Things We Do in Drupal

Back in the day, Drupal was for us a platform of necessity. There was a lot to dislike about it: no object architecture to speak of, patchy module support, enormous amounts of spaghetti sprawling through the hooks-based function names, a lot of messy UI, and a deep knowledge of magic words needed to theme an element or alter a behavior.  And on the design side, there was this seemingly deep-set predilection towards boxy pages.

Then we really started using it.  Then Drupal 6 dropped.  Now, D6 is our development platform of choice, and our default platform for many kinds of projects.  Here are a few types that range beyond the typical “site with managed content” category.

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Build what you need, not what you want

I met a writer the other night who has spent months freelancing for a prominent national magazine.  The magazine had enjoyed a reasonably popular web audience, including a community of frequent posters to its bulletin board.  The community was mostly middle-aged, middle-American women who used the magazine’s online space to chat and bring up issues that were loosely related to the magazine’s content.

It was an open question how best to take advantage of this community to benefit the magazine.  But instead of starting with obvious questions — Who are these users? What do they care about?  How can we increase their enthusiasm for our brand? — someone high up in the magazine’s interactive food chain had a classic technological panic. Read the rest of this entry »