Drupal Anatomy 101

23 Jun 2009

Thanks again to everyone who attended my talk at Design for Drupal at MIT.

As promised, here as some links. And, attached below, are my slides. Let me know if you have any questions.

Video: moving your static code to a drupal theme http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode24

.info files: http://drupal.org/node/171205

Variables available to you in page.tpl.php: http://api.drupal.org/api/file/modules/system/page.tpl.php

Variables available to you in node.tpl.php: http://api.drupal.org/api/file/modules/system/node.tpl.php

Drupal theme guide: http://drupal.org/theme-guide

Books: http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-themes/book, http://www.amazon.com/Front-End-Drupal-Designing-Developers/dp/0137136692

WHEN IN DOUBT: CLEAR THE CACHE! (on the PERFORMANCE page; or use admin_menu and/or devel modules)

Education Development Center is my current employer. I am in charge of their main site, which was re-launched last fall on Drupal.

I occasionally volunteer with the US Campaign for Burma. It's a wordpress site with some serious modifications. I've helped out with template tweaks, security concerns, general maintenance, as well as various hosting issues.

From 2002-2005, I headed up Oxfam America's fledgling online outreach program, helped build their e-list from 5,000 to over 100,000, and helped raise nearly $20 million online. In the process, I became very familiar with the Get Active (now Convio) application service provider - a 3rd-party web app which does a lot of the 'heavy lifting' (list management, bulk email, credit card processing, etc.).

This ongoing project provided me with a real Drupal trial-by-fire. The dev site was in version 4.7. I ported over several hundred nodes from a blogger site and created almost two dozen node types. The Grassroots International site gave me the opportunity to learn Drupal theming, module-building, image handling -- and a number of other skills.

Baseball meets Drupal ... again. During Christmas 2007, Jon Springer contacted after moving his site -- a catalog of every uniform number worn by every player -- from Wordpress to Drupal. I helped him out with a number of administrative and theming issues. But the best part was the challenge of Drupalizing his very primitive database of uniform numbers. Using Views, CCK, a number of helper modules, and some good ol' trial-and-error, however, we were able to create some slick rosters (by player name and uniform number).

It's -- take a breath -- The US Department of Education's Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention, a drupal site created and run by EDC. I acted as technical adviser and themer on this site. I helped with content-types decisions, php snippets in blocks, and views. I also took the designers comps and combined them with Zen to create the site's final theme.

I worked with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee for several years, consulting with them on a number of tech issues. I convinced them to move their static site to drupal. I also aided them in choosing an application service provider (Convio). And I helped UUSC find the developer who built the site.

I can't take credit for the UUSC site. But hats off to Lightbulb First and JM Designs for putting together a great site. [More info]

History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present. That about says it all. A simple Wordpress install, with some significant tweaks to an off-the shelf theme. The (not uncontroversial) content of Historiann is much more interesting than the story of its creation. Enjoy!

Creating the IES site was a great experience. It tested my PHP, SQL, and CSS skills. But I learned much more about client relations, information architecture, data migration, Python (to help with the migration), SEO, and teaching people to write for the web (if not always succeeding). The subject matter is pretty intriguing as well.

This Joomla site provided me with a number of interesting challenges, not the least of which was understanding and then mastering Joomla. I created a custom theme for the site, integrated it with PHPBB, and installed/tweaked countless modules. Take a look; the subject matter is certainly intriguing.

Ahhh. The first site that I created 100% on my own. Genuine Love -- a Red Sox blog born in 2004 -- which has gone through countless iterations (and raised a decent amount of cash for me). It's now returning to its roots; we're slowly getting rid of the ads and recently gave it a look -- black and white, vertical rhythm -- which was inspired in no small part by, among others, the great Koi Vinh.

A rainy-day project that has been over a year in the making. Open source is all about scratching itches, and SoxFeeds.com is no different. Desperate for a way to view all my Red Sox/MLB news at once, I created this site, using Drupal, CCK, Views, a touch of jQuery and the incomparable FeedAPI module. Bookmark this one, as I hope to keep building in cool new features as the season progresses. Short on style, but tall on info.