Drupal

I needed to format the Ubercart catalog differently from how it is in the default distribution.  Specifically, I wanted to include the product description teaser in the catalog listings.  I found two possibilities:

I found a blog post at http://www.sevenshadow.com/blog/ubercart-customize-datagrid that described how to add a field for a short description.  That was a start.

One of my web sites requested that I add a video clip to the web site.  At the current time, they have no video files on the site.  I was looking for the easiest way to add the capability without requiring hard coding and it needed to support playing a flash file with a preview image.

Yes, I know that Drupal7 is just around the corner, but I am stuck around the prior corner with some of my web sites.  My largest, most complex site is still on D5, and I am starting a project to migrate it to D6.  I believe that all modules needed are finally on D6, although I plan to look to the future and not depend on some modules who took a really long time to mograte from D5 to D6.

One site I support recently had a calendar problem.  We were using the Event module from Drupal, although Date has made improvements so that it could be used today.  Events were posted on the calendar that corresponded with the organization's most important external events.  They maintained an internal schedule of all rooms and meetings using a Microsoft Access tool that had been developed by a former employee, and it could not accept a date beyond December 31, 2009.  (Can you say Y2K plus 10?)

One of my web sites wanted to run a contest where people could vote on the best design.  After a period of time, then the voting would be closed and the best design would be made into a T-shirt.  Well, Drupal has a number of modules that support voting, so which one to choose?

This particular contest required that people could see thumbnails of the designs, and then vote on the one they liked best.  So I needed to provide a view of the designs, with voting information on each design.

I reviewed three voting modules for this case:

First, this is not about how to fully, automatically integrate CS and Drupal.  That would be nice, but I don't think there is a way yet. 
 
Instead, this is about my experience recently as I obtained Adobe Dewsign Premium CS4 and started to learn it.
 
I have been using CS4 for several months now.  I started my graphic editing with GIMP, an open source competitor to Photoshop.  I got an opportunity to acquire CS4, so I decided tos ee if it was all that much better than something like GIMP.
 

My church recently asked to have payment processing added to its web sites.  (Yes, we have two sites now: one for the church and a second for the youth group that serves multiple churches in Sonoma County.)  I did some studying of the options and decided to use Ubercart.  CiviCRM would have worked, but it seemed like a lot of overhead when all I wanted was payment processing.  On Drupal, there were two primary choices: e-Commerce and Ubercart.  Ubercart seemed like the more used, more up to date, and the more supported site at the current time. 

My server hosting account at Site5 was expiring.  I needed to do something.  All of my other hosting accounts were on Dreamhost, and, well, it was just easier to use.  I had commented in the forums on Site5 about some of the issues, and was told that they were not significant.  Well, they were to me.  So I decided to close my Site5 account and move to DreamHost.