While the summer is coming to an end the last of the VvAA summer campaigns are being launched. Within the span of a mere 2 weeks we've deployed this site designed by CoR. The site consists of a lot of custom styling. Especially in the various modal boxes. Although the amount of different pages is limited it's been a bit of a challenge to both grant the editors the maintainability they need and have all this custom styling within the site.
Thanks to this tweet by webchick, I enrolled for a Drupal Association membership.
I just finished the update to Drupal 7 for this website. Well, finished, it's a work in progress. Let's say I struggled my way to were the site's now. And it's been a bumpy road. I've played a bit with the betas, the release candidates and the first stable release. But this upgrade is the first truly in depth experience I've had with D7. My impression? The user experience is a lot smoother than it was in previous incarnations of my favorite CMS. However, there is a lot of work to be done still. And the upgrade path is far from smooth.
Sometimes, having an easy to use CMS like Drupal or Joomla is just one more excuse to keep on tweaking. Just now I added a related nodes block to the article and project pages. Let's say I write an article like this and I tag it drupal. A couple other articles on the same topic are shown in a block in the right column. Hard to do? I don't think so! Just use the views module an some view arguments, like so.
Discussions on Drupal site optimisation are usually technical discussions. But many a time they boil down to philosophical discussions. Search engine optimisation (SEO) and performance tweaks aren't necessarily good for the manageability of your site or for your potential visitors. I ran across a couple of these dilemmas in recent days while trying to optimise my own site.
Code Culture has a brand-spanking new layout. My wonderful friends Leon and Rob from WAT Ontwerpers have concocted a colourful corporate identity, logo, and website design. The drupal theme for this website, I built myself. Though this is still a work in progress (and it probably will be a work in progress for the remainder of it's life), many of the elements of the new design are in place. Let me point out some highlights:
My coworkers at Tressis and me have created another green site. The website's layout is mainly blue, but the client is green at heart. E-Connection is a company that starts projects in sustainable energy, specifically wind energy. You could say they are a typically Dutch company, since they deal in wind mills. In their own words:
Sinds een maandje of twee is de site Hier mag het wel in de lucht. Het project is een initiatief van Tressis. De site is een zoekgids voor horecageledenheden waar je (legaal) mag roken. Als een café een verwarmd terras of aparte rookruimte heeft komt ie in aanmerking voor opname in de gids. Zo kunnen rokers en niet-rokers makkelijk een gezamenlijke avond buiten de deur plannen. Deze weken wordt er ook gestemd voor de Revu Rookpluim.
De nieuwe website van de Nederlandse Wind Energie Associate (NWEA) is vandaag gepresenteerd. De vernieuwde website heeft een volledig opgefrist design en draait op Drupal. Met deze overstap naar het drupal cms is er een fatsoenlijk nieuw datamodel geïntroduceerd en is er een ledenlogin, met afgeschermde ledensectie, een nieuwsbrief en archief. Bovendien is alles geïndexeerd in een zoekfunctie en geoptimaliseerd voor search engines.