Show off your Drupal site

Lyemium is a new Arts & Design website, dubbed “The Visual Mass Media Of Art & Design”. The website is to showcase the individual artist, designer, and all things related. If you frequent several design blogs and web portals you may notice that a lot of sites are more Wordpress CMS-Centric. The idea of Lyemium is not only to promote individual artist and designer but to also to serve the Drupal design community on a whole.

The initial site was launched in the third quarter of 2009 and has now been revised and redesigned, in house, from scratch to keep up with the latest web standards, design practices, and visual trends that rapidly change in the design community and better reflect the current state of Drupal being a powerful and flexible CMS.

The site is being powered by Drupal version 6 with the anticipation of porting to Drupal 7 once the final version becomes released to the public. The modules chosen for Lyemium, which will be discussed later, were picked with Drupal 7 compatibility in mind. The actual development took place over a period of approximately 4 months to complete, ending February 28, 2010.

http://www.howtopractice.com/images/howtopractice.jpg (If someone knows how to insert images I'll update the post!! )

History/Overview

How To Practice provide information and resources for musicians to help with their practice time. That old adage practice makes perfect isn't true and we offer advice on how to enhance practice.

The site started back in 2006 as a straight blog - originally on Joomla. However some limitations on that platform meant we had to switch to Drupal.

In the last week we have launched a redesign of the site. We've updated the look and feel, added some new functionality and upgraded from Drupal 5 to 6.

New Requirements

Our old D5 site was an extended blog with various content types. It also had a shop which was a mix of eCommerce and Amazon modules.

With this release we have taken advantage of Drupal's community building functionality and added forums, friends and other social aspects.

Theming

I am fairly new to the Drupal community having moved to Canada 2 years ago and retraining in Web Development with no previous experience. I took a diploma course at VSBT and fell in love with Drupal. The community approach to Drupal is the thing I like the most and the way it is so configurable - I like being able to tell clients that "anything is possible"

For the past year or so I have been developing sites for VSBT's sister company North Studio and subcontracting under my business of Ice Shadow Studio. Every opportunity I get I like to try new things with Drupal and learn more. I now develop all my sites in Drupal and it was a natural choice for my new business project.

Flight Crew Finder is my new business venture and I built the site alone in just 3 weeks. I say alone but I did have some help from a very talented programmer in customising the Job module - the only real customisation on the site. Just 2 months since launch and we are going strong. Over 1000 registered users and the first crew being called for interview.

As a result of the New Zealand Government's Ultra-Fast Broadband Investment Initiative, we could soon have access to ultra-fast broadband at speeds 50 times quicker than what’s considered fast today!

A fibre optic network has the ability to transform your life by opening up educational, health, business, and lifestyle opportunities. And as Auckland is the economic hub of New Zealand it is essential that it keeps pace with the rest of the developed world. It will change the way you live, work and play.

Vector wants to install fibre to the door in Auckland and has a plan to reach over 450,000 customers within seven years, and also supports rollout to the rest of the country through the efforts of its fellow New Zealand Regional Fibre Group members.

Please show your support and have your say @ http://www.fibretothedoor.co.nz/

Check out our new theme Retail Displays. Based off Zen we totally customized everything using some basic modules: cck, views, imagecache, ddblock, nicemenus and ubercart.

Let me know your thoughts.