I'm using Drupal to run the site for my astronomy club: the Chesmont Astronomical Society.

All feedback is appreciated.

Comments

John Rodat’s picture

Your skyclocks are a great feature for your skywatchers.

Do you load them manually or have you figured out how to automate the process?

mwheinz’s picture

The webmaster of Clear Dark Sky wrote software to combine image processing of satellite data and weather forecasts.

Amazing stuff; he's got it set up for a bunch of different north american astronomy clubs.

But - if you didn't realize they weren't originating on my site, other people probably don't either. I should put a header on them so that it's more obvious.

BryanSD’s picture

I was just curious as to which theme Chesmont Astronomical Society is using and based on or if it's completely home grown? I believe the one I saw earlier was Crabnebula, but I'm not sure.

I'm just about to the local American Meteorological Society chapter to Drupal. I think your site will give them an idea to what Drupal can do for them. Though they like to see clouds in the sky...not clear skies! :-)

By the way, I did see a note on your site about pages not loading so quickly. Have you noticed an issue with Drupal being too slow in rendering pages? Any problems with hosting the site?

Thanks, Bryan

mwheinz’s picture

More recently, I did a heavily modified version of chameleon called "white" and also a simple template called "simple" - both for people with older browsers or limited bandwidth.

Our club is quite small and some of the members are still using older operating systems and dial up connections. That can be an issue because between the crab nebula title bar, the random photos, the weather forecast, the phase of the moon display and the "buy our stuff" link, it can take a while to see the whole page at 56kbps.

As for server performance - again, our club is quite small; actual CPU load hasn't been an issue.

My main warning to you is that figuring out the exact way to manage security can be a challenge. I'm using taxonomy access and the way that interacts with the other modules (like acid free) isn't always obvious.

Oh - one final note - no other astronomy site is allowed to use Drupal till I win the 2006 web site competition for the Astronomical League

:-D

BryanSD’s picture

Thanks for the information.

Don't worry, I won't compete in the Astronomical League as long as you don't compete within the American Meteorological Society or National Weather Association. Actually, the president of our AMS/NWA chapter is a professor in South Dakota State University's Physics with interest in Astronomy. He's brought us up to the roof of buildings more than once to look at the stars and planets. I keep on telling him he needs to get his head back in the clouds.

-Bryan