Triumph Owners' MCC Bexley branch

Background

I have built and run this site since early 2001, taking it through several incarnations. At the time of early 2008 the content was structured in stand-alone XML files and it used XSL scripts to transform that into XHTML. This was an improvement on previous versions where content and presentation were combined in individual PHP scripts, but it still required meticulous XML editing to maintain the content.

Adoption of Drupal

In April 2008 a chance meeting with Tim Deeson of Deeson eMedia lead to me consider Drupal as a suitable CMS for the site. I subsequently went about learning Drupal and spent several months converting the site to Drupal 6. In the course of that I developed:

  • a visual theme to mirror the appearance of the legacy site (as a sub-theme of the excellent Zen)
  • a module to provide an Event node type (not to be confused with the Drupal contributed module Event) and automate promotion and demotion of events on the front page
  • a module to provide a threaded guestbook-type Message page without the need to set up structured forums and require contributors to register
  • an admin module to convert the legacy content directly from XML files into Drupal nodes. This included all historical Event, News and Message postings, as well as over 1,000 Images
  • basic integration of the Event and Message modules into Views 2

Recent Work - New Theme

In mid February 2010, developed a new ground-up theme designed in Illustrator and adopting the 960 Grid approach with much enhanced use of dynamic blocks based on Views and Views Carousel. The new theme is still IE6 compliant and uses an IE6 JavaScript PNG transparency workaround.

Recent Work - Image module integration with Filefield_paths

To manage the substantial number of images on the site, I felt it essential to be able to organise image files in separate directories depending on their taxonomy categorisation (year, gallery name etc.). The Filefield_paths module had been enhanced to provide some support for the Image module so that uploaded images could be stored in this way but on further investigation I found that certain key functionality was not working as required. I have written patches for both these modules to bridge the gaps in their mutual integration (for the truly interested, see this drupal.org issue for Filefield_paths and this one for Image.

Adoption of the second of these patches is still pending but the code changes are, by necessity, in place on two live sites.

Site Address

www.bexleytriumph.org or click screenshot for larger version.