I have a late winter break this year. My last final was on December 23, and I still have 2 weeks left. I decided to spend my break doing freelance and volunteered web development, as well as looking for a summer internship. I am still working on THiNK Magazine’s Drupal website, which became a much larger project than I expected.

We started in september deciding between WordPress, Joomla, Movable Type and Drupal. I’ve known about Drupal for a while from old hosting clients, but this was the first time I actually worked with it. It isn’t as easy to start using Drupal as they claim it is, and using it for a magazine presents a unique set of challenges. A magazine is focused on strategically placed articles and imagery. Drupal is not inherently good at handling article placement or featuring images. Both require a wide array of modules. Behind the website there also needs to be separation of issues and a special hierarchy of users. Luckily I found an installation profile developed at RIT called “Innovation News.”

I had a lot of hope that Innovation News would make the project easy, but the project grew to be much larger than I expected. I am facing layout problems that I thought would be very simple. I haven’t touched the CSS much yet in order to keep it simple. The other main component we want is a “slider” on top of the front page to showcase the featured articles. This requires some information to be dynamically exported to an xml file, and there really isn’t any module written to do that. There is one that is similar for Drupal 5, but I am using Drupal 6. I have decided to take the module and modify for my needs with Drupal 5, and then try to upgrade it to Drupal 6. If anyone has suggestions please leave it in the comments.

I’ve learned how a team could really help to complete this project. I would love to bounce ideas off of people, and also handle the project in parts. It would be easier to look at the big picture that way. Sometimes I get lost in the details. I don’t have access for a project like this that was supposed to be small. On top of that, I am volunteering my time for it, but it has been fun to learn more about the concepts of a CMS. I’ve jumped right into the fire, what a mess…