Drupal

Choc Chip recently completed a major website design and online marketing campaign for www.visitgreatoceanroad.org.au using the Drupal CMS (Content Management System).

GOT (Geelong Otway Tourism) contracted us to build the new website to provide tourism information and represent the tourism association members by giving them prominent pages on the site.

Site Build

As well as an attractive, dynamic design, this site includes a considered navigation structure and content targeted to attract site visitors and lead them to the member pages.

The challenge in building this site was to incorporate data for the tourism association members from two different external sources.

Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System) that we use so that you can edit your own website.

However, Drupal can be used for much more than this simple task - it's so powerful and flexible that entire complex web applications can be built around the Drupal framework.

This 57-second video from PingVision is a (very) brief introduction to Drupal.

Drupal has become a growing force in building Social Websites and sites that have a high level of user interaction.

A recent article by the National Wildlife Federation hails using Drupal as one of the Top 10 ways to change the world using social media.

DrupalModules.com is a classic 'mashup' website, combining module information and downloads from the main drupal.org website with the ability to review, bookmark and vote for your favourites.

What's a mashup? From wikipedia:

In web development, a mashup is a Web application that combines data from one or more sources into a single integrated tool. The term Mashup implies easy, fast integration, frequently done by access to open APIs and data sources to produce results that were not the original reason for producing the raw source data. An example of a mashup is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct Web service that was not originally provided by either source.

We've released new versions for the Author Contact module for both Drupal 5 and Drupal 6.

The new D5 version is a minor update, removing the fieldset around the contact form and updating the way theming works.

The D6 version is now working properly and has been fully tested on our test servers.

Thanks go out to those users that gave us useful feedback and patches.

What is Author Contact?

As members of the Drupal community we like to give back where we can. Part of this commitment means sharing some of the modules that we create so that other developers can use them if they have a similar need.

Drupal.org is the main home of the Drupal CMS system that we use when our clients require a CMS solution. It's also what powers this website.

I chose to work with Drupal because it's highly extensible and flexible, it's powerful enough to do a lot of things and easy enough to customise for the tasks that are a little trickier. It also has a great theme system available so that we can customise brand-new themes for it for clients.

However, Drupal has had in the past a bit of a reputation as the 'Geek's CMS' - meaning that it needed someone (like us) to take the core installation and create your site for you with a good theme and an interface that makes it easy for you as the client to do what you want.

On a couple of websites I've built I've wanted to change the default Drupal menu into something that closely resembles buttons.

For example:

This is easy to do using CSS.

The menus in Drupal are formatted as unordered lists using <ul> and <li>, with some funky CSS included in by default to give the standard bullets and arrows.

To create a blocky, CSS button look we need to overwrite the default CSS with some of our own. In theory it's not that difficult, but it took me a while of playing around to figure out what CSS rules needed to be overwritten.

I start all my themes with Zen, so I'm not sure if this CSS will work by default with other themes - give it a try.

In your theme's CSS file, add the code: