By derek.b on

<shameless plug>I run a small web design business, http://lucid.com.au</shameless plug>. I did a revamp of the website for he Melton South Community Centre in Melbourne, Australia. The original site was done as a project using one of the those free web services and was rather tired and unloved once the project finished. Drupal came to the rescue.

The goals were to provide a low cost alternative that was easy for the staff to update, flexible, and fitted in with the values of the Melton South Community Centre. I visited the community centre and spoke to the manager. Made her an offer of a free website with free hosting. This fitted her budget quite nicely.

Modules Used

Initially the site was set up with Drupal 5.2, but a series of security advisories to use several upgrades, finally arriving at Drupal 5.6.

We used a series of modules to bend at Drupal into shape. The first two were Content Construction Kit and Views. Using CCK, we created a new content type called Course. We added some extra fields. A simple integer was added for the field Sessions - a count of the number of times each course ran. There was a field for the price and a concession price. Due to the complexities of Australian tax laws some courses attract a GST (Goods and Services Tax) and some don't, so we added a GST field to show that.

The other important thing was setting up a classification system for the courses. Using Drupal's taxonomy module, we set up a category simply called category. This category was used to classify all written content on the site. We set up a master category called education and further divided that into various branches for things like art and craft fitness of being hobbies languages etc.

The next thing to do with the courses was to fit them into some kind of calendar. The obvious candidate for that was the Event module. So we installed Event and the Event Repeat modules. We then went back to defining Content Types to make Courses become Events as well. This means that all courses would be entered into the calendar.

To make life easier when inputting the courses, we added the JS Calendar from the JavaScript Tools module.

The next functionality was to get modes to expire on predetermined dates. We used the Scheduler or module to do that. This added an extra field for publishing nodes where we could hold off and embargo some and set some to be not published after the course has completed. What automated using Drupal's cron process.

We modified the front page using the Panels module. The top part contains some straight HTML. The bottom part is divided into two columns. Headlines is a custom block made using the Views module that lists article titles which are not Courses in random order. The Upcoming Courses is also a custom block also made from the views module listings some upcoming Courses.

The Views module was also used to customise the output. For example the courses list is in alphabetical order by default. But the user can also elect to see the courses in chronological order.

Theme

The last part to be developed was the theme. The theme is a customised version of the Zen theme with a few alterations. We kept a three column layout as it fitted our needs.

We modified to the template.php file to create a new region called “top menu” into this replace the “primary” links block for the navigation bar. The tabbed backgrounds in the Zen theme is a very nice little trick, so we kept that and adapted it. We hybridised it with the suckerfish drop down technique to produce customised menu. Another examples of this kind of technique is to be seen in the No Koala! theme.

Going Live

Initially the site was tested on our faithful Linux server that runs our Intranet. Several versions were tried and scrubbed. We did run an experiment with the Drupal Ecommerce module that had a couple of problems trying to get it to adapt to our needs. Chief among those was trying to distinguish between two sets of prices for concession and full price. We dropped that idea that may come back to it in the future.

The domain name “meltonsouth.org.au” was free. The community centre fitted the registration criteria so we registered it. Transferred the site to our Web server. After spending a couple of weeks checking the content site went live.

Staff have been updating the site, adding new courses. Long may it continue to be that way

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x