I was poking around the Drupal site, and discovered that Zen had released a new theme - v1.0.  Well, I thought, this is probably an improvement, so I downloaded it and installed it on my test system, which is my development PC using XAMPP.  SHOCK!  They completely changed the philosophy and operation of the theme.  Fortunately, they included the "zen classic" theme, which is what I have been used to, so I had a way to get back to where I was.

The site needs the ability to maintain News and Events on the home page, with detail to expand any item.  I created a temporary version of this using a forum, but the look of the forum for the expanded content was not acceptable.  I reviewed the functionality of the module developed by IBM Internet Technology Group as part of their series,
Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site
 

I am working with a church to build a new web site. Their current site is rather tired looking and needs a real re-do. They hired a web designer to design the new site look and feel. They also agreed that a CMS approach was a good thing to do. We settled on Drupal. Now that they have approved the designer's concept, what does it take to make that design be the web site design of a Drupal based site?

Last night, I trained the core team on how they can directly contribute their content to our new web site. The training went well. Most questions were on the use of the editor, FCKEditor. It has all of the power that they wanted. There are many details that are needed to complete the site. The choice of calendar tools in Drupal is not what I would like. It seems that the future is toward Date rather than Event. I tried to get WebCalendar installed but there are unresolved issues that I can't take time to address right now, so I will go to Date.

I am in the process of setting up my first production Drupal based site. It will be for my church. The basis of choosing Drupal is that it will support the content experts maintaining their content rather than the webmaster having to do this. We want to enable the content experts to be directly able to maintain their respective content. Next week, I am training the team on how to use Drupal to initially enter their content. I will let you know how it goes. There are several content types I need to be able to support in Drupal.

There is a new book released on Drupal: Pro Drupal Development. I have started to read it, and like what I have read so far. It is aimed at developers rather than end users or administrators. It starts right off, after an introductory chapter, on how to create a module. That, to me, is a focus on development.

I am working on using Drupal as a CMS to reduce the maintenance work for a web site. It has great promise. Using it, I can set up a site and configure the look and feel, and the overall site content structure. Then I can turn over the daily maintenance of the site content to the content owners. This lets me concentrate on the structure, and allows me to take advantage of what a CMS can offer, like maintenance of menus so that I can change it once and have it affect all of the site. I looked at a number of CMS before I settled on Drupal.