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.

Flash front end with CMS

We’ve developed two sites where the client needed pervasive animated elements that required us to build in Flash.  We still wanted to give the client content management capabilities, however, so we resolved to do it with Drupal.  Our Flash developer, who is awesome, built his piece around an assumed XML data source, and provided us with a static XML sample.

We modeled the data as Drupal “books”: each book is a site section, and each section contains pages and other nodes as needed.  CCK and its closest friends (Filefield, ImageAPI/cache) are sufficient to fill out the core modules for this.  The we wrote a custom module that iteratively goes through each book and uses the structured node content to fill out an XML template.  The system handles image attachments and Flash video references with aplomb.

Our theme consists of a quick modification to Garland that serves up the Flash file on a clean, white background if the home page is requested, and the typical Garland page rendering otherwise.  This lets Garland show the structured content and admin pages to authorized users, while public users only see the Flash.

• http://mesaglobal.com/
• http://uniworldgroup.com/

News aggregation and volunteerism portal

The three founders at Fractor, no intellectual slouches, won themselves a MacArthur grant for their novel idea: a way for users to look at top news, and for each story see a list of related opportunities for volunteerism.  Facts plus acts equals Fractor.

We designed and built the identity, design, and site with them.  The site is in semi-private beta now.

The theme consists of typical Drupal-rendered pages, but also of a persistent “news finder” layer, a jQuery-run news browser application that shows by default on the home page and stands at the ready on other public pages.  In this layer, you can easily browse through thousands of news items by category and see the top volunteer act related to each one.  If you click on one of the news items, you’ll see a detail view that shows a longer list of related acts.  All of this happens with a good bit of Ajax, so that the user experience is of an application that lives in a separate layer over the rest of the site.  Since it’s aggregated news and constantly updated, we had no SEO worries with supplying so much content through Ajax.  Fun stuff.

• http://demo.fractor.org/

Rapid prototyping

As we’ve said before, Drupal’s flexibility actually allows you to prototype a site before you need to commit to much in earnest.  It also allows you to fill out content without making huge commitments to content structures — or the site structure, for that matter.

One of our clients came to us in January with a need to get a prototype up for an international media conference — in February.  The idea behind the site is to serve as a support and networking platform for independent citizen journalists.  They can store and share footage, craft their projects online, and learn from seasoned professionals.  The client didn’t have the whole site structure or functionality in place; indeed, they wanted to use feedback from the conference attendees to help determine the course of development.

So we took a month to prototype a fairly robust site that allows users to create profiles, upload footage, and contribute footage to other users’ projects.  We’ve also got a second set of professional or “faculty” users who can create instructional blog posts and upload footage and files.  We did this by making three important decisions:

1. Write a minimum of custom code, relying instead on the most rock-solid modules in the community.
2. De-emphasize theming, which can eat up a lot of time without providing much benefit in the prototyping phase.
3. Take advantage of a third-party media delivery network (Kaltura) with a well-written Drupal module already available.

http://mojo.helen-marie.com/

Here’s a rundown of the projects this year, starting with the two where we played a significant role.  These are all available on Black Public Media.

Virtual Letter to the President

We’ve seen a lot of open letters get published since the campaign gained steam, and especially after Election Day — from Alice Walker and Iraq War veterans, among a zillion others.  The idea of this letter is to be a living document, a compendium of individual voices that can serve as a creative channel of communication to the administration.  The principal producer is the amazing Anthony Marshall of Current.tv and Lyricist Lounge fame.  We had a great time developing a prototype for the conference, and are meeting with him and NBPC this week to plan the rest of the project.  Due to launch before Inauguration.  We’ll post when it goes up.

Fueling Voices

A WordPress platform that uses open-source and community-moderated content to track the national conversation on fuel, energy, and the U.S.’s oil problem.  Available as a prototype at fuelvoices.com.  This team was headed by Andrea Lewis, who was fantastic to work with.  We developed the design and WordPress implementation, and handled the nitty gritty of DNS and server configuration.  This, as with so many of our projects, is living in the happy, hyper-efficient clouds of a Joyent Accelerator.

Locative Media

Two teams produced projects where the media gets presented serially on a geographical layer, and the locations of the stories become part of the story.  One is about Haitian immigrants and produced with Roberto Mighty, another a historically-rooted, virtual “Welcome to Washington” tour for the incoming administration produced by KQED’s Leslie Rule.

Speak Out: The Kids’ Open Letter

Michelle Halsell of Missing Pixel headed the team for this project, which was produced in conjunction with PBS and allows kids to contribute their own voices and concerns, some serious, some hilarious, to the public conversation about the Obama administration.  This project is up and running on the PBS Kids site.

Collective Communities

This was presented in wireframe form at the conference, but we hope it sees the light of day.  Planned in partnership with Frontline, Collective Communities is a site meant to enable the archiving, categorization, and sharing of open-source documentary footage that would otherwise be left on the proverbial cutting room floor.  The possibilities are dreamy.

There’s more on Black Public Media, including an educational project in Secondlife’s Virtual Harlem and an issues-driven mobile media project.