Judy Moody was in a Drupal Mood

About Megan McDonald

Megan McDonald is the author of the award-winning Judy Moody series and its companion series starring Stink. More recently, Megan McDonald has recalled some of her own childhood with the warmth, humor -- and squabbles -- of three spunky sisters in The Sisters Club.

The Theme

Needle Consulting teamed up with Pete DeMarte, a former co-worker of mine, to create the custom theme. In addition, Tim Medlen often chipped in with graphics and layout.

We based the theme on Strange Little Town. Our goal was to make the design stand out from the majority of author web sites we ran across during the preliminary stages of development.

The Homepage

The homepage went through several iterations. The current homepage was born during the demo of the Stink Books. We were both loving the cork board so we decided it would be cool to carry that idea over to the home page -- thank God for page-front.tpl.php.

A Few Out of the Norm Modules

Of course we used CCK, Taxonomy, Views, etc. Below is a list of some of the other modules we installed.

• Typeface : One of the most important modules on the site -- used to embed the Judy Moody font (created by Peter Reynolds, illustrator for the Judy Moody series)
• Accordion Blocks : Modified this module a little bit in order to add the band aids on the left side bar for navigation (Judy Moody has a rare band aid collection)
• Curlypage : Powers the various mood rings throughout the site
• Custom Pages : Used for the Match-O-Rama game

The Fun Stuff Pages

• Match-O-Rama : Provided a few minor tweaks to this awesome tutorial
• Puzzles : Content type where Megan can upload an image which will automatically convert to a puzzle. Again, I pretty much followed this awesome tutorial
• Create A Mood Lib : Used Drupal's Form API combined with quite a bit of CSS

Hosting

Since we enjoy the command line so much we decided to go with Slicehost. Currently we have installed Memcache and are considering varnish-cache (http://varnish-cache.org/). In addition, I may add the Boost module in the near future.

Some Cool Pages To Checkout

http://meganmcdonald.net
http://meganmcdonald.net/content/happy-birthday-judy-moody
http://www.meganmcdonald.net/category/series/judy-moody
http://www.meganmcdonald.net/moodlib/create