3 weeks ago my friend and guinea-pig Jon came to me with complaints about his website being a little out of date. I immediately turned around and started the process of getting his site installed using Drupal so he could maintain it himself because I am busy with work and school, and he is more technical then your average user. I started his site migration from a stock static website with a wordpress blog to a new customized, dynamic Drupal site. As the MySQL database was being created, I went through the pluses with Jon as to why I felt his website should be recreated with a Content Management System.
Here was a short write up of that conversation…
- You are a tech-savvy user that enjoys blogging already. What if I could make it as easy for you to add new show information and sections within the shows page as it is for you to create a blog.
- What if I could make it so any blog that you tagged properly could automatically be added to the front page and only the front pag of your website, so that users will always get current up-to-date content that you provide them.
- I will be able to mimic the Lightbox functionality from your current website’s photo pages, on all your photo pages including shows, and you can add your own photos and they to will use the javascript functionality called lightbox.
- It will give me a chance to get you more involved in your own website and push me to expose my knowledge or lack-there-of Drupal.
I went forward with the redesign, spent a little over 20 hours on the redesign, with Jon talking out the functionality, the look, and testing and troubleshooting the look feel and customized views. What I finally handed off to him was my greatest Drupal creation so far and I am rather proud of the site. I used the Meta theme, and customized it to his liking, and alot of modules to get the look, feel and functionality I was looking for; Please visit the site and take a look at : http://www.jonhoche.com
Feel free to come back and make comments after you look around.
One Geek\'s View On... 
i was just wondering what set of gallery, image and similar modules you’re using for jon’s website.
i’ve looked at gallery2 integration but think that’s too much for me, and i see drawbacks upon updates, and i don’t think integration creates image nodes (where each image is a node) but i’m not sure.
i’ve looked at acidfree but am not sure i really like that approach totally. once you load the full size image if you click, it seems that should return to the thumbnail or the preview, but as i recall it does nothing. this means using the back arrow. also, as i recall it uses filemanager module, and i’m not sure if that’s the best thing, as opposed to using the image module or some other technique. (i’m obviously not sure of anything!) also as i understand it acidfree and lightbox don’t play together. (not sure.)
there’s shazaam but i haven’t played with it.
among the lightbox variations, most don’t work as well as lightbox or the litebox version. (i saw some cool stuff on cssplay and with greybox and the other -box versions, but the clicking right/left half didn’t work usually and it was just not as nice. i’m looking for a way to use the litebox lighter version but to also use image nodes or whatever…meaning each photo should be a node.
anything you’ve learned that you would share would be nice. i really like jon’s site except for the way litebox treats a click on the right half of the last photo. i’d like that to close the lightbox or to cycle to the first photo. perhaps this is an option and i’m unaware of that.
backing out of the galleries seemed a bit cumbersome after using the lightbox, but that’s nobody’s fault and is a testament to how easy to use lightbox is, rather than how difficult his photo gallery is.
thanks for putting this discussion up and for anything you’d share with us all about comparisons among gallery and image options using drupal. i’m thinking whatever i do i may just edit my theme instead of count on a module, but that depends on what i do of course! thanks, blake
Comment by blake — October 8, 2006 @ 6:38 am
Hi Blake sorry for the slow response
Modules I am using to create the shows area of JonHoche.Com are image, image exact, image upload and image gallery.
The lightbox functionality is actually built into the theme I chose to work with to create the site called Meta.
I decided to stick with this way of handling images because it mimiced the way I had previously set up his images using lightbox. I think for anything more then a personal site this answer really isn’t the best solution, it is too heavy and too reliant on prewritten libraries that are rather large.
I am going to leave Jon’s site as is and work on changing my wife’s site soon I think I will try to approach her photo gallery differently.
Thanks for stopping by and please feel free to question, comment and disagree with me I am very passionate about all of this and that doesn’t mean always right 🙂
RobbieTheGeek
Comment by Robbie The Geek — October 19, 2006 @ 11:58 pm