Website development is not my profession, it is only my hobby. I started to learn HTML in November 2007 and CSS in January 2008. I am very young to this website making much more about CMS. I spend only more or less one hour a day in building website and another one hour a day in reading posts in Drupal.org. I tried Joomla, Wordpress, PHPNuke, B2Evolution but I settled to Drupal because of its simplicity and organization of Administrative panel. My site is not elaborate or feature rich compared to other posts here but I am very happy with it. I can't believe made it. Thanks to Drupal and its community.

My site:
http://mathalino.com

Theme: foliage

Modules:
I enabled all the optional core modules except Locale and Legacy
ACL
Forum Access
Advanced Forum
Advanced Profile
Adsense
Adsense Injector
Bio
Custom Pagers
Embed Filter
IMCE
Panels
Path Auto
Quote
Site map
Spam
Thickbox
Tiny MCE
Token
Captcha
Views
XML Sitemap

Some modules are not yet fully utilize and I am trying to learn its implementation. I now feel the need to learn php to improve the implementation of Advanced Profile and Bio. I now started to make some trial and error of the Panels 2 Module for custom pages. Please evaluate my site and give me some critic, I need more insights in improving my community, specially the profile of my users. Thanks in advance.

Comments

silverwing’s picture

Those who say that Drupal is only for Techies and Geeks have only spent a few minutes with it.

~silverwing - preaching to the choir here.... (and glad to see you're using Advanced Forum!)

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Land of Midnight | MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS

jhun vert’s picture

Advanced Forum may not be the solution for those who need a feature rich discussion board, but its simplicity works for my purpose. The less feature the better for my need.

Rosamunda’s picture

Hello there!
I´m glad you could make it!
I´m not a techie myself, and I must admit that Drupal´s "learning curve" it´s not easy, but It´s simply the best CMS out there.
I´m a lawyer, so it took me a while to get acquainted with php, css and stuff, but I very grateful to Drupal community, and hope to get to visit a Drupalcon someday!
PS. Congrats for your site! Too much math for me, but liked it! ;)
BTW, I like the new site but I think the old logo was prittier.
Rosamunda
Buenos Aires | Argentina
www.ligadelconsorcista.org

jhun vert’s picture

I made a mistake in the spelling of techie, I made it it teachy (anyway, its not a proper English word and my English vocabulary is not rich).

I focus now on content, I will deal with appearance later, I even stop to work the profile configuration. I just want as many content as possible until 2009. In the average, I can only upload 1 content per day. Thanks for the idea about the logo. Good luck for your website.

vm’s picture

I made a mistake in the spelling of techie, I made it it teachy

I fixed it for you : )

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

jhun vert’s picture

Thanks VeryMisunderstood you saved me from real mess. ;)

michelle’s picture

I hope you don't mind that I plan to add more features... ;)

BTW, what version are you using? That showing "mark all read" to anonymous was fixed, I thought?

Michelle

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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

jhun vert’s picture

Thanks Michelle for your module, I really love it. I use version 5.x-1.0-alpha3. I see nothing unusual about "mark all read" to anonymous user. If this button is clicked by Anonymous user, it will return the "Access denied" page. For me, this is appropriate response. Or is it more appropriate that this button will not show to Anonymous user? I am not sure.

I hope I can help, but the only thing I know about php are the open and end tags. I already have the programming concepts of if, and & or in spreadsheet, thats all I know in programming. Maybe I can participate to this project by upgrading to your non-beta version and report whatever bug I encounter. :)

michelle’s picture

Oh, yeah, you're a ways behind. It's up to alpha 7, now. Normally the button doesn't show to anonymous users since Drupal doesn't track read/unread for them.

Testing is always welcome. No PHP knowledge needed. If you customized your forum theme at all be careful in upgrading. I think alpha 3 might have been before the major theme changes.

Michelle

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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

jhun vert’s picture

I can't do the upgrade as of now. But surely I do it later. I am focusing on content, my site can be considered as empty. I visited your Shell Multimedia, you're doing a great job.

michelle’s picture

Well, if it's working for you, no hurry. There's going to be new versions coming out for quite a while, I'm sure.

