Open hardware powered by Open software - Harkopen.com

Harkopen.com is an open source hardware community with the purpose of interconnecting open hardware tinkerers around the world. The website is offering fresh open hardware news, project hosting, hacker spaces locations, suppliers and tutorials while maintaining a strong connection with the users on social networks and constantly making new friends.

The website was an one man effort, me, Craciun Constantin - web developer from Romania with a day job as a weekend project that I started in 2008 and went mainstream on 1 january 2009. I am an electronics hobbyist in my free time and finding good open source projects was a pain, so I thought that others have the same problem and a community for open source hardware was the best answer. A little bit of content management systems digging and I was sure that using anything other than Drupal with be suicide.

Modules used

At that point I bravely dived into Drupal development with no php knowledge only strong html and css skills (I am a flash developer, don't shoot). I have installed a clean Drupal and some modules that I understood from the drupal.org community you can't live without and it was a wonder to my why were not already in core, here are some :

CCK - the powerhouse that enables you to carefully create content types and add fields with numerous properties and permissions;

Views - generating pages with specified types of content and with adequate properties, paging and sorting was a breeze whit this module;

Pathauto - generated aliases for the content published on the website on the fly;

GMap - integration with Drupal and Views was seamless and the position of the submitted hackerspaces were nicely displayed on the world map;

Google CSE search - I preferred to leave the search to someone who's name became the synonym of "search"

Theme

After trying a few themes I decided I can build one myself that would better suit my needs, so taking the bull by the horns I created the theme of the website following the tutorial Drupal 6 theme guide. Don't be afraid of Drupal theming, it's not so much php (once you understand the structure you will be placing regions in no time) and it's really empowering to see the beast wearing the specified colors and the content obeying the positions.

I went for the simple clean look, for fast loading and non-intrusive behavior, a little of cross browser testing, testing with the Speed Tracer and validating as much as possible the pages and that was it.

Tips and tricks

(I wished someone told me when I started tinkering with Drupal they are really lifesavers)

- downloaded modules don't go in /modules and downloaded themes in /themes ! Rather put them in /sites/default/modules and /sites/default/themes and updating the Drupal core will be a lot easier;

- don't install lots of modules! although the features might seem attractive overloading Drupal with tons of modules will lead to poor user experience, try to do as much as possible with the core modules and cck and views;

- don't enable all core modules (the optional ones), only those you really need;

- use a local clean drupal install to test new modules rather than your production website to decide if they are worthy and serve you well;

- using page compression (from site configuration, performance) will block views that use random sorting (for example when I activated page compression the front page was displaying the same 3 projects that were cached rather than other random 3 every time) - which is kind of normal if you think about it;

Conclusions

I absolutely love Drupal's way of getting things done and don't regret the choice of going this way. I still have a lot of things to do, diving into custom module development is one, waiting anxiously to migrate to Drupal 7 when is ready is another and basically it doesn't pass a day without finding a way to improve the website making it better faster, stronger.

And don't forget :

Release early, release often!