Another band site - but with a bit of a twist (or rather a lot of sliding)

Here it jolly well is.

First Drupal based site for me - a real headache until I'd partially got my head around the holy trinity of CCK, Views and Imagecache. In fact, it took me ages to realise that 90% of what I needed to do is related to those three.

And just when I thought I was on the home straight it was time for the bag of hurt that is moving from a local to remote environment (permissions bother, .htaccess wranging, clean url bonkersness).

If you like that sort of thing, grab a look at my frankly hilariously amateur style.css file. If I knew then what I know now etc...

Stuff I now know that I need to know:

• Find a way of elegantly integrating Drupal with the most important social networking sites (esp. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr) - so that I don't have to upload songs/photos/vids/news items through three different interfaces/systems.

• Sort out/theme the backend of the site so that actual humans can easily use it to submit/edit nodes. If you thought my style.css was funny... And I still can't decide whether individual nodes or multivalue forms are easier for editors to use; I do know that the latter are bastards to try and make a site with (blimming multigroup, database join hell if you know what I'm on about).

• Learn Views properly - so I don't have to avert my eyes from the relationships and arguments section in Views. Ditto: stuff to do with exposing Views

• Not to be frightened of putting incomprehensible gobbets of PHP in tiny dialogue boxes or text files with eyewateringly long and complicated names. Maybe even understanding some of it.

• Make the site easy to use for people using mobile devices.

• Put my fingers in my ears, tra-la-la-la as loudly as possible and pretend that Internet bastard Explorer doesn't exist.

To anyone reading this who is about to embark on their first Drupal project and who doesn't have the brain the size of Jupiter: yes it is very, very hard to start with but you will get there/somewhere in the end. As for me, there's no turning back now - I am at least 50% Druplicon.

Adam