By rbrooks00 on

I’d like to present Mona T Brooks Photography to the community. This isn’t the most technically involved Drupal web site you’ll probably visit but I felt it was worth sharing to show off Drupal’s ability to create simple, functional and visually appealing web sites.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that this doesn’t look like a Drupal site at all, there is no traditional two or three column layout, login block, etc. This demonstrates that you have almost complete control of the way your site with PHPTemplate. The theme wizardry was done by John Haas with Manape Design.

The idea was to build something with visual impact that was also incredibly easy to maintain and use.

Interesting Site Features

  1. Home page: The home page consists of a simple rotating image which can easily be accomplished with some PHP tweaks based on the PHP snippets. The images are uploaded using the image module and put in a special gallery.
  2. Portfolio: This isn’t technically Drupal but it is worth mentioning. This gallery is put together using Slide Show Pro, a $20 piece of flash software.
  3. Sections: Probably the coolest part of the site in my opinion is the fact that the average user doesn’t even know this is a Drupal site. The sections module allows you to keep the admin side of your site in a theme of your choice (in this case Blue Marine) while theming the user exposed portion of the site. This screenshot shows in part what you might see if you were an administrator. You’ll notice the standard Drupal navigation block at the top which is hidden from anonymous users using simple PHP visibility settings.

In my humble opinion a good example of a good looking site that is highly functional and easily assembled using Drupal.

Full Module list

  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Excerpt
  • Image
  • Img_Assist
  • Menu
  • Page
  • Path
  • Ping
  • Sections
  • Sifr
  • Statistics
  • Taxonomy
  • tinymce
⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

jreid’s picture

jreid commented

A very attractive site, indeed.

It's just a pity that the layout is broken in Opera - all except for the gallery and Clients page - strange.

John

rbrooks00’s picture

rbrooks00 commented

Hmm, we'll have to look into that. We definitely want to be compatible with all browsers (as much as is reasonable anyway). Thanks for the report.

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BuyBlue.org

bradlis7’s picture

bradlis7 commented

When I loaded up the front page, the username and password is in a random spot. It's covering up the right part of the logo, and "Request new password" and the login button are behind the main body of the text. At least on linux it's that way. Looks good otherwise.

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Bradlis7.com | Churchofchristnet

rbrooks00’s picture

rbrooks00 commented

Hmm, user login shouldn't be seen by anyone. I was having some issues with the blocks earlier so I'm wondering if you still see that after a cache refresh.

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BuyBlue.org

bradlis7’s picture

bradlis7 commented

I think it's fixed now

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Bradlis7.com | Churchofchristnet

rbrooks00’s picture

rbrooks00 commented

Excellent, thanks a lot for the report by the way.

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BuyBlue.org

Squidgy’s picture

Squidgy commented

Very streamlined and minimalist - nicely done! About SlideShowPro - is that incorporated with Drupal somehow or is that pre-rendered, so to speak, before it was uploaded?

rbrooks00’s picture

rbrooks00 commented

That page is pretty simple. All that was done is the code to embed a flash movie was included as a drupal page.

Slide Show Pro itself consists of a flash movie file and an xml document that defines the galleries, images, descriptions, etc. It is probably possible to be even more sophisticated and have drupal generate that xml file for you but it is pretty easy to author on your own.

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BuyBlue.org

Squidgy’s picture

Squidgy commented

Ah, that's what I thought. I understand how Slideshowpro works, I was wondering if you'd taken it to the next level or not. It'd be a great module for somebody to produce! I'll have to look into harassing our team programmer...

rbrooks00’s picture

rbrooks00 commented

It looks like SSP has taken this to the next level on their side, their SSP Director product is worth a look: http://www.slideshowpro.net/product_sspdir.php and http://www.slideshowpro.net/mint/pepper/orderedlist/downloads/download.p...

Might even prove to be good inspiration for the next generation of Drupal gallery apps.

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BuyBlue.org

kozuch82’s picture

kozuch82 commented

Woow,

i cant believe this is drupal site - very nice theme!

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StandyGames.com - Quality, cross-platform free game downloads!

Southpaw’s picture

Southpaw commented

I suggest taking a look at this page regarding your top navigation menu:

http://www.cssplay.co.uk/menu/naf_ir.html

kozuch82’s picture

kozuch82 commented

The site does not load for me buddy...

Jan

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Support Drupal! - Drupal at Free Scripts Forum
The Linux Boy - Free Scripts and Linux Guides

rbrooks00’s picture

rbrooks00 commented

Something must have been up with the server, looks a-ok to me. If there are still problems please let me know what browser/OS combo you are using.

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BuyBlue.org

fossilfool’s picture

fossilfool commented

Thanks a lot for this example. I too chose SlideshowPro for my gallery.

