Jewcy.com goes Drupal!

Advomatic is proud to announce the Drupalization of Jewcy.com.

If you have ever posed one of those "Can Drupal do xyz?" questions, the Jewcy site is a great example of all that can be done for a robust community/magazine site.

Here's some of what we did and the tools we used...

Overall theme/design:
The theme was developed from photoshop files designed by Chopping Block. Everything here is custom and uses the phptemplate theme engine. It's a mix of various approaches for each major section of the site. We use views heavily across the site as blocks, sometimes as pages, and very often embedded depending on the functionality required.

The homepage:
Building a homepage that allows Jewcy's editors to set content in many places was a good challenge. We created a tpl file that uses a mix of phptemplate regions, blocks and nodequeues behind the scenes, with some basic dhtml on the front-end in for scrolling through featured articles.

A custom admin view was built for the editors to manage homepage content regions.

Magazine content:
There are distinct content types for formal magazine articles and community blogs with guest editors (CCK, imagefield, drupalimage/ing_assist/TinyMCE, views, custom tpl files for each node type). Many articles have multiple authors and multiple pages. CCKs userref and nodereference fields were employed for these article types. The views module provides the arg filtering we needed to generate lists of articles by author in the userref field.

Community tools:
Wikis (custom module/filtering development by Advomatic), Forums, and user blogs. We used an unconventional approach for the main forum screen. This is themed to have 2 custom blocks on the top (one for recent wikis, 1 for active forum posts). Forum containers are pulled in as small boxes beneath with titles of the most recent posts.

Youtube videos (CCK type with a nifty tpl file). This implementation bypasses the need for embed and object tags, so users can submit videos without the security risks that may come along with more traditional approaces. AJAX tabs make it cool. (you know...)

AJAX-ified member profiles pull member's details, blog, other posts, event attendance, friends, and more.

Complex searches against member profiles, social networking style.
(custom module development by Advomatic)

Events with invitations and attendee lists (Event module themed with views, "event signups" custom module development by Advomatic)

Finally, we developed an online store (CCK types post to external/offsite cart) with a hierarchical navigation menu that reads store taxonomy. Oh, and there's also an ad server so jewcy can manage banners.

Advomatic also hosts Jewcy.com.

Feedback is most welcome.