Salam to all `Drupalists'
We are webmasters & designers who make use of Drupal CMS for various websites.
Several factors about Drupal that make us addicted:
1. The URL alias! This gives the feeling or actual `total control' of contents right down to the URL link.
2. The easy categorization of contents, again with the use of URL aliases. (You call it taxonomy)
3. There is no OBLIGATION whatsoever to refer our sites using Drupal! Non-Drupal users will not have an idea that any given site is running on Drupal unless we tell them.
Other CMSes - they ask us to retain that footer copyright thing. Some CMS like Xoops doesn't even allow some major links to its sites to be removed from its themes.
4. SMALL yet POWERFUL inital setup of Drupal only requires about 1.9 MB and that's a lot of savings for small websites. PHP-Nuke for example require close to 23 MB and that does not include contents.
5. Its themes and appearance is easy to change if you are willing to do so with some knowledge of HTML. That also includes changing colors and texts.
OK our websites:
http://muslimin.org/ummah - Inspired by CivicCRM - for NGOs and online activism,
communications assisted by Drupal system and emails
- Cross organizations and individuals
- Actually Drupal with additional modules by CivicCRM
http://muslimin.org/Islam - Simple categorization of contents (Who/what/why/how)
http://smart-paradise.com - `Corporate website' - working on it still, using SpreadFirefox
theme
And many more which cannot be disclosed here :)
Recommended modules:
Webform
Event
Summary
Shortcuts - side menu
***For beginners or aspiring `Drupalists' feel free to msg or email us if you want to learn new things like how did we build our sites and installed modules. Not that you cannot learn from Drupal.org, just looking forward to share our interests and methods.
Comments
Recommended Modules
Drupal is small because many useful modules do not come readily. You have to install them yourself.
So for beginners what modules you need out of A-Z of Drupal modules? See our websites above and you can see the blocks
in left & right columns are modules we installed ourselves. Feel free to try it but don't make our site crash!
Sidecontent
Quotes (not `quote')
Image (for photo album)
Print
Forward
Article
Weblinks
Whatsrelated
FCKEditor - need to download `lib' files from FCKeditor.net
Simplenews - for newsletters
CitizenSpeak - for targeted email petitions
Some `unworkable' modules which we did not manage to utilize:
Guestbook - for admin and members
Privatemsg - why doesnt it work? Did the SQL query
Modules from CivicCRM not working properly, so are disabled:
Volunteer
Survey
Internet for ISLAM, get to know Islam and Muslims :) May Allah brings you to the Straight Path
http://muslimin.org/Islam
Drupal all the way
http://muslimin.org/Risalah-Islam (Green theme gworks, only left column)
http://young.muslimin.org For teenagers
Our clients:
http://payphone2u.com - Took 2 1/2 hours including putting 4 products, images, attached files, webform,taxonomy_context, custom secondary links, and also CubeCart (eCommerce) installed. And we are confident to leave it to be ready for the owner(client) who has no HTML or previous website knowledge.
See, the more you are familiar with Drupal, the faster you work and the more efficient it gets.
Another incentive to use Drupal is CLEAN URLS (url alias / path alias) by Google:
Our Muslimin.org was only recently indexed by Google (past owner problem) and Google indexed almost all (70%) of pages (nodes) with its own URL alias which is easy to look at, attractive, and no Session ID like it does for Joomla or most other PHP sites.
We also have an acronym for Drupal
C.R.E.A.M
If you need to present Drupal to non-Drupal, or HTML illiterate clients who demand a lot of expectations from websites, present to them from their point of view. They wont know or bother what is CMS, HTML, PHP, cfm, asp, etc.
But they need to know how their needs can be served, and a webbuilder with Drupal has a lot to handle the needs.
Internet for ISLAM, get to know Islam and Muslims :) May Allah brings you to the Straight Path
http://muslimin.org/Islam