Drupal Alumni/College Sites

Hi,

A few months back , my undergrad college had requested me to help them is their websites. (I had no idea of Drupal then). I was looking for possibilities of migration into a CMS. We had some dynamic pages built in JSP for login and updation their information (Thats it). Drupal seemed to be a flexible solution.

Started exploring Drupal. At first i had huge set of problems.

Some of my major problems started were integration:
1) We already had a userbase. (had to convert them to drupal DB). - Wrote a script for this
2) Our usernames were in 'email-address' format. This posed a lot of problem, since we didnt want to display the mail addresses. So we got a way out of this using theme_username()
3) Not all modules were using theme_username. Had to literally change almost all modules.
4) The major problem was profiles. I wanted to use the profiles module at first , but the thing was too inflexible (as we had a table containing all the data). For some reason i shelved out profiles.
4) So i started writing a module for user profile. this seemed not a big problem, but the issue was that this was a very big form, so started using wforms (This is a really nice module , which i think i used the best of).
5) wforms was not completely written. It had no support for select boxes. Had to change the form.inc for this reason.
6) Registration: This was kind of strange. We dont use the internal registartion system of Drupal. We already have the user info coming from the school like their firstnames,lastname , DOB. We identify some few params input from the user and decide whether to accept him/not.

The above problems took some time to write/fix/patch. Then coming to the modules. I used some and want to list them out here, Problems they caused .

1) yshout: This module is awesome and the most used one in our sites at present. Had to fix the display of username. Anonymous posting by default was allowed. Not allowed anonymous posting
2) chat(buddylist): This seemed to be really buggy. Fixed lot of issues with the display of username and get it working for us.
3) lightbox: Many ppl wanted this functionality, but noone posted a solution. SO sat down and wrote this patch. For a demo look at http://www.cbitusa.org/?q=node/317
4) imagedrop: This module hjad major problems. took some time to fix this
5) Events : No problem with this module
6) Jobs & Resumes. : Placed a views for proper display of the jobs and resumes

There were other small things like fixing username display in various modules. The theme was done by a professional.(Iam no designer)

For some more clarifications visit http://www,cbitworld.com http://www.cbitusa.org (We are coming with one more intiative, this is called CAMP. Metor Mentee Program. This will have some more modules like a mentor mentee notebook and mentor mentee lists. Will post on it when i finish it up. )

We want to thank Drupal for the lovely product. I really liked playing arround with the whole code, but i really dont know if i have to upgrade the codebase. I have made lot of changes to the files and have no track of them.(Anybody to my rescue?)