Drupal sites

A few days ago, the Trinidad Guardian's Main Stage was launched.

Without a doubt, the website runs on the very powerful cutting edge content management system, Drupal 6.

The design was done in-house at The Guardian (provided as a template) and some features used are the jQuery powered photo galleries.

A gallery is considered a "node" which can contain multiple images, all of which are seamlessly uploaded through the web interface of the same website.

The South West Regional Health Authority is now using Drupal.

Some of the requirements were an easy-to-use content management system where users of the SWRHA can easily update the pages themselves and add/edit new content. The users skills would range from no technical experience to minimal XHTML knowledge.

The Trinidad and Tobago Linux Users Group (TTLUG) is now using Drupal. Well seeing that I promised to have a website up and running after becoming President of the TTLUG, this was the least I could do on my own company's time.
It took me about 8 straight hours to set everything up from scratch. This 8 hours involved transferring nameservers, setting up hosting account, setting up Drupal, installing some modules, picking a theme, troubleshooting OpenID and creating some content to get things going....oh yeah somewhere in between I watched an episode of Scrubs, opps my bad.

The Trinidad Guardian, one of 3 popular newspapers in Trinidad, re-launched their website on New Years Day 2009 using Drupal. The site has a simplistic design done by their in-house graphics designer Ms. Maxie Navarro. The Drupal developer behind it, Shivan Jaikaran, would like to share his techniques as a tech case study.

The Homepage

The homepage has a different look from every other page on the website. This was done using a custom page-front.tpl.php and Panels. The main sections of the website (the same as their print edition) are the main menus (or the primary links). The colours corresponding to the menus correlate to the print editions as well. The colours (on hover and active) were done using simple CSS.

The Internet Editors needed to decide which articles go exactly where in the centre column of the homepage. For this, Nodequeues were used extensively.

Presto Car Rental Ltd designed and developed using Drupal by yours truly...I did it using Drupal version 5.0 with a customized theme template. Scope it out.