Lesson 16: Drupaldojo.com Design

Hey, folks. This is Squidster, maintenance chap - I'll be giving a quick once-over as to how I built the new drupaldojo.com theme and how the lessons are maintained. I'll also be talking about where I want the theme to go from here, a little background into the mistakes I made, the modules we've harassed into service for the lesson system, and the new functionality yet to come.

Lesson null: Site launch!

Note: This info is out of date; please check out the design and construction of drupaldojo.com lesson for the latest details about the site itself.

On Saturday, February 17th, 2007, drupaldojo.com became self-aware!

We finally have a place to collect the screencasts and content from each lesson so that you'll be able to quickly find the current events, browse previous screencasts and look up references. Running off a modified Zen theme, it took about three nights of effort to complete. User accounts are currently disabled, but anonymous posting is encouraged, especially in terms of submitting links to the Resources list.

A breakdown of the site is as follows, in case anyone was curious as to its construction.

Modules used:

User side:

• CCK: Used to make six custom "create content" pages for all the content types sitewide.
• Taxonomy: Sorts collections of things into smaller collections of things.
• Image: For generation of thumbnails, handling of images, etc.
• Node Relativity: To establish parent-child relationships between type Lessons and type Feedback. Far superior to the book module. Very handy.
• Pathauto: For making clean urls quickly.
• Views: The key to all directory-style listings on the site. The 'View Feedback' section is also views-based, with an Argument that selects all child nodes of the current node id.
• CountDownTimer: To display the countdown to upcoming lessons.