Matt Farina - Tech / Faith / Life

Drupal is a great development environment. And, when it comes to creating themes, you don't have to be a php whiz to create them either. There are even efforts to make theming easier with each new release. So, why aren't designers coming to drupal in hordes? Better yet, how do we make drupal more designer friendly?

Answersingenesis.org just released a new, cutting edge, web 2.0 look.

Have you ever architected a church community site? This is a task I am taking on for a new project. A basic architecture for a community site is pretty easy to throw together. Sites like myspace (ugly and bad example but still an example), yahoo360, facebook, and many other give an outline for that. In the church arena mychurch.org is a great example.

But, there are some major differences between these and this project. First, those are for massive amounts of people who are trying to create communities within the greater community. This project is for just a single community. Second, there sites seem to be more about socializing and gossip than working together towards a purpose which a church site would be about. Third, these sites seem to be individual focused rather than community focused.

Mychurch.org and fraternitylive.com are the sites that come the closest to what I am looking for but neither quite fits the bill. Though, they do give a great starting point for an information architecture.

Note: This is for a community driven site and not the main church site. There will be a separate main church site with info about the church, the pastors, the podcast, and all that other stuff.

Here's my first pass at an information architecture:

Internet Explorer has this annoying feature where all objects, including flash, need to be clicked to activate before you can use them. This was brought about because of a law suit where designers ended up down wind having to deal with this annoyance. So, let's theme the 1pixelout flash player in drupals audio module without the click to activate.

When I themed the 1pixelout flash player for the Geeks and God podcast I couldn't find any good documentation on how to theme the player. Since I was under the gun for time I just manually built it into the site and cut the audio module out from displaying the player. This is a hack. So, let me share the right way to go about this which happens to be the easier way.

Drupals audio module is a powerful asset for media and podcasting sites. But, as someone who has used the audio module for a podcast, I've learned that making it do what I want and getting the flash players to look the way I want to is often not obvious. So, over the next couple weeks I am going to blog about some lessons I've learned to hopefully make it easier for others.

Let's start with that situation where you have the audio module installed, you created an audio node with an mp3 file, and your flash player isn't displaying. What you get is a link that says Click to play.

Let's face it. Over the last decade the Internet has become the single greatest communications channel to reach people, especially the younger generations. In the past few years the Internet has grown from a communications channel to a place with full on communities. This makes the Internet one of the greatest places for the church to get involved in.

It happens to every drupal admin. You have your site up and running smoothly. But now you have have to make a change to your site. One that is best done in maintenance mode. Maybe your updating your drupal install to a new version. Maybe your installing some new module. Maybe your moving your site from one server to another. Or any number of other things. Your ready to switch to maintenance mode but you don't want that default look. You want something custom that matches the rest of your site. Here's what you can do.

Welcome Geeks and God listeners. On this past episode of the Geeks and God podcast, Bob and I said we would start blogging about drupal, the popular open source content management system, and design and development in general. As we said on the podcast, these design and development posts will be about once a week. To help with finding and sorting these posts on MattFarina.com there are new design and development categories. So are you ready to dive into something that combines design, development, and drupal?

Note: You can find Bob blogging about this at mustardseedmedia.com/blog.