How To Practice - redesign/upgrade case study

http://www.howtopractice.com/images/howtopractice.jpg (If someone knows how to insert images I'll update the post!! )

History/Overview

How To Practice provide information and resources for musicians to help with their practice time. That old adage practice makes perfect isn't true and we offer advice on how to enhance practice.

The site started back in 2006 as a straight blog - originally on Joomla. However some limitations on that platform meant we had to switch to Drupal.

In the last week we have launched a redesign of the site. We've updated the look and feel, added some new functionality and upgraded from Drupal 5 to 6.

New Requirements

Our old D5 site was an extended blog with various content types. It also had a shop which was a mix of eCommerce and Amazon modules.

With this release we have taken advantage of Drupal's community building functionality and added forums, friends and other social aspects.

Theming

During the initial design stages we thought we needed a 3 column theme with columns of varying width. For this reason we went for one of the 960 type themes, in this case Adaptive theme. As the design has developed we've now come to rest on a 2 column design and whilst this could have been acheived without a 960 template the Adaptive theme has made design easier. There are also some nice added touches like the ability to edit configure views, panels and blocks direct from the front end without having to go through admin menus etc. This has saved vast numbers of mouse clicks.

One of the trickest areas was navigation. Nice menus quickly gave the menu and drop down options we needed. However it took a lot of CSS work to get the images, hovers and active items required - especially active parents and children.
http://www.howtopractice.com/images/howtopractice2.jpg

Content

I mentioned ealier that we switched early on from Joomla to Drupal. This was a decision based on taxonomy hierachy or the lack of it in Joomla. An earlier iteration of the site required several nested levels of taxonomy (musical key signatures > type > range > variant) which resulted in hundreds of nested terms. Drupals taxonomy setup handled this very well.

As well as standard story content we also make use of a bibliography via the biblio module, webforms via the webform module, links via the weblinks module and a couple of other custom types created with the help of CCK.

http://www.howtopractice.com/images/howtopractice3.jpg

Community Build

At the basic level Drupal community features were not rich enough for our requirements. Fortunately there are several excellent modules to remedy this:
Organic Groups
Advanced Profile Kit
Advanced Forum
Author Pane
Advanced Blog
Activity
Bloggers
User Relationships
User Points
Comment Notify
Fivestar
Invite
Private Message
Quote
Signatures for Forums
User Badges

Commerce

If I had to criticise any area of Drupal it would be the commerce provision. In the previous version we used eCommerce but this does not appear to be a viable option moving forwards. Ubercart is certainly feature rich but doesn't meet our particular requirements i.e. our own physical products plus affiliate items.

Our idea solution is a cart which will allow us to process our own products in house and then redirect for affiliate products. We took an extensive look at the Amazon modules and whilst these might work for single country with single product type they do not suit sites where multiple countries, multiple product categories from multiple affiliate vendors are needed.

For the time being we have a paypal cart for our own products and are beginning the laborious task of manually adding and checking affiliate products. We've created some custom contents types for this. It does work but the management of this is going to be a problem moving forwards . . ..

Modules

I guess it's the norm for complex Drupal sites to make extensive use of modules. Those that we have used are:

Admin: Admin Menu, Better Permissions, Access Control, Fasttoggle, Filter Permissions, Path Auto, Poormans Cron, String Overrides, Tab Tamer, IE Unlimited CSS
Design: Block Title Link, Panels, Views, Custom Breadcrumbs, Dynamic Display Block, Read More Tweak, Flat Comments, Nice Menus, Menu HTML, Skinr, Taxonomy Image, Thickbox, WYSIWYG
Content: Biblio, CCK, Cumulus, Embedded Media Field, FAQ, Simplenews, Meta Tags, Page Title, Quotes, Relevant Content, Search 404, Site Map, Smileys, Unique Avatar, Weblinks, Webform
User: Captcha, Facebook Connect, Login Toboggan, Remember Me

Hosting

We're currently hosted with 1and1. The server is in Germany so there's a good possibility that this will move to a US based Drupal specialist.

Future

As with any site/business building it, whilst not simple is the easy part. Promoting/selling and attracting users is much more difficult. Our immediate priority is going to be turning this from an extended blog into a site which get repeat visits from a community of users.

We'll continue to watch the commerce situation to see if something appears that more closely fits our needs.

That's all from us - if anyone in the Drupal community has any comments then we'd love to hear them however good or bad they might be!! We're not developers and have been learning this stuff as we go. I'm sure the more experienced on these boards will spot errors/omissions that we have made ;)