New Drupal 4.7 website for my Church
This is my first real Drupal site (http://www.pittsfordcc.org). This is for my church. I am using Drupal 4.7. I backported Garland to 4.7 at the end of last year. That way, when I move to 5, there will be no perceived changes. I am not a graphical designer, so I appreciate the efforts of the Garland creators. I am using the category module, hidden containers and all to manage the hierachy so that breadcrumbs and menus match. The learning curve on that module was a bit steep, but now I am very comfortable with it. It is very powerful if you have a complicated hierarchy.
Pathauto is used to create human friendly URLs. I used ContentO to create new content types so that I can restrict what types of nodes are created by different classes of users, hence where they appear on the site. The different types were tagged as different categories. Other types were used as containers. I use insert_views a lot for generating page content as opposed to PHP code. I am concerned now that I "hear" CCK is being built into the core, so I am not sure what I will do with my ContentO node types.
I researched a lot of CMS's. I wanted to stay with what was available in CPanel (the tool my hosting site provides). I originally thought about using Mambo now Joomla/Mambo. I played with a few test installations. Looking back, one of my requirements was fined grained user access to content creation editing and workflow management. Joomla/Mambo at the time did not meet my needs there. I do recommend that users consider Joomla for a put it up quick site. There are a lot of canned low cost "themes available". I recommend that as a starter CMS for newbies like me. Most of my friends see what can be done with Drupal and are looking into switching. I had never used PHP before and was used to html files. The node thing took a while to get accustomed to. My comfort level is increasing each day. I hope to someday development my own modules.
I love how easy it was to integrate Gallery2 into my Drupal site. That is a great package for managing multimedia content and integrates into Drupal just fine. Thanks to the developer of the gallery module. That is how all the different galleries are created on my site. Each section has its own random gallery display from a different section of the Church photo album.
My latest project on the site was to make Sermon Archives available. For this I used the audio and playlist modules. I am very curious to see what will happen to podcasting development in Drupal 5 and 6. I really like the playlist module. It packages everything I need in one module. No custom development required. I have not figured out how to theme the "browse by" feature though.
For producing the audio, I use my Linux system (I run Ubuntu in VMWare on my XP laptop). I tag the audio, add a cover image to the mp3 so it appears automatically on the node. My site limits my uploads (I think) to 8Meg. Not an issue since audio import is a breeze to users and handles bulk importing of lots of files with ease. Once the files are imported, I assign them to the different "play lists" (I call them Sermon Collections on my site). Audio_getid3 is used to parse out all the tags to provide node content. A very convenient feature.
For integrating all these things together and tweaking the theme, I highly recommend the FireBug plugin to FireFox. It helps you find css tags and allows on the fly change and check capabilities. I also use UltraEdit to edit my site remotely. I have not mastered the ability to set up a local development site. All those Mac Guys at Lullabot are making me have Mac envy with how easily they "hack" (in mean this in the best way) on their sites during the blogs.
Here are all the modules I used:
audio
audio_attach
audio_getid3
audio_images
audio_import
audio_playlist
backup (I am still having issues with this great module. Doesn't work with my setup.)
category modules
contact
content
contento
excerpt
gallery
image
img_assist
insert_view (very useful)
invisimail (very useful)
nodewords
pathauto
playlist
scheduler
scripture_filter (very useful for my site)
tinymce (I love the paste from Word feature)
video modules (No examples yet. I have been handling video with Gallery2 for now)
views
I hope this is helpful to someone.
Rich