Digital Photography Magazine Relaunch
Illustrated Photography is a pet project which I started in January 2007.
At that point it was little more than an idea, and all I really knew was that I wanted to use my limited HTML skills to create a Photography Magazine, which would combine editorial "top-down" content with community "web 2.0" interactivity.
The idea was that it would be a place where photographers of all skill levels could get together, learn about photography and perhaps even display their own portfolios.
I then set out to learn PHP from scratch, imagining I'd pick it up in a weekend.
After about three months I was well and truely discouraged, and my PHP was nowhere near the level needed to create the engine that would serve the site.
Enter: Drupal.
I first read about Drupal in a magazine, and after comparing it to Joomla, came to the conclusion that it was a much more powerful and intuitive platform, and therefore more suited to my needs.
My initial instalation problems was overcome when I desisted from installing PHP, Apache and MySQL individually, but rather installed them as a package using Apache Triad.
The Theme
I was fortunate that the theme I had chosen for the site had already been ported to Drupal by cdoyle. The multiflex theme, originally by Wolfgang, is a fixed-width, two or three column design, with a range of different preset customizations. Some believe it looks a bit old fashioned, and a new version of the design has been launched by Wolfgang, but we are completely satisfied with the theme as it is.
Small adjustments to the theme included widening it slightly (the assumption being that a larger percentage of photographers have their screens set to higher resolution.
We use the three column design on landing pages and a two column design on content pages.
The reason why we have chosen a fixed, rather than a liquid design is because it allows us more accuracy in placing images, which are a major feature of the site.
Underneath the Hood
The core modules
Illustrated Photography utilizes the following core modules:
Blog
Which is used for our weekly "Letter from the editor" or as we like to call it "ed's Blog". We still have a few issues in themeing the blog pages. We thought it important to have an individual page layout for the blog, as we wanted a short introduction to appear at the top of all the blog pages. This serves as an introduction, so that new users can quickly identify with the content. The problem is that the following pages, which display the exact same content, are rendered differently:
http://www.illustratedphotography.com/edblog
http://www.illustratedphotography.com/blogs/does-camera-matter
We will be addressing this issue in the near future.
Forum
The forum module has not been modified, but the way forum topics are displayed have been vastly customized. A lot of work remains to be done in the Forum section. This includes creating Taxonomy types and just generally, making it a bit more user friendly.
Book
The vast majority of the site's editorial content is generated using the Book module. We have only made minor adjustments to this module.
Color
Comment
Menu
Statistics
Path
Taxonomy
Statistics
Tracker
Poll
Contributed Modules
CCK & Views
CCK is perhaps the most powerful module we have encountered so far, we use it to create custom content types and combine it with views to create highly styled pages such as our front page.
We are not using it in all the places that we could just yet, but we will extend it's integrateion in months to come.
Gallery
Gallery2 was crucial to our site, and without a place where users can display their own pictures, Illustrated Photography would not be where it is now. I am still slightly lacking in my understanding of Gallery2 and feel that I am only scratching the surface of what is possible. The site is also not doing enough to promote user galleries to the users, but we are hoping to address this soon.
Adsense
DiggThis
Global Redirect
Insert View
Metatags
Page Title
Service Links
Path Auto
Token
XMLSitemap
Short commings of the site
As far as we are concerned, our major shortcomming is that we are not making enough use of the Profile module. We aim to concentrate our efforts on expanding the user experience by allowing more interaction and "web 2.0" content creation such as user blogs, creating friends and so forth.
Your advice
Illustrated Photography is my first Drupal based site, and only my second ever web site, the other being Pro Snapper - a photographer's home page.
This, I believe is a testament to the ease and versatility of the CMS, and I would like to convey my thanks to all those coders who sit up late at night with pots of coffee, just to make my life easier.
You have restored my faith in humanity.
Anyway, that being said, as I am still a bit green, any advice or critisism is more than welcome, and as far as is possible, I will use it to improve the site.
Thank you drupal community.
And likewise
We will also be more than happy to answer any questions regarding how we achieved certain results, should you be interested.
Wow, I like it.
I run a website www.nyclightwave.com
It's for a user group of people doing 3d art.
Maybe I should run an excerpt on what I did to get mine up and going, also.
I never bothered because I don't think it's really all that great. I've probably got
way to many modules being used. Drupal is lighting fast with less modules.
The developer module is really good in helping figure out which module is taking
up to much time. I've had to disable several for a balance of speed.
Also my hosting company, finally after a long time upgraded their servers,
that helped out quite abit.
I like the site. I was going through it, and like the front page.
Can you describe a little of how you achieved that. I thought maybe you used the panels plugin,
but I am thinking now, after reading your post that it was the insert view plugin.
Can you describe how you used that module?
I found a few modules I liked to help with the profile.
User Expertise 5.x-1.x-dev Evaluate a users expertise and display the result on the user's profile page.
Depends on: Taxonomy (enabled), Voting API (enabled)
User Interests 5.x-1.x-dev Shows a user's most used taxonomy terms on the profile page.
Antonio
Telling people how it's done taught me a lot.
Antonio,
Yeah, I know what you mean, I don't think my site is all that great, and being involved with it every day makes me see the errors more than most people would, but I thought I would describe which modules I used etc because I liked reading that sort of showcase when I first started.
