Showcase: Gordon Parks Elementary School

I've just completed a conversion of http://www.gordonparks.org/ from a half-HTML/half-PHP cobbled-together site to a Drupal site. Gordon Parks Elementary School has been a client for a couple of years. We inherited a very pretty but horribly constructed site from a designer who disappeared after setting it up. It had a rudimentary CMS where the school administrators could add news items, job openings, and teacher bios, but that was about all.

The school is a non-profit and their website is aimed at donors and potential donors. Because they were unable to update their own content, they had to rely on us to update it for them. Last year they had no budget for us, and we gave them a lot of free work as a result.

This year I wanted to learn to use Drupal, and decided to recreate (and clean up) the existing Gordon Parks site as my training project. That way, I didn't have to charge the client for my learning time, and they got a site they can update themselves.

It took me a long time to figure out how to do everything. I bought several Drupal books and consulted drupal.org constantly. I don't know anyone else who uses Drupal, so I was just winging it most of the time. Fortunately, I have lots of CSS experience, so the theming was not too hard.

I have lots of different content types and ended up writing quite a lot of documentation for the client. They can add library books to the recommended reading page, add fund-raising events, edit the contents of the boxes on the home page, add staff members, import donor lists annually, create new job listings, among other things. They're pretty happy with it, and I am too.

I know there are things I'll do differently in the future; in fact, I've already discovered various modules I could have used here.

All feedback is welcome! I plan to keep using Drupal as much as I can, and am in the process of converting several other sites.

Mary