WSHancockSociety

Prepare to be thoroughly unimpressed!

http://www.wshancocksociety.org

I've been talking about moving to CMS for years and been so hesitant to leave my beloved and and defunct FrontPage! Recently I had a client who had no budget and a crappy site. Their current site just died and fortunately we were able to save the content from archive.org.

So I decided to use this bad luck as a primer to get started with Drupal. Believe it or not this site has taken two full weeks from start to now. It almost makes you wonder what I've been doing? Well, it was important for me to do everything right and understand, at least to a small scale, what what happening behind the scenes. I made the decision to install locally and learning about that, installing WAMP and setting it all up was a pain. Just trying to figure out how to unzip drupal was on ordeal (didn't know what a tar thing was). Setting up directories, setting permissions, etc...

So once I got it installed locally I struggled with everything from finding navigating admin to updates to backup. There's sometimes 50 ways of doing things and other times none. My biggest issues where figuring out how to get a WYSIWYG editor installed. They all worked, but I couldn't find how to work with images at all. I ended up with the FCKeditor and ImageMagick, with things like ImageCacheAPI and a ton of other modules that made little sense. Now I have the images working but figuring it all out over again will be rough. After all that I noticed the core had an Upload Module? I wonder if that might have helped? . Thus far imagers have been very overwhelming, and I still have no idea where they are meant to be stored, or how I'll manage them in the future. Let alone how I'm going to choose and configure a gallery system. ahhh, it will all have to wait until tomorrow.

But I had bigger problems after putting the site into maintenance mode and the http request thing not working. I scanned the forums and tried multiple fixes and finally had to edit the commons.inc file. I had no idea what I was doing but it worked, an I have to thank everyone in the support forums for all their help so far.

Getting it all online was its own nightmare, but here it is. I had to rebuild all the images of course but right now there weren't that many.

Of course I'll I've got here is your basic Garland themed site. Actually I think the client will be very happy with it. But learning how to edit and create themes is important and I think it's going to take a long time.

I also think the client has a lot more potential with this site. It will be easy (I say that relatively) to create a forum for visitors, and with any luck they's have a lively user base helping to created a great mini community. It will be a place where people will come to learn about Mr. Hancock and about History. Creating membership levels and a community will allow the Society to grow beyond it's few local dedicated volunteers. I didn't plan to build a drupal site for this, but in the long run, say by the 3rd incarnation, they will have a much more versatile site for whatever their future needs may be.

This article was really helpful:
http://www.rundrupal.com/tutorials/top-10-things-do-after-you-install-dr...

so was the entire site
http://www.www.leanbythedrop.com

And this kid on You Tube had some great tutorials:
http://www.youtube.com/user/tomrogers123