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Trying to get a handle on Drupal philosophy - appropriate for my site?

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djfenske - April 22, 2009 - 16:21

Hi there Drupal gurus -

I've spent a few days trying to evaluate Drupal as a platform to move my site, honey.com, to as we are currently redesigning it. I've been learning a lot, but it would really be helpful to me to get some direct opinions and answers from you folks who have worked with it and know its capabilities. Thanks in advance for your responses!

  1. I will be getting help from a graphic design firm to come up with a beautiful new layout, which will be delivered as a Photoshop psd file, then I will be cutting it up into CSS layout and style sheets. How difficult is the process of transforming that into a Drupal theme?
  2. I need to have a recipe database equal to, if not better than, the one we have now, with 1400 recipes, searchable in a few ways. Can I integrate a page with my own PhP/MySQL code, or does it need to be a Drupal module? In other words, does every page of the site need to be under the CMS management? (Not that it would be a bad thing to have a specific module for this need!).
  3. I'm having a hard time grasping the admin (back end) site and the users (front end) site being the same thing; can someone help me understand how this works? How do I customize the menus and not eliminate my access to administrative features? This is no doubt a really dumb question, but I apparently haven't found the right documentation pages yet...

Thanks so much!
David

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Wow, lots of words

mradcliffe - April 22, 2009 - 17:14
  1. Well, it depends on how well a design firm knows about transferring these kinds of things. It's sometimes annoying to work with someone who designed a PSD that is very difficult to implement using CSS. For making Drupal themes from scratch it comes down to getting the .info syntax correct and using firebug and api.drupal.org to change the default page.tpl.php and node.tpl.php into what you want (with style.css). Not from scratch, you're just working with the Zen theme or hacking another theme you like if that's easier for you.
  2. Yes, you can include PHP code in nodes via the PHP Input Filter or you can put PHP code directly in template files in the theming layer. However, for custom content like "Recipe" I would investigate making this a content type with customizable fields via CCK. You can create a Recipe content type with various meta data, and then use Views to create faceted or filter search for recipes.
  3. A drupal site will look the same for everyone by default. Viewing content, menus, blocks, etc... is limited by user roles & permissions. So an 'authenticated user' may be able to create content and thus have a create content menu option available while an 'anonymous user' will not have that menu option because they cannot. This will work the same way for things like blocks or the tabs (local tasks) that appear for content editors (View/Edit). Some people like to have two browsers open, one logged in as one user role and another as anonymous or another user role, to compare how things look. Personally, I just know how things are going to look differently for each user role.
    1. You can customize menus admin/build/menus and disable the ones you do not want to appear, but you can still access them via url paths. You can also install something like Administration Menu to put a dynamic menu at the top of the page only for administrators. Or install a theme like Rootcandy and enable it as the Administration theme to provide an alternate theme for an administrator. You can place a link to admin anywhere you want, and be able to access the administration interface.
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WorldFallz - April 22, 2009 - 17:28

Couple things to add:

Regarding #1: see http://www.mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode24, a great screencast on converting a standard html/css layout to drupal theme.

Regarding #3: I usually develop logged in as admin with firefox/firebug and then browse the site as a user with IE.

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Thanks - that helps

djfenske - April 22, 2009 - 19:24

It sounds like anything I want to do will be possible - I just have to be willing to spend enough time studying and experimenting. I'm at the stage where I'm trying to decide whether to make that investment. Your comments are encouraging, and they will lead me in the right directions where I need to study.

I've wondered about the idea of using a custom content type for Recipe - but I would need some automated way of importing all the old data (stored in 9 relational tables) directly into the Drupal tables. Must be some way to do that under the hood, directly in MySQL.

Thanks again for your extensive responsive - I should probably keep to one question at a time! LOL.

David Fenske / Colorado, USA / Honey.com

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WorldFallz - April 22, 2009 - 20:05

There's definitely an investment to make-- no question. Drupal has a learning curve. However, once you learn it, it's doubtful you'll ever need to spend time learning something else. With wordpress, once you've stretched its capabilities you're pretty much at a dead end and you have to find something else. There's no dead end with drupal. ;-)

As for importing, you could import directly to mysql-- i've seen plenty of people create custom scripts for that. I would try http://drupal.org/project/node_import though. You may want to look at the http://drupal.org/project/recipe module also (you'll still have to import though).

Or, if you already have the recipes available as a feed of some type on the original site you could use the http://drupal.org/project/feedapi and http://drupal.org/project/feedapi_mapper modules to grab them.

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Great suggestions

djfenske - April 22, 2009 - 21:01

Thanks for the excellent suggestions, WorldFallz. I may have to go through several steps to get the recipes in a format feasible to export/import. They are probably over-normalized right now. I'll definitely check out the Recipe module. Perhaps it would be possible just to modify it if it doesn't do exactly what I need.

The link to the theme creation screencast on MustardSeedMedia was awesome! Exactly the kind of overview I was hoping for. That really encourages me to continue to pursue this...

David Fenske / Colorado, USA / Honey.com

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WorldFallz - April 22, 2009 - 22:21

glad you found it useful ;-)

good luck.

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