Anyway, doing the profile this morning made me look at the site through new eyes, and highlighted some of the errors. I am not ashamed to say I found a few modules that were turned on while they were not needed. Needless to say I corrected these errors as I was writing the profile.
With regards to your questions:
How the front page views were done
Indeed, it was created using Views.
Each content type has a text input field created using CCK. Using Views I can then tell Drupal where to place this info on a specific page.
Each month, as I create new content, this is automatically moved to the front page, and last month's content is moved to the archived section (in the case of the site, this is called the "Digital Photography Tips" section and the "Basic Photography Tips" section. This saves a lot of time when I update the site.
I am not yet using CCK and Views everywhere where it is possible to do so, and some of the things I could be doing using those modules are still coded the old, hard way, using HTML, but, for the most part, the dual column node teasers, like the "Basic Photo" and "Gear Review" section, is done the easy way, and was achieved using the Views Theme Wizard.
I am not familiar with the Panels module, but will be looking at it to see if this is a better way of achieving what I wanted to do.
Quick and dirty vs Clean and Elegant
Well, being a novice coder at best, I have to say that we have employed a lot of quick and dirty solutions to problems on the site. Snippets are added left right and center, and I expect we are going to run into a few problems soon, but I am hoping to clean up the code when I move the site to Drupal 6.
This will be done as soon as all the modules I need are available on Drupal 6.
Things I like about your site
You don't mind if I pinch some ideas, do you.
Captcha
I have registered at your site, and intend pinching some of the good ideas. I like the fact that you have captcha, but I have to say I sometimes have a hard time reading these. Is yours a different captcha from the ones most people use, I see it imploys $ % @ and all sorts of symbols. Also, how effective is it at combatting spam?
Quick Message
I really like this feature, and I think it can go a long way towards fostering a fledling community. I am probably going to integrate this, along with the "Who's online" block
User Profile Images
At the moment users on my site can upload their own avatars, but there are not any default ones to choose from. I like this idea of yours and plan to implement it.
Thanks again for your input.
I hope to hear from you again soon.
Views Theme Wizard.
HI,
How did you use the Views Theme Wizard? I could never figure that thing out.
Also, I've been super lazy. I can actually program things, but it's not easy for me.
ONe of my criteria was to just install modules and enable them and that's it.
One day I might have enough courage to modify modules. Functions really get me.
I Used themes, and that was it. I did not code any html or php in the whole site except for
a switch statement on some blocks and a css line for the shadow from the photoframe module.
That took me quite along time to figure out for some reason.
(If you goto google, do a search for nyclightwave.com
click on the link, you will find that there are extra blocks that are now active (with adsense)
This was achieved using a switch statement, with the names of the referrers from several search engines.
This way, normal users and people looking for my site aren't spammed with adsense.)
I've made good use of the blocks I think, having only certain blocks showing up on certain pages.
I got them all off on the front page. I've always liked that feature of blocks. One thing I'm waiting for is the panels2 module to
finish with their beta, that looks great. I've always wanted to do a front page that looks nice and is functional. I think you have
a nice blend there with that. How do you get the front page stuff archived after a month? That's cool. There is a views bonus
module that has an archive block which is great.
I've played around also with wyswig modules. I finally just use nicedit. I used to use tinymce, but that thing
is really hard to deal with. But once set up you can add in icons for adding to the g2 gallery (which I see you have) or icme
for file uploads.
Also one of my favorite modules was form filter, which allowed me to simply forms for posting, and moving them
into a switchable folder, leading to less confusion. I still have to redo my input filters, because I still get unpredictable results
with posting php. I ussually have to disable nicedit to post any of the php. (nic edit shows the admin the ability to disable nicedit for a field, which is a life saver.)
I like 5star and the voting api and views. I was able to modify the tracker to show the ratings as well. I was able to make a block for top rated things also. (Views is awesome. I know I haven't even scratched the surface of it. I see some tuts out there, and they were a bit daunting.)
I used the captcha module and there is a section where you can click on on a checkmark for what characters you want to include.
I use low distortion. I also have been to sites were the it's so bad I can't even read it.
I've started using drupal since 5. Once certain modules I use are converted to work with 6, I'm updating the site.
One thing I always had a problem with was images. People had trouble just uploading an image to a post.
I use the nodeimage module, and that seems to work very well.
Antonio
Views and more
Right, about using the Views Theme Wizard to create the two node teasers appearing next to each other on the front page: It works, and I did it, but as for a step by step of how I did it, I honestly can't remember. I know it took me two whole days and I had to spend ages in the forums.
Using the views module, it is possible to create a conditional switch that will place things in a certain place if they are "promoted to front page" or in another if they are not. That is how I achieved the archiving trick.
I am definitely going to look into the Views bonus module with the archive block.
Now that I have it set up, though, whenever I need to create another dual teaser layout, it's quite simple.
I can't program at all. Just to do a simple If statement, I find myself refering to books, but I have hacked a little code in drupal. Most notably creating the block that displays "register or log in to enter the contest" for non-registered users and "click here to enter the contest" for logged-in users. Not a big deal, but it made me feel proud :)
You are clearly much more experienced with drupal than me, I haven't used most of those modules. I realise that I am just scratching the surface with what is possible, but exploring the possibilities is half the fun, right!
captcha
Since I've implemented this, it really has gotten rid of alot of spamm.
I allow anonymous to post to comments, and I used to get alot of spamm.
Now very little. But still some.
Antonio