Mountain Biking site built on Drupal

Posted by drumdance on May 16, 2006 at 9:35pm

Hi All,

We just took the wraps off our mountain biking site built on Drupal. We plan to launch quite a few sites over the next couple of years and hope to evolve along with Drupal. (We also have a corporate site on Drupal but we haven't done much to enhance it. See it here.)

Anyway, I would love any feedback you can provide. While we're pretty happy with the result, we realize that the launch is only an approximation. We'll adjust based on what users tell us they're looking for.

This was my first Drupal project. I've previously done custom stuff in PHP and WordPress. While it took me a while to get my head around some of the concepts behind Drupal, I'm generally quite impressed with it's flexibility. For this site I ended taking shortcuts and inserting hacks because I didn't understand all of Drupal's capabilities. (For example, the main menu is hard-coded in the template.)

I hope to improve on that with each site, so that by the time we get to site #5 or 6 configuration will all be possible via the GUI. Of course, by then we'll be on Drupal 4.8 and all my hacks will break because they rely on old API calls. ;)

Comments

Love it

Posted by alynner on May 16, 2006 at 10:29pm

Being a Drupal newbie and avid mtn biker, I think the site looks great. Kind of like Pink bike but better because users can add stories.

nice one!

Cool!

Posted by Marco Palmero on July 19, 2006 at 9:41am

Thanks for the heads up! Great design, functionality - need I say more? I'm into a little biking myself... but sadly the local MTB track (the track they used for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games) has been left to disrepair...

I linked to your website here.

Now where's my free bumper sticker?

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Great start

Posted by admin@retailmob... on May 16, 2006 at 10:58pm

Very engaging. I like the use of several methods to educate the viewer on your goals and the site's status and to invite them to participate and at least get on the email list. We are just starting to build a site focused on the retail trade industry. We have a good PHP programmer but he is just learning the drupal way of doing things. Appreciate your note on the hacks. Interested if anyone thinks this can be done in similar fashion without the hacks based just on 4.7 functionality.

Probably...

Posted by drumdance on May 16, 2006 at 11:05pm

Most of my hacks are in the theme. The menus could probably be done without hardcoding, but I was worried about new modules injecting their own menu items. For example, we use the aggregator module to pull in links to other sites, but I didn't want a separate "aggregator" menu item to show up. The only way to get to these links is via the "Around the Web" block on the front page.

We also hacked the upload module considerably to automatically inject uploaded photos into the article instead of treating them as attachments.

And BTW if you're going to accept large photos, I suggest boosting PHP's memory considerably. It took me a while to figure this out because the Ajax-y upload tool doesn't capture PHP out of memory errors. So sometimes I'd click upload and nothing would ever happen. PHP was displaying an out of memory error, but the Ajax upload tool didn't display.

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The window that opens over

Posted by Mirrorball on May 16, 2006 at 11:22pm

The window that opens over the content for signing the newsletter is irritating. There must be a more pleasant way to encourage users to sign your newsletter.

Sorry, but popups work

Posted by drumdance on May 17, 2006 at 12:05am

I've founded that DHTML popups are far & away the most effective way to get signups. We only show it once every three days. If you sign up, we cookie you and don't show it any more.

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So how much is...

Posted by jodo on May 17, 2006 at 1:11am

a lot of memory in php?

BTW very compelling site. I really like the way your image upload is working. If you care to explain further how you accomplished that, I'm all ears.

Please excuse me for sticking this out of thread.

Memory

Posted by drumdance on May 17, 2006 at 2:33pm

You have to compile PHP with "--enable-memory-limit" to turn it on. The default setting for memory_limit in php.ini is 8M. I boosted it to 64. More info at http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php

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that's the number

Posted by jodo on May 19, 2006 at 2:58am

I was looking for, 64M. I do have "--enable-memory-limit" compiled but only run at 16M which was the first setting I tried when the stock 8M failed. I have not experimented with higher numbers like yours. Do you find drupal to run "smoother"overall with 64M?
I'm going to give it a try.

great!

Posted by mwu on June 30, 2006 at 5:17pm

your site looks great!

does the Drupal Top Sites icon require some kind of approval?

what modules are you using for advertising?

Very cool

Posted by yaph on July 2, 2006 at 10:07am

Your site looks great, congratulations!

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Nice site

Posted by abaryudin on July 2, 2006 at 11:55am

Nice site, although the tooltips are too large to my taste.

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Very nice

Posted by agentrickard on July 5, 2006 at 8:17pm

So this is what Steve Outing is doing in his spare time?

http://www.yourmtb.com/user/steve (user #2).

Overall very nice. The front is a bit crowded for my taste. but the interior is very clean.

And you managed to make a pretty green site. Quite a challenge.

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Thanks!

Posted by drumdance on July 12, 2006 at 12:34am

This is Steve's (and my) FT gig. More info at http://www.enthusiastgroup.com (Which, alas, is an example of how NOT to do a Drupal site. Working on that... :)

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