By togakangaroo on

Hello,
I built and maintain http://therootsofmusic.com/ for a friend's charity organization. Currently its mostly static html with the header/banner/sidepanel/footers in a layout.php file and the two assembled via php. Over the past year, as the organization has grown so have their needs to the point that they're contacting me to make changes every week. To save myself and them the bother it is now time to encorporate a CMS.

I chose to transfer the site to Drupal because it is open source, popular, respected, and knowing how to work with it will likely come in handy in the future. I need the site managers to be able to update content without having to know html or php but I do not forsee a time when we will need comments or anything like that (maybe a forum for the students to use could be handy).
So question #1 (and asking on the drupal forum I can predict the response): do you recommend drupal as a simple solution to the task or is there something else I should be looking at?

Question #2 is: I've read up enough on Drupal to understand that I will need to create my own theme in order to trully be able to recreate the site as it is now, does anyone know of a theme that could serve as a good starting point given the current site structure? Is there a way to browse themes easily?

Oh, and question #3, is there a photo gallery module? I'm going to need to include that eventually

All comments and questions (on my approach or on the site) are welcome
Thanks a lot,
George Mauer

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

hollybeary’s picture

hollybeary commented

1. I highly recommend Drupal :)

2. If you click on download up there in the top nav and then click on themes you'll be given a list of drupal themes. I like to sort by date to see the newest ones. You can also sort by drupal versions. Most themes are also viewable in the drupal theme garden http://themegarden.org/

Just off the top of my head from looking at your page you might like the terrafirma theme to use as a starting point, but definitely check out what else is out there.

3.yes, there are many ways to make an image gallery, here are a few modules. You can also use modules like cck, imagefield and views.
http://drupal.org/project/imagefield_gallery
http://drupal.org/project/brilliant_gallery
http://drupal.org/project/xsasg
http://drupal.org/project/fast_gallery

there are many more but that should be a good start

talyia’s picture

talyia commented

is available as a free download and REALLY helped me out a lot. I am busy converting a site and creating the initial template turned out to be a LOT easier than I thought, thanks to this chapter (and the wonderful people here at Drupal). Go here for the free download http://www.bookpool.com/sm/1590597559
This chapter has come highly recommended from many people as I have been doing my research.... it explains a LOT.

Christine