lacks a really good and scaleable newsletter system.
cheers
Tom
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http://adrenalinehub.com/thomjjames - Action Sports Community
http://www.sustravel.co.uk - Sustainable Travel Magazine
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https://tomswebstuff.com
Me Too!
I am very impressed as well and would love to know about some of the modules you used. I have played with over half of them with varied results and *love* your implementation. Clean, easy to use, fast .. it's just great. Got me excited over concrete! LOL
Julie