Michelle

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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

jhun vert’s picture

I encounter no problem in my upgrade. I just deactivate (uncheck) the module in .../admin/build/modules and delete the advanced_forum folder in .../public_html/sites/all/modules/ and upload the latest version of advanced forum in the same path. Activate it and I am up and running again. No data loss, my forums are still intact. Thanks.

michelle’s picture

I'd hope there would be no data loss. It doesn't store any data other than a couple variables. :) BTW, you don't need to deactivate the module first.

Michelle

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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

jhun vert’s picture

I now understand a little bit about how Drupal handle our contents (I call it Data - I hope this is correct, I am really in the process of learning Drupal). The modules will not hold the data, so we can activate/deactivate the module without losing our contents, its just there. Only some are not accessible if we disable its module; like blog "entries" are no longer accessible if we disable the blog "module" but the contents are still there. This is what happen in my upgrade process, the contents are just there.

I carefully examine the contents of forum, no loss, excellent.

I just want to share this... :)
My forum members are most active when there is a class. I use phpBB before for 3 months (before I know Drupal) but loss all my data when I transferred to my present host. As I observed, my forum members becomes inactive this class vacation months, most of them are students. My forums will hopefully become busy by June when classes resumes.

michelle’s picture

That's true in general but, also, advforum is currently just a wrapper around the core forum. It's core forum that handles the data and advforum handles the "looks" of it. So advforum doesn't do anything with the database at all. Even if you completely uninstall it, your data is fine. (Just in case someone reads this years from now, I don't guarantee that won't change.)

Michelle

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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

jhun vert’s picture

I deactivate the Advanced Forum in favor of my new theme. The reason is, the comments in the forum did not show in this new theme.

michelle’s picture

I'm sorry to hear that. What theme are you having a problem with?

Michelle

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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

jhun vert’s picture

I tried to use a free theme from outside of drupal.org but it brought lot of headaches than help, so I switch to another theme inside drupal.org. Now everything is fine.

mir-ink’s picture

I beta test this stuff too 2 dev servers and one real. Have you bothered to try beta 7?
bet not. We do though and i dont like this neg input. How mutch did you pay or offer ?
I dont care what your point is. I know what works and i say so!

Its my box i do what i want on them, 30 years i have done so .. I Chooses what works.

Drupal works .. simple like a truck!

You can help out too yah know.. i do what i can , i dont fraken compalin about it

Mirage (X-fido-OP 226 and thats no kiss)

PS: The panles work just fine .. READ b4 you burn all the books!

vm’s picture

who pee'd in your wheaties ?

did you even take the time to read the original post ? or just the title to the post ?

There is nothing but positive words being said in every the OP and in the comments.

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

michelle’s picture

He's got a tracker full of bizarre comments and I think sepeck just took care of it.

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

jhun vert’s picture

I don't know exactly what you mean, maybe you're in a wrong thread? :)

Wolfflow’s picture

Hi, yes I agree fully with you. and your Site look really clean and functionally. By the way as I am a Newby(maybe a bit older one ;-) could you help me out?
Your Frontpage-Menu Site Map is really very good but I have no clue how to implement it
on my Site, can you help me out? That will be very much appreciate. Thanks.

Cheers

Share your experience with the Open Source Community
it's not only a choice but a Life Philosophy !!!
http://www.adaccs.at : A Drupal advanced CSS Content System - Community Project

Contact me for drupal projects in English, German, Italian, Drupal Hosting Support.

jhun vert’s picture

The Frontpage is at its basic configuration. New entry (blog or book) will automatically go to the frontpage below the sticky one (if there is any).

Implementation of Site map:
There are two site map modules available. One is for robots (XML Sitemap - http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap) and the other is for human (site map - http://drupal.org/project/site_map). I implemented both to my website.

"Site map" (for human) module is very easy to implement. After you uploaded the modules' folder to .../sites/all/modules/ just go to .../admin/build/modules and check the "Enable" check box next to Site map then click "Save Configuration".

You can then go to /admin/settings/sitemap and configure it the way you want it. Take note that books and categories will not automatically go to the site map, you need to select it under its list box. List boxes are the following:

Categories to include in the site map:
Books to include in the site map:

Note also that new category and new term in your vocabulary will not automatically go to the site map. Example: if you will create a new term Algebra then create contents under this new term (Algebra), contents under Algebra term are not visible in the site map UNLESS you select it in the appropriate list box. This is both true to Categories and Books. I am not sure how it works in free tags (I will implement free tagging soon in blog).

