Posted by jggarley on November 9, 2011 at 8:15pm
Hello everyone. I'm a final year IT major and for my senior design I have decided to redesign a non-profit organization Web site using Drupal. My background is in .Net Framework but I have been playing with Drupal and I have a developed lot of interests. The non-profit organization is a chapter based organization, which has 1-3 chapters in every state and some parts of Africa, Europe and Canada. My academic adviser has approved the project BUT said that I will have to develop two custom modules. I have never develop any module before. Any suggestions/ideas will highly be appreciated.
Comments
You can start from here
You can start from here http://drupal.org/documentation/develop
Definitely so. I started
Definitely so. I started going through the documentation already again thanks for your reply
Forms
I'm not a module developer but I think a good start might be to create a custom Form module http://groups.drupal.org/node/14682
Sure you could use Webform but what's the fun in that? Plus, if you have any crazy form validation you'll need to create a custom module. Check out this article by Lullabot (for Drupal 5-6) http://www.lullabot.com/articles/modifying-forms-drupal-5-and-6
http://www.webbfx.net/
Thanks for your suggestions.
Thanks for your suggestions. I will look into that..
Another approach
I would say the first thing would be to plan your site and then flesh out what needs are met by current modules and create custom modules to fill the gaps. Creating something for emerging technologies would be good. Maybe some kind of social media dashboard or a back end custom module to accept data from a third party and put it into Drupal.
Regarding the site needing to have chapters, Organic Groups would be a great place to start. There are even a few distros already for this kind of site and you may want to start with Drupal Commons. It will give you a lot of your need out of the box and let you spend more of your time focusing on the custom modules that you need to develop for support.
There are also tons of sites out there on module development as well as books. All have at least something to offer.
James
--James
Thanks James. I totally
Thanks James. I totally agreed with you regarding planning the site first and OG will definitely take care of chapters, which I can do.
I like the idea about some kind of social media dashboard or a back end custom module to accept data from a third party and put it into Drupal. Also, the site will be accepting online donation via PayPal and this where that third party module comes in...Again thanks for suggestions.
You just mentioned dabbling
You just mentioned dabbling in .NET so in case you haven't picked up on PHP yet, I highly recommend getting comfortable writing up some logic and database queries outside of Drupal to get you comfortable with the language...I personally found that to be massively useful before getting dirty with module development because it helps detract fear from some of the ominously tedious hooks and, every now and then, lack of documentation.
Also, Drupal 7 has not really reached a pinnacle of good performance yet-and many others in the community have openly said this-so your best bet may be to just use D6 if the church has heavy traffic.
Good luck!
We're currently developing a
We're currently developing a CRM for Drupal and you could try and work on one of the sub-modules. This one for example: http://drupal.org/node/1261784#comment-5081484
Also, you've posted in the church group but I don't know how much church stuff is relevant to your website. If it is, I have designs and ideas for a Prayer Wall module that will make extensive use of javascript I think. Interested in hearing more about that?
We're on IRC on the channel #drupal-crm if you want to chat further.