Our requirements

Our requirements were quickly set:

• The site layout should remain largely as is, with two thirds for the main content area and a column of news headlines on the right.
• There is a flat list of sections with articles, some of which arrange the teasers in two, others in a single column.
• The sections can be accessed by a dynamical list of tabs at the top of the page.
• Sections should have simple URLs, with some other articles having intuitive URLs as well.
• The page structure is such that the front page features article or section teasers.
• Initially, there will be no community features like comments.
• Content should be editable through its front end view.
• The site should validate as XHTML, and should further follow the guidelines for barrier free web sites.
• Text formatting should be using Textile markup.
• Technically, there should be as little as possible software development on top of stock Drupal. However, we wanted to develop templates using the PHPTAL engine and knew we would have to transform one of the standard Drupal templates to this notation first.