Once you have these things enabled, you still need to enable the "menu" for the site map. In my case, I enabled it and put it under "primary links". Just go to /admin/build/menu and look for "Site map" enable it and transfer it to where you want it to appear.

I hope this quick and short answer can help. Thank you for your comment.

Wolfflow’s picture

Many Thanks RTFVerterra ,
that was really kind of you to explain me and for others.
And yes it help me out and i will implement that too.

Wish you good luck with the further develop of your Site.
Cheers

Share your experience with the Open Source Community
it's not only a choice but a Life Philosophy !!!
http://www.adaccs.at : A Drupal advanced CSS Content System - Community Project

Contact me for drupal projects in English, German, Italian, Drupal Hosting Support.

jhun vert’s picture

I visited your site (http://www.adaccs.at), I can see that you have a very advance CSS knowledge as shown in your design. I learn about css last december 2007 and started to incorporate it to my static html pages (which are now offline after I started to use CMS). I admit I'm too young in CSS, I want to improve my skill on it. I want to create my own theme in the future and share my work to Drupal community. I hope you can suggest some links of online resource of CSS.

Wolfflow’s picture

Very much appreciate your visit.

You may find in the Promoted Drupal Sites many references to Drupal Themes Sites. I have a lot of work to do on my sites and soon you will also have to see every CSS examples for all the Drupal Themes.
An example how it looks: Here

Give me some month then you will have also a simple written CSS reference so that struggling with CSS will be more
easy!!

Bye

Share your experience with the Open Source Community
it's not only a choice but a Life Philosophy !!!
http://www.adaccs.at : A Drupal advanced CSS Content System - Community Project

Contact me for drupal projects in English, German, Italian, Drupal Hosting Support.

rawdeal101’s picture

OMG, I am a newbie myself "sorta". I am glad to finally be using a cms tool that actually works. I have tried joomla, php nuke, etc. and after tired of either being hacked or trying to figure out the code, I am glad to finally find something useful. Your site looks pretty good! Lots of content to read. I do have one suggestion tho, when first looking at the site the home page just jumps out at ya like a tornado of math. After, poking around a bit I can see how to navigate with the buttons at the top right, but I can see how users could get confused with the array of jumbled math problems on the home page. Not so much as appearance, but as structure. I don't know if I made any sense at all, but I thought I would just throw it out there. :-)

good job!

jhun vert’s picture

I already made some trial homepage arrangement, but did not implement for the moment. I used panels 2 and views to create this FUTURE front page. A good example of excellent front page arrangement is that of Spirit Library, it can be found at http://drupal.org/node/242993

As of now, I am focus with the contents. I need to upload as many contents as possible during my spare time. My site is a one man show. I am the developer, content creator, maintainer, etc. I always appreciate if authenticated users will post a blog or participate to forums, but most of my traffic are readers, not content creator. This will make my front page creation a little bit longer. :)

jhun vert’s picture

I switched back to Garland theme, but I did not use the theme under its default location themes>>garland, instead, I copy the garland folder to sites>>all>>themes>> and rename the folder into my_garland. Modified the page.tpl.php and style.css of my_garland theme through the help of this thread... http://drupal.org/node/198500

I am now looking for a way to improve my home page, any suggested readings? A link will greatly help...

Wolfflow’s picture

Hi, I have see your change and it looks OK. Great Job. If you are interested in making a new THEME from scratch
giving to your MATH site a look with colours and layout that will refeer more suitable for mathematics let me know

I will appreciate to help you out with my experience so far.
You may contact me here or leave a message on my test homepage www.adaccs.at

Cheers

Contact me for drupal projects in English, German, Italian, Drupal Hosting Support.

jhun vert’s picture

Dozens of improvements are added to the site. It is now far from basic. Non-techie can make it, I made it through Drupal.

Some improvements are worth mentioning:

  • Better organization of contents
  • Wiki like pages (Book Access module)
  • Who's New Avata (Avatar Blocks module)
  • Rendering of Math Equation aka Latex (jsMath module)
  • Drop the Adsense and Adsense Injector modules (I simply use block for Adsense Ads)
  • Drop the Bio module
  • Use the tapestry theme

Future Plans
Contents, contents, contents, and more contents...