WinBeta.Org redesign using Drupal 6

About WinBeta

WinBeta began around 1998 as a tech community that focused on Windows betas, Windows news, and Windows reviews. Over time, we branched out and began talking about various other tech related news. WinBeta has broken numerous stories related to Microsoft and its Windows operating system. To this day, we provide up to date tech news and reviews.

Old CMS

Several years back, we began using VirtuaNews to power our front-end and Invision Power Board to power our forums. Unfortunately, Virtuanews was rarely updated and provided very little flexibility and extensibility. Our website had issues to say the least.

Enter Drupal

We began experimenting with the concept of using Drupal as our CMS. We were very impressed with the ability to extend the CMS using modules and themes. Over time, we constructed a theme that reflected our vision as to what our website was to broadcast. Using several modules, we were able to put our vision into code.

Module Highlights

Here is a list of a few modules that make up the entire website.
Advanced Forum - This module powers our forums
Advanced Poll - This module allows us to have a better poll on our website. It simply looks better and works better.
Better Messages - This module does just that. It gives us a nice means of looking at typical messages.
Boost - This module helps us cache our large website for anon users.
Imagecache - We love this module because it allows us to have different sized images throughout our website.
Lightbox2 - This module is lightweight and works just right.
Privatemsg - This module is used to support a private messaging system on our website.
Troll - This module allows us to monitor spammers and take appropriate action.
User Badges - This module is used to assign graphical badges to our users.
User Points - A great tool to allow points to be rewarded to users who contribute to the website.
Views - Last but not least, the best module ever. This module is the backbone of the website. Nearly 80% of the website is displayed via views. Such a great creation.

Administration Area

Drupal provides a nice admin panel that allows us to fully customize and configure our website. We didnt have to do much theming to make our admin panel look good, it was already good to go. The admin panel is very useful and well organized. Drupal makes it simple to upload and edit content.

Frontpage

Using views, we display the main content as well as items that had the most comments and items tagged as reviews. Using the taxonomy module, we display tags above our story titles. Users can also filter what they are looking for by clicking on a tag. For example, clicking "microsoft" will display all items tagged as "microsoft." Nearly all items displayed on the right sidebar is a result of the Views module.

Forums

Our forum community is powered by advanced forums. One thing we liked about advanced forums is that we were able to fully customize the theme to our liking. We actually prefer using Drupal's forums combined with advanced forum over Invision Board. Drupal makes it simple, easy to use, and nice to look at. We look forward to the newer release so we can further enhance our forums.

Final Thoughts

View the old Winbeta

View the NEW Winbeta powered by Drupal

Drupal has made it very simple to create the perfect website. If you have any questions regarding the website, please ask away and I will answer.