centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Web Development
Drupal
CentreSource launches redesigned site for Civic Bank & Trust
Earlier this week we launched a redesigned site for Civic Bank & Trust, a Nashville-based bank that we have been working with since 2007. The new look and feel is very different than the the prior version, originally designed to match their printed materials. The site features a dynamic slideshow to promote their financial products and services, an area to highlight team members, and an overall better organization of the site’s content so that is easy for a visitor find the information they need.
CentreSource launches new site for Mission Discovery
CentreSource recently launched a new site for Mission Discovery, a non-profit faith-based organization in Gallatin, Tenn. Mission Discovery specializes in short-term mission trips, representing a unique opportunity for teens and young adults to volunteer in such activities as building schools in Mexico, teach in Guatemala, or lend a hand in the disaster recovery efforts in Haiti. There are even opportunities closer to home to help inner city school children with their school work. Mission Discovery is all about connecting people with opportunities to grow in their spiritual journey by serving others.
Tools That Make My Job Easier
Bash Aliases
Working on a Mac, I spend a lot of my time in Terminal (the command-line utility). This is where I do all of my interaction with my local databases, the central Subversion repository, and issue various system commands. Some of these commands can get quite long and are time consuming to type out. That’s where aliases come to the rescue!
Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
At CentreSource, we have a motto that “outcomes always outweigh the output.” Through this, we try to focus on meeting the individual goals of our clients, versus focusing on the process of how they get done. One goal we often hear is that our clients would like an easy way to update the website themselves. By using a Content Management System (CMS), we enable our clients to accomplish this — without having to install anything on their computers, or know too much about how websites work.
Over the history of CentreSource, we’ve worked hard to choose the perfect CMS to be able to meet the individual needs of each client and project that comes our way. There was always a balance that had to be struck — it couldn’t be too cookie-cutter, or else we wouldn’t be able to do everything that the client was asking. Conversely, it wouldn’t be cost efficient if we had to custom build a CMS for our clients each time. By focusing on the outcome (the client’s goal of an easy-to-update website), we decided that the best single CMS option was not a single option at all, but instead a “toolbox” approach that would allow us to use the appropriate tool for each unique job.
DrupalCon 2008: Popular Science Magazine Case Study
The folks at pingVision have posted their case study for the Popular Science Magazine website on drupal.org.
I attended this session and left it feeling very inspired. It was amazing to see what this small crew did with such a behemoth of a site. Just the thought of having to migrate a 1.66GB Oracle DB into a Drupal site makes me sweat. All things considered, I felt like this was probably the best session I attended at DrupalCon 2008. It wasn’t the nerdiest, or the geekiest, and it didn’t have lots of slides of code…but for our line of work, it was incredibly valuable. Not only did they go into the “nuts-n-bolts” of how they built the site, they also touched on the project management side, and also managing client expectations with such a large project.
Panels 2 Context Screencast
Jeff Miccollis and Young Hahn with DevelopmentSeed gave an excellent presentation at DrupalCon 2008 titled: Creating Custom Workflows for Drupal Apps: taking advantage of core hooks and context. The primary focus of this session was explaining the various methods of maintaining “context” throughout a Drupal site. In layman’s terms, this simply means a method of determining what content to display, or what actions to take based on where the user is currently located on the site. A simple example given was multi-lingual sites. A site may be in English by default, but if the user switches the site’s language to Spanish, then the there has to be some method in place to remember that this is the language this user has chosen, and we can assume that the user wishes to view the rest of the site in whatever language they have chosen. The language the user selected has become the “context” for the site. Now, any page that the user navigates to will be in Spanish, because the site has been implemented in a such a way as to remember the user’s chosen language.
More DrupalCon Slides!
Addison Berry from Lullabot has posted the slides from his DrupalCon 2008 presentation: Contributing to Drupal: A guide for everyone.
Woot!
John VanDyk - DrupalCon 2008 Triggers and Actions and Hooks, Oh My!
John VanDyk, author of Pro Drupal Development, and longtime Drupal developer/guru, has posted the slides and video of the presentation he gave at DrupalCon on triggers and actions. It was great presentation from one of Drupal’s founding fathers. Though centered around Drupal 6, many of the basic principals can be applied to Drupal 5’s Actions module. There is also word of backporting Triggers to Drupal 5!
If you missed the Boston DrupalCon 2008, don’t miss out on this wonderful session.
Files can be downloaded here…
DrupalCon Boston 2008 - Session One: From Drupal Newbie to Drupal Ninja
Session: From Drupal Newbie to Drupal Ninja
Time: 9:00am (EST) 03/03/2008 Presenter: Chad Williams (hunmonk)
This presentation was targeted primarily at the Drupal newbie, and was mostly a “tips & tricks” session. Here are my notes from the session:
Live from Boston Drupalcon 2008!
Bob, Jared, and I just got to Boston for Drupalcon 2008! All week, we’ll be checking in and giving updates about what we’ve learned. If you’re in town for the convention, send me an email chayner {at} centresource.com and we’ll try to hook up for lunch!
For more information on the conference, check out http://boston2008.drupalcon.org
