By dchaffin on

I finally finished my first site built with Drupal: http://grdi.wvstateu.edu

It took some getting used to at first, but is extremely powerful and flexible. I did some customization of the breadcrumbs and created new content types to produce xml files from views to feed the little video launcher and the flash features on the home page.

I'd like to thank all the contributors to the forums without whose this site would not have turned out so successful.

I still have some tweaking to do I'm sure, but it's running quite well so far.

DC

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

ted.lam’s picture

ted.lam commented

it's very nice if it is your first drupal project!!!

what theme did you use?
if you did make the custom theme, will you release it to the community?

anyway, great looking site!!

dchaffin’s picture

dchaffin commented

I did create a custom theme, but not sure about releasing it outright. However, as it is basically a hodge-podge of help from around the drupal community, most of it is out there somewhere. Unfortunately, I've been working on it so long and at times so sporadically I don't necessarily remember where I found certain things, but I'll try to answer any questions about its creation.

yeeloon’s picture

yeeloon commented

a very nice site indeed!

btw what module did you use for the flash slideshow and the calendar event?

dchaffin’s picture

dchaffin commented

The slideshow I coded myself in Flash and used a custom Content Type in Drupal to input the image, description, and link. I then created a view that listed all items of that content type and a template to render them as XML which was then consumed by the flash piece. I embedded SWF Object in the main template before I noticed there was a module for that - don't know if that would've been easier, but will certainly look at it more next time. Unfortunately, I'm not on my work machine right now, but if I get a chance later I'll post some of the code for creating the xml template.

As for the calendar stuff, that's the standard Event module.

Oh, and before anyone asks :), the Chat is not a Drupal thing - the client already had that running (it's called RealChat) and it is simply loaded in a frameset in a new window.

hectorplus’s picture

hectorplus commented

Elegant site! nice color manipulation.

Tecito.com
The growing Hispanic community in Canada.

socialtalker’s picture

socialtalker commented

i have seen more than my share of web master sites and their portfolios that lacked an simple elegant site design like yours. and since you have learned how to custom fit a cms for your site's needs, i am not a site designer, but that's gotta be a big plus.

dchaffin’s picture

dchaffin commented

Thanks ... I appreciate your comments. That's one of the things I like most about Drupal is that it tries to stay out of your way. I've used DotNetNuke extensively and explored Mambo and Joomla for this site before finding Drupal. It's been quite a success for me so far and I hope to use it one more projects in the future.

Delford Chaffin
Dream Catcher Creative
www.dreamcreative.com

ThePickwickProject’s picture

ThePickwickProject commented

I'm really impressed! I'm currently working on my own first Drupal site, but expect that it will take quite some more time before I can achieve that...

dchaffin’s picture

dchaffin commented

Stick with it ... I was fortunate (?) to have a client who was a little slow delivering content and had time to learn, explore, forget, and re-learn Drupal. Also, it of course wasn't my/our first website design so we had that experience already - just fitting Drupal in was where the learning curve came.

Delford Chaffin
Dream Catcher Creative
www.dreamcreative.com

JMowery’s picture

JMowery commented

I'm new to this and I am very jealous over your skills on making that site. Very nicely done. I hope to be able to create something along those lines soon :) Would love to see a simplified version of that theme released to the community.

Keep up the great work.