Camp Yavneh Summer Camp
Our company, Software Knowledge recently completed a redesign and launch for Camp Yavneh (http://www.campyavneh.org), a Jewish summer camp in New Hampshire, USA. The client's main goals included a fresh new kid-friendly design and an easy to administer content management system, as their old design had grown stale and making changes became quite unwieldy. The development of the site proved more involved than we initially spec'ed out, but each time there was a new request we were able to fit the need perfectly with Drupal's many modules.
Old Standards
CCK, Views, and BBCode power much of the content in the site. In particular, the client was pleased with the way that BBCode simplified the process of formatting new pages as compared to standard HTML. The BBCode reference link proved invaluable during the launch process. The site includes eleven custom CCK content types including image galleries, calendar entries, music uploads, and employee bios, among others.
Camp Yavneh uses two primary menus, both of which are driven by the Nice Menus module, allowing for an easily modified drop down menu structure. These menus also feature CSS rollovers which flip the English images into Hebrew -- an early requirement from the client.
This site challenged us to create our largest Webform to date, which was an employee application consisting of some 240 fields spread across three pages. Since this form is reviewed by several members of the administrative staff, we called upon the HTML Mail module to style the emailed form content and make it much more readable. The client was also impressed with Webform's built-in ability to export form submissions as Excel data.
New Techniques
This was only the third Drupal project that our company had undertaken -- we made the switch to Drupal only six months prior and the other two sites were far simpler than Camp Yavneh's. As such, there were quite a few new techniques and modules that we discovered to fit the requirements of the client.
As an example, the internal layout design calls for a corner graphic that overlaps not only the page title but also the top menu, and the client wanted to be able to change that graphic on every page. Our solution was to simply add two additional CCK fields to the Page content type -- one for the green title background and another for the main part of the photo. Using CSS the two fields floated together perfectly. Other content types received similar treatment -- for the Staff directory, we made use of the corner graphic to display a photo of the employee rather than have a dedicated separate field.
The Photo Tour called for use of the Lightbox module, but we also needed to create a node-gallery.tpl.php file with some custom PHP code to handle formatting. Specifically, because of the corner photo used on every page the thumnails could only be four across on the first line while all other lines could fit seven. We also modified the full size photo link to display a description during the slideshow.
RootCandy
After attempting to reinvent the wheel by creating our own administrative theme, Software Knowledge settled on the RootCandy theme because it's clean, elegent, and comprehensive. Our clients have appreciated the intuitive menu structure that RootCandy provides and it has allowed us to standardize our training manuals and webinars for this and future clients.
Permissions and Content Access
The client wanted a secured area featuring blogs and photo galleries from the most recent year at camp. While securing the blogs was a simple process handled by Roles and Permissions, creating public and private image galleries was accomplished with the Content Access module. This allows the administrators to create public galleries like the Photo Tour and private ones that only parents of campers can see.