By forreststevens on

Hey everyone, I'd like to introduce myself and post a site that is still under development but which I feel is at a stage that it might benefit from some public exposure. The client loves it and with very little training they have been able to add and maintain content throughout each of the areas.

www.culhamwriting.com

Though the learning curve was a bit steep (I'm a long-time PHP coder but new to Drupal) I created a heavily customized theme using overridden theme functions from the various modules. I used the following modules:

ecommerce (to show prices now, ordering not yet enabled)
event
image
img_assist
tinymce
views
frs (a custom module)

I wrote the custom module for certain things that the views module couldn't accomplish. But, the nice thing for me was that I did it all using the stock beta 4.7 Drupal code, first with beta 2, and upgraded with each revision through beta 4. I achieved my goal of not having to edit the modules or Drupal code (I want to be able to upgrade, relying only my theme and CSS to maintain look-and-feel). I used this project as a bit of a case-study in Drupal and have to say I'm very impressed with not only its flexibility but the coding standards.

Despite the rather sparse documentation I was able to create an XHTML compliant theme (the majority of non-validating code is a result of TinyMCE and client updates on her own content) where the visual customization is handled not in theming functions but rather using CSS. Custom image borders are handled in JavaScript, navigation text image replacements are handled using a PHP-driven text/graphic class and CSS (that's just a standard Drupal menu under there).

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think! It will definitely blow up on IE5 and we haven' put up a print media CSS file so most of the images will disappear leaving you with a nice, reasonably accessible XHTML document, as you'd see with images or styles turned off.

Yours,
Forrest

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

gonzocoder’s picture

gonzocoder commented

Hi Forrest,

I like this a lot. I think the style fits the subject matter really well.

Can I give just one tiny piece of feedback....? Whenever I see a '+' next to a menu item I instinctively go to click on the '+' rather than the title (sorry, there had to be something didn't there!)

All the best

Gonz

forreststevens’s picture

forreststevens commented

Hey, thanks for the feedback, that's an excellent observation. I'll switch it to an arrow and see how that feels.

Jimmy Neutron’s picture

Jimmy Neutron commented

Hey Forrest,

Are you using the Category module or just the Taxonomy module that comes with Drupal 4.7 ?

Regards,
Neil

forreststevens’s picture

forreststevens commented

Just taxonomy, though it's a little misleading as I made liberal use of URL aliasing. The only taxonomy terms being used are to separate out the product categories ( http://www.culhamwriting.com/products ) and Training ( http://www.culhamwriting.com/training ).

Those pages above, however use either the views module to create blocks (in the case of training) or overridden themable functions (for products) to separate out groups based on taxonomy ID.

Jimmy Neutron’s picture

Jimmy Neutron commented

I have been having some problems trying to get a category to have some opening text followed by a list of the items/nodes within that category. But you look to have accomplished this.

I have only just downloaded the views module, but i'm not quite sure how these work yet.

forreststevens’s picture

forreststevens commented

You're on the right track. The views module allows you to create a list of nodes associated with a particular taxonomy and add some text to come before it. You can then use that "view" as either a block or a new node/page. It's very slick.

Jimmy Neutron’s picture

Jimmy Neutron commented

So I could create a vocabulary with some associated terms using the taxonomy and then, using the views module, add the text to the vocabulary to come before those terms?

Sorry for troubling you, i'm sure you are busy with your website, but I really appreciate your replies.

Thanks,

Neil.

forreststevens’s picture

forreststevens commented

Yup, exactly. You can create a separate "view" as a block using the views module for each vocabulary item that you want to separate. You can then add these views as blocks into a single page.

Alternatively, if you know some PHP you can use a snippet just like this in your page:

http://drupal.org/node/30967

This allows you a lot of flexibility in how you set it up, it's just a matter of whether it makes more sense to use a snippet or a view, depending on your familiarity with PHP, need to re-use, etc. I'm more than happy to help out as much as I can!

Jimmy Neutron’s picture

Jimmy Neutron commented

Thanks for your offer. :)

I have made a few posts before about the type of things that I want to do. I guess I am trying to use as much of the inbuilt functions of Drupal as possible without relying on other modules to ensure that the site will last longer than the module developments.

The following comment I made has a bit more of what I wanted to do:
http://drupal.org/node/44519

Some of the things like the categories module seem to have too many options - meaning more things for me to click on and break. lol.

Jimmy Neutron’s picture

Jimmy Neutron commented

Forrest, I was wondering if I could contact you via email to ask you something rather than taking up the discussion here?

I think my 'Contact user' page is working so you should be able to contact me there rather than publishing an email address on here.

Thanks,
Neil.

ghankstef’s picture

ghankstef commented

Really looks superb. I think if we could get more designs like this one as the "default" design templates, it would do Drupal a world of good.