My Apple Guide powered by Drupal

My Apple Guide (www.myappleguide.com) is a one stop knowledge database for everything Apple. It was my first Drupal powered site and the site I have had most fun building to date. I have been getting emails about how various parts of the site are put together, so I will do my best to include as much detail as possible. All modules used to develop the site are easily found right here on the Drupal website and none are original. The Website was created in 8 Weeks without any prior knowledge about Drupal. The site is built with Drupal 5.x .

Background:

My Apple Guide was built because of 3 main reasons:

1. I love Apple and think they make innovative and well designed products
2. People are always asking how to do things on their Apple devices
3. Most Apple websites don't reflect the design quality that you would expect.

So mix that together with a bit of frustration, a lot of passion and consistent inspiration (my fiancee) and MAG was born.

One rule governed the creation of MAG: I had to enjoy browsing it. I need to be able to browse my site and enjoy it. I knew that if I could accomplish that, then it would be a great success.

When designing the website, there were a few things that I kept in mind. I wanted it to maintain a similar feel to the Apple website, while still being original in taste. I knew that advertising would be an important part of the site; however I did not want to sacrifice design for ad placement optimization. I often come across sites with ads thrown in every possible corner and in the middle of content. Though it is more profitable, I believe it can be a major turnoff. As such, the theme was developed with 210px sidebars and a 500px middle container. There is also a left column, a right column, a content bottom, a content top and header and footer regions. We also imported a bit of the Mac OS X UI into into it.

The Home Page

The Movie Trailers Links on the left are created using Feed API and are parsed from Apple's Quicktime Movie Trailers RSS feed and then converted into individual nodes. The Feed API is very easy to set up and it definitely beats creating such nodes manually.

The slideshow in the center of the page was created using frontpageslideshow (FPSS, costs 22 Euros). Though there is very little support, it was exactly what I was looking for at the time and I tweaked it until I got it working for me. I also came across a Google Code project that created an alpha version of a  Drupal Module that integrates FPSS in your Drupal website. I installed the module but could not get it working because of some conflicting internal coding on our side.

The site heavily utilizes the CCK and Views modules. For example "The Apple Times" was a view created for the story content type. We also specific content types for guides, product reviews and downloads. Each content type is tagged by Categories and sorted into different views.
E.g. A content type called Guide exists. There are categories such as Apple TV, iLife, iPhone and iPods. A view is then created to display only Guides tagged with Apple TV etc.

With a site of this magnitude, organization is essential. And the taxonomy based organization that Drupal offers is just splendid. It is very easy for the reader to quickly access what he/she wants and makes maintaining the site very easy. RSS feeds are also created from the taxonomy which allows a reader to click on a term and get all articles tagged with that term.
 
Forums

The forums are created using the advanced forum module version 5.x1.x-dev (an updated one is available  - P.S. Thanks Michelle, you do an awesome job with this module!) I basically went in and changed up the coding here and there and added my own graphics. The advanced forum module was exactly what I was looking for as it was not too bloated with unnecessary features and is easy to customize once you are willing to spend some time playing around with the coding. I also integrated User Post Count module that tracks the number of posts a user has made.
 
Other Modules Worth Mentioning:

Ad Module – This module is really great for managing your ads. One of the features I loved most about it is the ability to create ad groups and rotate the ads. For example if you go inside one of the forums or The Apple Times Page, and refresh, you will realize that the ads change upon each refresh. This helps to keep the site from looking monotonous. It supports various ad types and gives you great stats on your activity.

SEO Checklist

Every webmaster knows the importance of Search engines in driving organic traffic to a site. As such SEO (Search Engine Optimization has always been a top priority for me. The SEO checklist module does not do anything by itself – it simply provides a very thorough list of things which you need to do on your site to make it search engine optimized. This is a highly recommended module.

Secure Pages

Security is another big concern for webmasters.  However using https on every webpage will make your site very slow. This module allows you to set certain urls to use https and will automatically switch when it links to one that you haven't specified. Of course you will need to have an SSL domain to use this module. 

FCKEditor

What would I do without this baby! FCKEditor is a great WYSIWYG editor which makes adding content to the site a breeze. This is especially important as some members on board are not familiar with coding and it is also very helpful in the forums. You can switch between raw html and using the WYSIWYG editor on the go. I also use this to file all the images on the site as it has a built in image browser. This also is very convenient as users with appropriate permissions can share and browse image folders with ease. Using this module makes the page load slighty slower, but it is a trade-off I'm willing to make. The module allows you to create various editors for each user type and thus I give regular users a very simple editor with just basic functionality while editors etc, have more complex ones.

Google Analytics

This just helps you to integrate you Google analytics tracker into your drupal account. Though my host providers offer a similar service, Google analytics is more detailed and has a lot more features. For example, it provides a map overlay feature that shows you a map of the world and color codes where your visitors are from. You can select countries and it will zoom in, then you can select specific towns.

Poorman's Cron

This module just makes it really easy to run cron jobs. You can set the time interval between cron jobs and set it to record logs.

 
Complete Module List:

Ad Module
Advanced Forum
CCK
SEO Checklist
Feed API
Feed API Add-On
Invite
Javascript Tools
Privatemsg
Avatar Selection
Custom Links
Custom Pagers
FCKEditor
Global Redirect
Google Analytics
Login Destination
Page Title
Pathauto
Persistent Login
Poorman's Cron
Safari Search
Secure Pages
Service Links
Thinkbox
Token
Webform
reCAPTCHA
Single Login
Views
Views Bonus Pack
Five Star
Voting API
XML Sitemap

Final Words:

Looking at myappleguide.com, many people are shocked when they find out that I don't have an extensive background in web design. No html, no CSS, no php... nothing. Everything I picked up along the way. So don't get turned off if you don't know where to start. Just dive in, play around with the code. Literally, there were times when I would changed a word just to see the change it would effect. And thats how I learnt ( and spending time googling also) Ask questions, the Drupal community is extremely helpful - you will be fine!

www.myappleguide.com