Posted by Anonymous on August 22, 2007 at 7:49am
Hi everyone,
Just thought I would let you know about an event I participated in last weekend called Full Code Press, where an Australian and NZ team built a site in 24 hours for 2 charities.
I was on the Aussie team, and we used Drupal as our CMS. We didn't win, but it was a great experience.
I have posted some of my thoughts here.
It wasn't all positive with Drupal from a front-end perspective (I was the XHTML/CSS guy), mainly because of our limited knowledge of it and the time frame. However, I still think Drupal is a great platform and I learned a lot more about it. If I had my time over again, I would still have used it but would have altered our methodology and approach somewhat.
Comments
Brave
Hi David,
Very interesting. You're brave using Drupal for a time-limited challenge like this with limited knowledge. It's the ideal tool but it sure helps knowing something about the insides. Not the sort of thing you can necessarily pick up overnight. I presume the others in your team knew something about Drupal beforehand? Did you prepare a version with all the sorts of modules likely to be needed preconfigured before the event started?
--
Mark Matuschka
Glo Digital
A bit more explantion
I knew a little about Drupal from a front-end perspective ie how themes work and how to customise them to a certain extent. We also had a developer who had Drupal knowledge and another PHP guy who picked it up very quickly. However, applying the design really tested us.
My issue was mainly that I was constantly overriding inherited CSS, and this proved time consuming and frustrating for me. In hindsight, we really should have built from scratch rather than trying to adapt an existing theme to suit our needs - if anyone has links on this sort of thing I am eager to learn more.
Having said that, I was impressed with the functionality we managed to build in, thanks to Drupal, and what we achieved in 24 hours.
David McDonald
Web Designer
http://www.davidmcdonald.org
When starting with an
When starting with an existing theme to build a new site's theme. I always try to take a minimalistic approach. i.e. I ask 'what can I remove?' before asking, 'what do I need to add?'
On justcauseit.com, which has just gone into beta launch, I started with zen theme, added some garland theme for drupal core bits like tables fieldset tabs default lists and forms, then spent a number of hours removing CSS that was duplicate or specific to those themes and not reusable in the custom theme.
Initially I just commented out large chunks of css files, later I deleted those chunks entirely, once I was sure that I hadn't removed too much.
This way, I find I am able to inherit a good default set of styles for generic theme-able objects, and the custom CSS is only for the layout, exceptions to default styles and edge cases. It also saves on file sizes, bandwidth and loading times -- overriding should be restricted to exceptions and edge cases.
If you are coming from a background in which you are used to writing all the markup, dropping in 'php print $some_var' or other placeholders and then styling your markup, then you might find it easier to start from scratch. My first drupal and joomla themes were done this way.
Now that I have more experience with drupal, I've learned that it's easier in the long run to learn drupal's core theming techniques and markup and take advantage of them -- they're usually very good. And when they are not good enough, well that's what drupal's theme() function is for, you override them in template.php.
Bevan/
Really impressive
Hi Bevan,
I don't mean to barge in on this discussion, but I just wanted to say great job on the justcauseit.com site! And thanks for the helpful info on theming strategy. I'm always looking for excellent Drupal examples to show to clients, and this one will be added to the list.
Good Info
Thanks Bevan. It's always good to see how other people approach this.
I am used to writing all the markup, and having full control of the XHTML/CSS. However, your suggestion to learn about Drupal's core theming techniques is something I plan to work on.
David McDonald
Web Designer
http://www.davidmcdonald.org
On listening to your
On listening to your interview in the recent lullabot drupal podcast, It occurred to me a clean way of clearing out all of drupal's default CSS. In _phptemplate_variables() you could selectively remove specific css stylesheets, or all of them.
Bevan/
I have a post in the
I have a post in the handbook to get around the default style sheets.
http://drupal.org/node/155400
I find it amazing that you did the site in 24 hours. It took me about 6 months to get my head around the theming layer and that's only because I didn't know php at first. Once your familiar with it, you can pull off amazing designs.
Keep it up Dave!
Thanks
Thanks for the tips everyone, much appreciated.
Myself and some of the FCP team have just done an interview on Lullabot as well.
David McDonald
Web Designer
http://www.davidmcdonald.org