My Adventures in Drupal

Hey folks. I'm trying to feel out the type of community we are building here and what the best platforms for communication are in drupal groups. Just wanted to share some of the projects I've been working on, recent triumphs and frustrations, etc... just in case it helps anyone else in the group.

PSX Anime List - (http://psxanimelist.mattsmessyroom.com/drupal-5.7/) (Note: This is my Drupal test bed. View the base url for the current non-Drupal site) This is a fan site for folks that import Japanese games for Sony video game systems. I'm planning to extend this to some other systems like the older Sega and NEC systems, but for now I'm focusing on Sony.

On the Drupal end I've been struggling with recreating some of the functionality of the old site, with an eye on adding new functionality. I set up a content type using CCK fields to hold information about game listings. I'm looking at it like a database of games including a set of information, with each record tagged by appropriate taxonomy terms, (categories or vocabularies or whatever, I find Drupal tends to have it's own unique vocabulary that is not always internally consistent).

I want people to easily and elegantly be able to search out listings within this set of data by things like genre, release date, system, etc... so I used the "Faceted Search" module to include a really elegant taxonomy based filtering system. It took me a little while to figure out how I wanted to approach images but I chose to use imagecache to generate different sized images on the fly, and I made content types for the different kinds of images I'd be dealing with like "box art" or "screen shots". A breakthrough for me was figuring out that if you go to the "Display fields" tab of a content type you can specify the imagecache action or preset or whatever they are called that you'd like to use for teaser or full view.

Another thing II wanted to do was to upload an image and tag it with the game in the site that it is associated with, then have it show up in a gallery alongside the games info when you are viewing the game listing node. I recently found two modules that work in conjunction, Views_Multiblock and Views Argument API. These let me specify a taxonomy category/vocabulary to send as an argument from the node that you are on to a view that you have set up to display items tagged with that taxonomy term. This allowed me to create a single view for "screeshots" for instance, set it to display nodes of type screenshot that include a screenshot as a list of thumbnails that receives an argument from the game listing which is the name of the game. What I get is a nice block of thumbnails including only the images tagged to that game that pages via the "more" link to a nice gallery view (via the "grid view" in the bonus views module) for the view page. It's really slick and I'm super happy with it now that It's finally working the way I wanted. I've made galleries like this for "box art", "screen shots" and "videos" (youtube videos via the "embedded media" module).

I'm making the screen shot and video content type non-published by default so that I can "moderate" them by publishing them myself, and giving authenticated users the ability to post those two content types so they can submit screenshots and videos. I'd like a way to be notified via email when someone submits content that needs to be moderated. I tried out a module called "moderate" but it was pretty lame. I think all it does is hide unpublished nodes from users, who I'm not giving access to that content as it is anyway. I'm still looking for now.

From here I'm considering adding a calendar with future game releases, and I'm trying to figure out what other kinds of cool things I can let my users do. I have a forum set up and a star ratings system for the games installed so that people can write reviews and rate games. I've got to do a lot of testing but I feel like things are moving in a good direction. This is my "test" site for Drupal where I feel like I'm trying a lot of things that I may find useful for other sites that I work on professionally, but this is my personal project where I get to mess around as much as I like.

Note: I have not made any adjustments to the styles for this site and I'm using the default theme, but I'm becoming well versed in styling the "zen" theme pretty much any way necessary for a site. Putting the "skin" on will probably be the last step after I finish what I consider to be the hard part.

I'm glad to field questions or comments from the group.

BTW: I'm Matt. I was able to attend the first VDUG meeting along with Ian. We were the ones from Randolph doing work for Vermont Computing. Sorry we were not able to make it to the second meeting.