At the risk of asking a FAQ: How to use Drupal for a traditional content site?
So, I'm tasked with building a "traditional" content site. Let's use epicurious.com as the model for discussion (no, I'm not building a site about cooking or food). Epicurious has a front page filled with different content "modules" (blocks in Drupal), plus content category pages (like http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/howtocook) and ultimately actual content pages (like http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/howtocook/cuisines/unitedstates...).
I'm using pixture releoaded theme (thanks, Jeff Burnz!), but I'm too much of a noob to grok how to set up Drupal for something beyond the basic front page. Specifically, I need a page with altered versions of the theme so that I can serve a content page (in 80/20 2 column format) and a customized category page.
I have the "Using Drupal" book (very handy) and the "Drupal 6 Social Networking" (sadly, not so handy for my needs). However, these books seem set for some pretty basic site stuff. I"m thinking I need to do some subtheming and Page/Block hocus pocus to make this all make sense.
Before you ask, yes, I should spend some $ and hire a good Drupal person. Turns out, I'm swimming against a tide of IT people that happen to think that their multi-million dollars Enterprice Content Management system can solve the worlds problems and that we can't do it in Drupal. I think InfoWorld, the Onion, and PopSci.com prove them wrong, but I need to bootstrap a demo that will make the jaws drop on my management chain BEFORE I can ask for money. Sigh.
Anyway -- can anybody offer suggestions on what I can read to approach this problem? A book perhaps? I'm willing to spend my own money to get smart on this, I just want to make sure I'm not pissing away my own hard earned cash.
Thoughts? (Flames are routed to /dev/null)
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I think you should start with the genesis theme (another of Jeff's) which will give you far more options with regards to regions in which to put "stuff"
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Boy, can I sympathize regarding regarding swimming against the tide-- I'm basically in the same position. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one that doesn't think sharepoint is the answer to world peace, lol.
Yes you can do it with theming (and Jeff's themes are great-- just checkout his new project at http://adaptivethemes.com/free-high-quality-themes-for-drupal ), but you might want to checkout the http://drupal.org/project/composite and http://drupal.org/project/panels modules as well.
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different frontpage (in pixture)
For a little hobbyproject of mine I had the same question.
Turns out that copying page.tpl.php to page-front.tpl.php was the answer. Drupal ( 6 ) automagically uses that for the frontpage now.
You can change that frontpage within the Drupal framework. This means that you can do whatever you want, empty it and fill it with plain HTML or rearrange everything to your liking and use all the information stored in Drupal.
For other ways: http://tips.webdesign10.com/drupal/how-make-a-custom-front-page-drupal-3...
For more info on templates: http://drupal.org/node/190815#template-suggestions.
Hope this helps!