Wingflap.net - A Portal About Portals

The Wingflap Development Network

Overview

The Wingflap Development Network (www.wingflap.net) is a portal about portals. It is a development community portal whose goal is to introduce Drupal to the users of the now-defunct Skyportal. Skyportal was an ASP portal that was an offshoot of MaxWebPortal (c.2000). Skyportal shutdown earlier this year and left a large community without a site, support, or new development.

As an admin and active participant of the site, I decided to create a place for these people to discuss their future plans for their portals. There's some discussion about Skyportal support issues. There's also discussion about why people chose their new platform (mostly Drupal).

But mostly, it's a site that's in construction looking for community feedback about functionality and technology to achieve that functionality as an effort to help converts transition to Drupal.

The Site

The site is a mix of Drupal, modules, and a custom theme to make give the site the look and feel of the old ASP portal with the advantage of the use of newer technologies. Eventually, through the use of the Features module, functional areas will be bundled to allow an easier implementation without having to understand all of the underpinnings. The discussions on the site, however, will be at a lower level allowing the members to understand how Drupal works under the hood and, therefore, what's really going on in the site as a whole.

It's built with Drupal 6.16, CCK, Views, and many other modules. The goal of the site is to:

a) Use modules that hopefully will be supported in Drupal 7.
b) Be able to run in a shared webhosting environment.
c) Have it's functional direction steered by the members of the site.
d) Provide support to people either wanting to stick with Skyportal or, hopefully, transtion to Drupal.

Skyportal was a plug 'n play portal that people used for smaller community, hobby, or promotional sites. There are over 10,000 copies downloaded and almost 1000 active sites running it.

The structure is based on what was modules (functional areas) like Forums, Articles, Pictures, Links, Classified ads, etc. Navigation is based on taxonomy with the use of taxonomy-based paths (thanks to Pathauto), breadcrumbs (Custom Breadcrumbs), and child terms (a view).

The site also uses Organic Groups to allow content to not only be categoried by a multi-tiered taxonomy heirarchy, but also by the group to which the content belongs.

Audience

The audience for this site is basically anyone who is coming from Skyportal (or any other portal software) and is interested in transitioning to Drupal. For many, this transition involves a mental paradigm shift that can be difficult to understand. The site will soon contain a book talking about the portal at a high level, describing it's functionality, and then mapping the functionality to an implementation in Drupal.

There is a wealth of information about specific aspects of Drupal available either on this site or elsewhere. I have found, however, that this information is usually specific to a certain module and not a mix of modules to achieve specific functionality. For example, if someoene is new to Drupal and wants to create a gallery, there are many articles about creating the gallery in any one of many different ways using different modules. On Wingflap.net, the specific implementations will be discussed and the complete recepies will be the outcome.

It's a site geared for the Droobie and will hopefully complement (and reference) a wealth of material from the Drupal site in an organized manner. It's also geared for those more familiar with Drupal to help participate in discussion about the buildout of the the site and to hopefully help members looking to start out.

Look and Feel

The site's theme is based on a theme that was popular on the Skyportal site. It's created with the Genesis theme by Adaptive Themes. I wanted to keep the theming simple so that it's easy to follow.

Feedback would be appreciated.