drupal talks

today i talked with jason about the design and functionality of our website upgrade.

it's going to be a major improvement, but also, a lot of work. pretty much the whole website is going to be retooled while we move up from Drupal version 4.7 to Drupal version 5.0.

Once completed, it will be a lot easier to manage this project and allow everyone to participate more. it will also create a solid step toward the Collaboration Foundation, which is exciting.

uploading videos, photos, etc. will be much more powerful, as will the ability to join and organize groups. We will also be displaying project info on your profiles, so that they will be more functional tools for keeping up with the production. There are also a couple of fundamental changes designed to open this project up even more, while also keeping track of participation.

I've been researching various modules, and spending some time going through the Drupal forums. overall, i must say that i'm pretty happy that i chose Drupal as our CMS platform. choosing the technical platform for this project was a big decision; the Drupal community is proving to be very active and very forward thinking, and i'm excited about the potential of collaborating with the community as this project moves forward.

spending the last 8 months with a drupal site, i've seen how people use our site, or at least how they try to use it. this has informed alot of the changes we will be making to the site.

So, for the next week or two I will be designing the various sections of the site in photoshop while making more detailed lists of functionality. Then the plan is to use a webservice called psd2html.com to convert the photoshop files into a web theme that can be applied to the Drupal site. After that, we will start plugging in modules and migrating our Data tables. A lot of the data will be ported into new Drupal content types; for instance, the 'perfect moments' will become content that we can comment on and favorite. Same with video and photos.

it's going to be insane and really cool. having been through some webdesign, i have a better understanding of the process, so the steps are a little less daunting. but it's still another mountain to climb.

step by step,

n