Nikoport

Besides launching today a page for a friend of mine, who gives explications of geography, i am working on a big project, which will be hopefully launched in March. It is a quite a big site for environmental community, written completely in Drupal with a big number of modules.

At the moment we are close to start beta testing and there are just several functionalities that are not quite optimized, that i am refining. Besides normal modules, there are some areas where online payment is going to be used, so it will be probably one of the biggest project based on Drupal that i have done untill now, so i am very excited about finishing this one. =O)

A couple of days ago i have put online a new site for “Dino Consult“, that was developed on Drupal. The design is very simplistic, to accompany the visit card that the owner of Dino Consult has. It was also based on the schematic design that was created by the client. Dino Consult is by their description a “consultancy firm for the export of innovative technologies, process comparisons and project management”.

Besides creating a xhtml/css template I have used the following modules: Views, Google Sitemaps, Update Status, TinyMCE (i still argue that it or any other editor should make into the core of the Drupal), PathAuto, Meta Tags, i18n and IMCE.
Basically the Views were used to place together. I still cannot imagine more or less complicated site or even a normal one (like Dino Consult) without Views module, it simply can do so many things for you.

At the moment, in the spare time between projects (a very virtual thing – spare time, i have to say), i am writing 2 new modules for Drupal – one of them is a submodule for using Flash in a advertisement module and the other one is a directory module for Drupal. Both of this modules will be based on the 5th branch of Drupal.

First module was born out of the need for the current project i am doing, when i found out, that Advertisement module has had no support for flash-based ads. While smaller sites are basically using animated gifs (images), the bigger companies are using flash for advertisement. I was told by a couple of different people, that the “big firms” they are or were working for created the biggest the part of the online advertisement in flash. When i was responsible for one of the Fortune 100 sites in Portugal i saw a big percentage of their inner advertisement done in Flash as well. On a personal note, i would add that i do not like flash ads, and prefer the “normal” images – they are lighter and do not appear like a buddy-spam. After finishing this submodule or better “ad type”, i am thinking about submitting the code to the author of the Advertisement module, for his decision of inclusion into the “official package”.

The second module is being born for the other project, since it looks like there is no real directory module for Drupal, which seems to be quite a negative surprise. I am still in the phase of projecting it, but leaving the doubts behind, this module has to be implemented this year, because the website based on drupal, i am going to implement, is going to need it badly.

While the Flash Type submodule is virtually ready and being tested, the Directory module is likely to be finished in the second part of the 2008, mainly because of my newest personal project, which should go live in August this year.

This is the release i have been waiting for quite some time. Drupal 5th version represents some major changes made in this exceptionally fine CMS, though i have to add that such necessary addition as an easy usable image upload module is still missing (argh – tinyMCE is not good enough). Since last major release of Drupal goes back to 2002 (that is 5 years ago), it is something to shake up the things in open source cms community a little bit. I have no doubt, that a new release will bring a big mountain of bugs in the nearest future, but thats life, and such releases are simply necessary, cause any new release has a destiny of producing a lot of small and not so small errors. I just hope that such things as one that has happened to Wordpress last week won’t happened to much times in the next releases of Drupal. =O)

I have become quite a fan of Drupal lately spending some time playing with it, experimenting with modules and even developing a theme or two for learning its template system. The CMS i have considered to be an alternative is Joomla, but as they are still beta testing their newest 1.5 release, and their default templates are a kind of table-based, i have decided to choose Drupal. I am going to play with the final Joomla 1.5 release when its appears, as i still consider Joomla having a lot of potential. Joomla guys are being extremely nice and even publishing a congratulation article to Drupal’s 5th release on their home page – don’t say a thing, but even in the open source community it is not a common way of greeting someone who in some kind of a way is creating a competitive product. My total respect…

I am looking to implement one of my two next projects in Drupal, as it really impresses me much.

Recently i have spent some serious time constructing a test site in Drupal CMS 5 beta2, and i was very positively surprised by the ease of its configuration a standard compliance, that i am definitely going to try constructing my next work in it. I have already made one site in Joomla, and it is a very nice system, but in the sense of standard-compliance it is still far away from Drupal. Though there are several templates on the net which are not table-based, the basis configuration of Joomla to start with (even in the most recent 1.5beta) is still largely based on the tables, when Drupal’s default templates are all standard-compliant div-based designs, which is a very decisive factor for me. Being still the beginner (actually a noob) in various CMS available on the market, i am even considering using Wordpress as a complete solution for some very simple projects.

I loved the ease and the speed of the changes that i made to transform drupal from what seemed to be a very blog-based system into a very well-looking content editing site.

The next thing i am going to do some heavy experiments is a user management, and if its going to be that good as the customization, am definitely going to consider completely switching to Drupal.