Drupalcon Boston 2008 - blog

welovebeauty.com

Dig the Pixels — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:47:07 +0000

We Love Beauty is a fashion focused blog and online community. Conceived and fed content by the Thread Group of Santa Monica, CA and developed and maintained by Dig the Pixels, a small, Chicago based, open source agency. By using Drupal the site was built within two months and on a very, very small budget. Site maintenance and daily content is handled by two people on a part time basis. The community has grown to over 2500 active users from all over the world and currently handles an average of about 1600 uniques a day. While welovebeauty.com does not have cutting edge features, its a great example of small team with a limited budget being able to create an online community and share their passions with the world. An upgrade to Drupal 6 is planned in a few months and will include many new social features

RedBlueAmerica

Laura — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:08:11 +0000

RedBlueAmerica is a news-and-debate website we designed and developed for The E. W. Scripps Company. From the press release:

The site will serve as an ongoing public forum for a full array of user- generated content, including blogs, personal profiles, videos and more. While focusing at the outset on the 2008 election campaigns, RedBlueAmerica intends to provide the public with an open forum for a wide range of cultural and political views long after the votes have been counted….

With some extensive use of CCK combined with some fancy theming, we developed a site where a neutral article can be displayed along with two opinionated articles — representing the “red” and “blue” political perspectives — that address the same topic. Also added are blogs, polls, a custom poll section called “Truth or Not?” and some less obvious features, such as private messaging.

The traffic projections were such that we had to anticipate and prepare for some fairly robust traffic and posting activity on the site, so we spec’d out and configured an enterprise-level multi-server hosting setup. We did some additional benchmarking and performance tuning to bring the site performance up.

The not-quite-standard page layout, and targeted Doubleclick advertising placement requirements, led to some interesting challenges in theming, including separating the comments (labeled “thoughts” on the site) from the nodes (aka “posts” for readers not familiar with Drupal), which ordinarily would load in tandem, so as to pull them up in separate containers on the page. (We could only blame ourselves for any interesting challenges due to the design, since we did the design ourselves.) Also fun was coding up the custom voting widget on the main topics, which involved some custom image mapping tied in with the voting API, with some jQuery goodness thrown in for good measure.

JustCauseIt.com

Gregory Heller — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:07:13 +0000

JustCauseIt.com is the website for the upcoming print magazine, JUST CAUSE. The website provides editorial content from the magazine and expanded coverage on topics covered in the magazine including directories of organizations, calendars of related events and interactive blogging for individuals, organizations and corporate CSR. This vibrant social network allows many voices to be heard, and facilitates civic engagement on a local level – while still linking people across the country around common causes.

The initial version of the site was built in approximately 3 months with a cross functional team including a Project Manager, Lead Engineer, Theme Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer, Information Architect, Visual Designer and Application Specialist. The client was closely involved in the process from its inception and continues to be as new features are deployed on an iterative basis.

The site makes significant use of CCK, Views and Panels, as well as Organic Groups and a number of other contributed modules.

SolveClimate.com

Gregory Heller — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 01:47:38 +0000

SolveClimate.com is news and information site focusing on climate change related news. Blog entries are added to the site and related to other content along 3 axis: politicians and candidates, constituency groups and major solutions to climate change. The goal of the site is to show that there is common cause amongst disparate groups of Americans for progress on major climate change solutions.

To achieve the site’s mission, a CivicActions team consisting of project manager, information architect, lead engineer, theme engineer and application specialist worked with the client and a third party designer using Drupal and contributed modules to develop a visually appealing and well functioning site.

The site makes significant use of CCK, Views and Panels, as well as Node Auto Term and other taxonomy based features to pull together content consisting of blog entries, profiles, nodes describing solutions as well as candidates policy positions on those solutions and a glossary around the three axis mentioned above. Users can sign-up for the site and subscribe to email updates based on categories (via the subscriptions module, or simply subscribe to RSS feeds.

We are also using a variety of techniques maintain site responsiveness during periods of high volume as a result of social bookmarking sites like Digg.

www.morrisfurniture.biz

martin_johnstone — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:00:11 +0000

This website is a showcase of the quality furniture manufactured by the Morris Furniture company, a leading brand in the UK home furniture market.

As my first serious venture into Drupal the learning curve was steep but I am very impressed with the power, flexibility and standards compliant code that Drupal can support. As a commercial website SEO is a key requirement of the CMS I used and I am pleased to say that the site has already been ranked by Google for a number of key words and has only been live since the end of January. I look forward to watching it climb up the rankings in the following months.

Some key features:

Browse furniture by range name
Browse furniture by type
Browse furniture by finish
Search for local stockists
Download latest brochures
‘Lightbox’ integration allowing large pictures of products to be seen
Blog to allow dialog with customers
‘Showcase’ facility to allow customers to upload pictures of their furniture at home (live end Feb)
Secure area for furniture stores to download images/press releases etc

Akagumo

dsp1 — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:34:30 +0000

Akagumo is a english and japanese multi-language site. The site offers free open registration. Users can create blogs, ask questions in the forums, post videos and view the photo gallery.