I've been having trouble getting the Flash slideshow to appear. Can you please help me double check my technique?

Drupal is in my home directory.

I have uploaded all the Slideshow files to /slideshow/ not in my 'files' directory, just off the root directory.

I'm using relative paths to refer to the slideshow. /home/[username]/public_html/slideshow/

I have FULL HTML set, and I have added the tags to the list: EMBED, PARAM, OBJECT.

I changed the TinyMCE setting for Verify HTML to false. (Before doing this, the object, PARAM and EMBED tags got stripped. Any clue why?)

I use the TinyMCE button "HTML" to paste the following code: 

 <div class="node">   <div class="content">
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" id="slideshow" align="middle" height="400" width="550"> 
 <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"></param>  <param name="movie" value="/home/[username]/public_html/slideshow/slideshow.swf"></param>    
<param name="quality" value="high"></param>  <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"></param>   
<embed src="/home/[username]/public_html/slideshow/slideshow.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="slideshow" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" align="middle" height="400" width="550"></embed> </object></div> </div>

Drupal creates a white block where the flash object should be. Any help would be really appreciated.

Do I need to upload the Slideshow directory to my 'files' directory? Is there something I'm not getting about HTML filters?

Thanks for your help!

Paul

www.fossilfool.com and www.worldbike.org
Bicycle entrepreneur, inventor, musician, advocate.

rbrooks00’s picture

rbrooks00 commented

I had a similar problem as you did here, and I'm not sure I know the exact technical reason why it occurs. Basically I was able to get everythng working by placing the .swf file in the root directory of Drupal instead of a sub directory. When I did this the movie rendered properly.

I think this probably has something to do with Drupal's .htaccess file but I chose to do things the expedient way instead of figuring it out because it wasn't a big deal for me to put the swf in the root directory.
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BuyBlue.org

rbrooks00’s picture

rbrooks00 commented

Oh and the actual image files are located in a subdirectory as well, not Drupal's file directory. The reason for that is because there are currently not any tools in Drupal that would allow you to manage the images and generate the required XML file.

I am about to switch the thing over to using SSP's new "director" product which features a very nice interface for creating and maintaining albums.

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BuyBlue.org

fossilfool’s picture

fossilfool commented

To see if Flash content can display? I made the change you suggested, putting slideshow.swf in my root directory. I kept everything else in the slideshow/ directory. I changed the XML file path in Flash to slideshow/images.xml from "images.xml"

I still can't see the slideshow. Wondering if there's a simple test I can use to debug it.

Thanks for your help so far.

Paul

www.fossilfool.com and www.worldbike.org
Bicycle entrepreneur, inventor, musician, advocate.

fossilfool’s picture

fossilfool commented

Thanks again for your help. My problem was that my site is on a subdomain, and I was uploading to a different directory than I thought.
So, it had nothing to do with Flash or SlideshowPro, just good ol' file management.

Paul

www.fossilfool.com and www.worldbike.org
Bicycle entrepreneur, inventor, musician, advocate.

indeepthought’s picture

indeepthought commented

But it breaks up for me in Firefox. I love how simple it looks yet has the power of Drupal. i peeped it in IE(yuck) and it actually worked properly.

rbrooks00’s picture

rbrooks00 commented

Yeah somehow some things got broken in FF, we have a laundry list of things for our designer to take care of.

Thanks for the compliments :)
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BuyBlue.org

aaron stanush’s picture

aaron stanush commented

I know Slideshow Pro has the ability to create slideshows from RSS feeds (ex. Flickr), so would this also work for a Drupal RSS feed with embedded images?

Has anyone tried this?

adshill’s picture

adshill commented

I have tried this just now and because drupal rss feeds don't show the image, it doesn't appear to work. SSP Shows the right text for the gallery and the right number of images, but the images don't come up in the slideshow, just white boxes.

Anyone got any ideas how to deal with this? Alternatively which technique did you use to feed the images into SSP in the example given?

Any help would be greatly appreciated (site is @ www.thegraffitiproject.net/gallery

Inge-1’s picture

Inge-1 commented

Simple clean and beautiful. I had no problesm with Opera. Love the Flash gallery.

zigma’s picture

zigma commented

Do you store all images under one folder?

Are you managing different set of original image files under different directory? Is it possible to do so?

grundum’s picture

grundum commented

Somebody knows how to integrate this two? In the way other slideshows take the galleries from Drupal? I really want to use SlideShowPro, but I don't want to use another image manager -in this case SSP Director- to do it in a separate way -like monabrooks.com-. Some ideas? Even for coding a Module to achieve this? -I know SSP reads XML, but I don't know if this implementation won't be cumbersome later.. and, in the other hand, I don't know if will be worth the pain to read directly from the Drupal Database -dealing with taxonomies, user roles, etc-..

Thanks for any idea or suggestion*