Quevin, LLC - www.Quevin.com

http://www.Quevin.com is still a work in progress, and I'd enjoy some feedback...

Quevin.com offers Web Design & Development, now including CMS (Drupal) development to clients in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, and a growing client base throughout the United States. Happy to help anyone in the EU too!

The website was previously running MT4, which was fine for blogging and simple content management. I'm sure it could do more, but I'm more interested in what Drupal can do for the website and my business. After using Drupal on various small projects, I decided to apply it to Quevin.com and then offer it more exclusively to clients. Still loving it so far.

I started out with the "Celju" theme (http://drupal.org/project/celju) and modified it from there to add a few templates for , blog and sub-pages. It didn't take much effort to modify CSS rules, and since Celju was very similar in design to Quevin.com, that helped a lot. I'm using "Garland" for my administrator theme. No "hacking," though I still need to merge my dynamic pieces into jQuery. I think I'm using MooTools (multibox and slide), Yahoo UI (event handling) and Drupal has jQuery running. Yikes! No need for all of these JavaScript libraries.

Although I'm playing with CCK and Views (hope they get past BETA soon), I haven't done much with these modules yet. For now, I'm simply using Blog and re-building my taxonomy structure. Since I had some posts in MT4, I got some help from "woytek" to import XML: http://drupal.org/node/860#comment-864109. That worked well, however, I did tweak the format so I could maintain my Marksmarty input types. I don't know why my taxonomy wasn't imported properly, because it created Forums for each instead. That's why I'm rebuilding my taxonomy structure.

My Essential Modules

• Backup and Migrate - I develop on a Mac w/ MAMP installed with Drupal running locally, so it was simple to export/import when I was ready to migrate to the live site
• Devel - Crucial to help theme and test
• PHP filter - Helped to import my MT4 data
• Taxonomy (duh)
• Pahtauto - Better for SEO and I want to control how my pages and blog entry URLs are constructed
• Meta tags - Seems essential for SEO

One problem I encountered is that the contact form provided by Drupal is a bit insufficient. I use a detailed form for estimates, and just created content to integrate it seamlessly into Drupal.

Another problem is getting TinyMCE to work right. For some reason, when I create a profile it kills all the drop-down links on my content entry pages. I may try a different admin theme to see if there's a UI conflict. Ideas? I'd like to know that TinyMCE will work for my clients who don't want to mess with HTML. Could be that my default input type is Marksmarty...

It has taken some time to get acclimated with Drupal jargon, and I believe I have a good understanding about what it takes to produce a Drupal-driven website for my own clients. I will need to learn more about how to use CCK and Views to provide custom CMS development for clients, and I'm getting to it.

Thanks!