Posted by jonathanmd on February 6, 2012 at 10:42pm
I wanted to create a post so that we could gather topic ideas for the February meetup. This is that post. :)
Feel free to post your ideas and whether you're interested in presenting or just interested in the topic. As you see people adding their ideas, feel free to vote them up or down.
Comments
Site breakdown
I can give the group a look at how I went about building my latest site that launched, http://goo.gl/yLa02
Building this site was a lot of fun, and I'd like to share some of the process I took to build it with the rest of the community.
I would love to see your presentation
Hey Jonathan,
Great looking site. Did you design this site as well? Very impressive all the way around.
Anyway, I'd thought I'd throw my 2 cents. I'd love to see how you did it..
Kurt
Nope
No, I didn't do the design, but it was designed at our company (Digitaria) primarily by a designer named Grayden Poper.
http://www.graydenpoper.com/
Did you work on the LRA
Did you work on the LRA Crisis Tracker at all? I know this is a drupal group, but I'd love to hear how the Flash/Actionscript developers created this amazing web app.
Kurt
Yes
Yes, I was one of the developers (along with our CTO, Chuck Philips) working on the Drupal side of the site, but I didn't do any of the Flash / Actionscript development. I worked closely with flash developer so that we could create a smooth interface. The map tiles were created using TileMill. The flash map was created using the Modest Maps API. There's a handful of callbacks from flash out to javascript that do things like pop open models and trigger events like the news ticker starting or the count up of events below the map on page load.
I gave a talk on the site back in november and spoke at SandCamp a couple weeks ago about how to make maps using TileMill. Did you catch any of those?
Sigh, I found about San Diego
Sigh, I found about San Diego DUG a week after Sandcamp. Does Digitaria use Drupal for most of its clients' sites?
Kurt
Yes
We're agnostic when it comes to CMS platforms, but the large majority of sites we develop are done in Drupal. We sell solutions rather than technology, it just so happens to be that more often than not that solution involves Drupal, mostly because our developers love the flexibility and framework Drupal provides.
Perhaps you can talk about
Perhaps you can talk about some of the flexibility that Drupal provides and what makes Drupal's framework so great? That would be awesome.
There's no need to wait
There's no need to wait until the group to learn about why Drupal is so great. Its been covered fairly well, probably better than I could, elsewhere on the internet.
http://drupal.org/drupal-7-released
http://drupal.org/getting-started/before/overview
http://drupal.org/node/1033340#comment-3973978
http://www.aimadvantage.com/content/why-choose-drupal-content-management...
I'm sure there's more, but that's what I found with a quick search on the internet.
Taking a tangent
Jonathan, looking forward to hearing about the site. As a tangent to the previous comment, I think it would be real informative to hear about just one or two aspects of the site where you really extended "standard" drupal framework elements like entities, or conversly, any areas where drupal fell short and you had to use other technologies. More of a focused talk rather than a general site overview. (As a side note: is Digitaria using a css framework like sass/compass for theme dev?)
No CSS Framework
The site isn't using a CSS framework. The CSS and Theme are completely from scratch. Some of our sites use LESS css though, http://drupal.org/project/less
I like you're idea of getting into the non-standard or difficult areas of the site rather than the more common parts that are using an off-the-shelf setup. One of the most complex parts of the site was the guitar filter / sort section http://goo.gl/3elVo That's a complex integration of multiple views
Another complex part of the site are the guitar detail pages. That's a mashup of a lot of data, some from the node, some from node references, and some from taxonomies, so that there are a lot of dynamic blocks that are displayed depending on if that node has content.
Cool
Sounds great. Handling taxonomy/context/reference is really at the crux of cms development.