Hi guys,
It was great to meet some of you this past Thursday at the meetup.
As I said there, I am currently working with a small indie games studio, and one of the things we need/want to do is to take the existing site we have and migrate it from the current Joomla 'thing' that was built by me with a half-baked knowledge of Joomla based on a site/theme I'd initially built for the company with hand-crafted PHP/HTML and move it to something that has the power and flexibility that Drupal seems to afford (and hopefully avoid to many pitfalls in the process).
I've been digging into Drupal, having not had much exposure to it in the past (basically, I knew it existed and that was it) and have been trying to map the knowledge I've gained around Joomla and how to do things there into this new domain.
Sadly, what I've been finding is the typical '50 ways to skin the cat' problem that tends to occur in OSS, with no real guidance on how/why skinning the cat in a certain way might be better or worse for my particular needs and no real clear way to choose between the different methods.
After the meeting, I was talking with two of the folks who were organizers (and my apologies for not remembering your names!) and they suggested posting here, and suggesting using my site as a case-study over 1 (or more?) user group meetings on showing how to take an existing site/theme and rebuild it in Drupal.
If that idea has merit and support of more people, I'd be greatful and if not, well I will still keep attending and learning and will eventually pick my way through the minefield :)
The site as it exists now is http://aethericworlds.com and ideally, I would want to keep the same 'look' and at a minimum the same basic functionality (ie, the rotating carousel on the front page, the accordions on a few of the pages, etc) while doing it better and eventually providing new and more powerful features for the community the company hopes to build.
Comments
Case study & Slack
I certainly hope that the group gets involved in providing guidance, as we were all newbies once, right?
In that vein, I would like to propose to the Powers That Be of SeaDUG that we set up a free Slack site to facilitate discussion of this and other technical topics. I am involved in two other DUGs, one in Bellingham and one in my former home of Salt Lake City, and both DUGs are successfully using Slack to facilitate discussions (my first experience with Slack was with the Utah group.)
I assume that at least some of you are using Slack in your work environment and hopefully would have some good things to say about it. I'd like to emphasize that Slack would not replace GDO for organizational discussions, but would provide a better platform for technical discussions.
My $0.02.
Slack
A Slack site sounds good to me. Warren, would you be in charge of setting that up?