Drupal

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. 

I was poking around the Drupal site, and discovered that Zen had released a new theme - v1.0.  Well, I thought, this is probably an improvement, so I downloaded it and installed it on my test system, which is my development PC using XAMPP.  SHOCK!  They completely changed the philosophy and operation of the theme.  Fortunately, they included the "zen classic" theme, which is what I have been used to, so I had a way to get back to where I was.

I am working with a church to build a new web site. Their current site is rather tired looking and needs a real re-do. They hired a web designer to design the new site look and feel. They also agreed that a CMS approach was a good thing to do. We settled on Drupal. Now that they have approved the designer's concept, what does it take to make that design be the web site design of a Drupal based site? I am 95% of the way there, and it was not as tough as I feared it might be.

Last night, I trained the core team on how they can directly contribute their content to our new web site. The training went well. Most questions were on the use of the editor, FCKEditor. It has all of the power that they wanted. There are many details that are needed to complete the site. The choice of calendar tools in Drupal is not what I would like. It seems that the future is toward Date rather than Event. I tried to get WebCalendar installed but there are unresolved issues that I can't take time to address right now, so I will go to Date.