Crydee.com - The Official Raymond E. Feist Website.
Raymond E. Feist is a New York Times bestselling author
In the beginning, back in 1979, there was a small fansite, with less than a dozen pages, but during 1998 it grew quickly into a structured layout till in 1999 Crdyee.com was born as the Raymond E. Feist Reference Pages.
Within a year there was a whopping 100 pages, all created using the one tool I knew, MS Frontpage (OK I didn’t know any better), By 2002 the site was the most comprehensive reference site for Raymond E. Feist on the web, evident by its number one Ranking on Google for the Authors name. At one point, in the old Google way of listing, Crydee.com took over 150 of the top 200 pages.
Nearing the end of 2002, and after discussions with Feist himself, the site became semi-official. The author had investigated putting up a site, however it had been pointed out Crydee already did most of it.
By now the site was already getting harder to manage due to its size, and remember this was a one man operation. So during 2003 the idea of moving to a database driven site came to the forefront. After an offer of assistance, some initial work took place, but after 3 months contact with the said party, was broken.
It wasn’t until 2006, that the idea was looked at again, with myself muddling through with what existed, though it was already nearing impossible to manage. I took a look at this new concept from my perspective "Content Management System (CMS)" It looked an interesting approach, so I read up on several, but narrowed it down to Mambo, Joomla and Drupal. The final decision was made, Mambo was out for sure, Drupal a close second and Joomla was chosen. For the last 3 months of 2006, I played with Joomla, but my skills were still lacking, and I was finding it a bit harder than first expected. It was then I was approached by "Stijn Teijssen" offering to help convert the site to Drupal, so Joomla was dropped, though I took the offer with caution, as from the previous experience a lot of time could be wasted if it went nowhere, But Stijn, was in it to succeed. In January 2007, I was given permission by Raymond E. Feist to take on the title of The Official Raymond E. Feist Website, and work commenced on the conversion.
We started with D4.7, a theme Stijn, developed and a couple of custom modules for content types to handle our data, work progressed at quite a pace, and progress was made. Then someone decided to release D5! If I remember this was about February. BY now Stijn, had other projects, so I took on the task of continuing the re-vamp. Drupal 5 provided far greater scope, with easy to create content types, though the first headache was to find a new theme that was D5 compatible, with only a few differences, it looked like the site we started with back in January. Even though much of the workings of Drupal and contributed modules were still a mystery, it wasn’t long before Contemplate, CCK and Views were operational. Progress was now at a phenomenal rate, and luckily I was still able to draw on Stijn for the occasional coding issue that was causing me problem.
It was time to set a target April 2009 was the date for going live, after almost 100 days and 1600 hours of work the site went live with Drupal 5. As new modules appeared that might work, they were tested and included, sometimes, feature requests being fed back when an opportunity for improved functionality was seen.
Today we are running on Drupal 6 with a bit of php here and there to perform specific tasks. And to think before 2007, I had never used php, or css, so it’s been an interesting learning curve, though I am not sure if I have reached the curve yet. We now have over 8500 pages of content on the site
, and a whole 6 users, including the author himself, which shows you don't have to create a large community site, it can be a one man operation if you want.
The benefits that Drupal has brought is to allow for the quick easy addition and categorization of data, no more changing this page and that, the different views can deal with it. The amount of time that is now saved, permits doing other interesting things in life, which included building another Drupal website for a group raising funds for charity, maybe I will showcase them in the near future
For those who are interested here is a list of the modules and of course the theme.
Views
CCK
Content Taxonomy
Contemplate
Date API
Devel
Advanced Help
Alinks
Clone Module
Custom Search Box
Diff
FAQ
Global Redirect
IMCE
Keyword Autocomplete
Lightbox2
Link Checker
Module Grants
Node Breadcrumbs
Nodetype
Path Redirect
Pathauto
Poormanscron
ReIndex
Revisioning
Scheduler
Search 404
Search Restrict
Site Documentation
Sitenotes
Synonyms
Token
Quiz
Wysiwyg
IMCE Wysiwyg API bridge
Insert View
Views Slideshow
XML Sitemap
and Pixture reloaded as the theme