For the Summer newsletter:
As Drupal matures, so do the sites that it powers. The following are but a small sampling of sites that have been recently built or re-launched with Drupal. Each of these case studies, published since this spring, are well worth reading, to see how other developers do their magic, and to see a tiny bit of what Drupal is possible of doing.
Caribbean Resumes - Job Opportunities and Careers in the Caribbean
Caribbean Resumes just launched - It's is a little monster.com that is geared towards providing a job portal for all the recruitment, career advice and hiring needs for Caribbean residents. The following details how I built the site, including the history, overall design approach, what modules were used, and more. Read more.
Art Institute of Chicago's first brush with Drupal
The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) is one of the world's premier art museums, best-known for its collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and American paintings. In addition to housing famous paintings such as Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles and Grant Wood's American Gothic, the Museum also has world-class collections of photography, arms and armor, ceramic figures, portrait sculptures, miniatures, and galleries of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts, including the mummy of Paankhenamun. Read more.
The Vintage Aviator - Build Story
Last week, I released thevintageaviator.co.nz. It was probably one of the most challenging Drupal sites I've ever done, but also the best so far. It's a presentation of a local WW1 Warplane workshop, containing build stories, reference material, and thousands of great images of plane reproductions and archive materials. The build story is a long one, mostly because the requirements shifted along the way quite a bit. This story is targeted at current Drupal site developers who are interested in the tools and techniques used. Mostly to head off the "so how did you do that?" questions we get whenever we do a write-up :-) However among the interesting thing for developers and designers will be the complex layered look, the way this layout was optimized to scale to all screen sizes, and the surgery I did to Drupal to make this all happen. Initial feedback we've received so far has been overwhelmingly positive (save some justified grumbles about the page weight) and I'd like to share this case study. Read more.
Sparkle*Shelf - Beauty & Style Community
We have just launched the Beta release of Sparkle*Shelf (http://sparkleshelf.com), a site that provides beauty enthusiasts with the latest information and tutorials on fashion, hair and makeup. We currently host fifteen regular feature writers, who contribute a total of 3-5 articles a day. Sparkle*Shelf is also a place for members to connect with other like-minded members. There are basic social networking features as well as a number of beauty related applications/games, such as polls, quizzes and "smack-downs". Read more.
Eureka! Science News just launched!
Eureka! Science News just launched – it is a site dedicated to provide the very latest science news, but with a special twist – it is entirely automated! There is no human editor behind it - it finds relationships between news stories from all major science sites and regroups, categorizes, ranks, tags, finds related press releases and publishes them directly on the site. The result is an efficient overview of everything happening in science, right when it happens. The following details how we built the site. Read more.
Spirit Library - complex panels 2/views based drupal site
Spirit Library is library of spiritual messages and information. It contains thousands of articles/messages from spiritual speakers and authors which are filterable and sortable in different ways. The site extensively uses the excellent Panels 2 modules alongside Views. This is the third incarnation of the site, and the one that finally gets very close to where we wanted to be with it. The first version was launched 18 months ago as a Plone site, as that was the CMS i had most experience with, but after a while it became too restrictive and we started looking in Drupals direction. For the second version we migrated the site from Plone, and the change coincided with a large jump in traffic and at the same time gave the vps it was hosted on more room as it used less server resources (especially memory). Read more.
SonyBMG Launches MyPlay on Drupal
Myplay.com is a redesign and re-branding of Sony's Musicbox site which showcases SonyBMG's artists, providing free access to their videos, music and photos. Users can create lists of their favorite artists as well as review their music and embed widgets of their favorite artist's content into other sites. Sony Musicbox was originally implemented by the Lullabots who provided the base framework for this redesign. Thanks to their diligence and teaching as well as excellent tools provided by Earl Miles (Panels 2, Views and Nodequeue), three people (Suzi Arnold, Jerad Bitner and David Burns) were able to accomplish this task in just over a month. This case study documents how the site is put together, and provides implementation details on how we've combined numerous important contributed modules to build a "next generation" Drupal site. Read more.
Popular Science Magazine (PopSci.com) Case Study
Following up on the Popular Science Case Study presented at DrupalCon Boston 2008 by Kevin Bridges (cyberswat), Laura Scott and others at pingVision, along with Megan Miller and John Mahoney of PopSci.com, here is a written case study on the development approaches for PopSci.com. Read more.