[Webcom] Fwd: Drupal-ers unite!

[Tyler Mitchell]

Hi all, after Arnulf's question and Cameron's comments I realise I should just cc: webcom on the tasks/discussion I've been having.   John Callahan offered to help out a bit with the migration - same issues I've been discussing with Wolf offline (when I've been able to corner him! :) ).  John  recommended psd2html.com to help create a real drupal theme from our design, so I've followed up with them and impressed with their professional approach so far.   I pointed him to webcom list so we could continue the discussion here.

Wolf and I also have had a lot of back-and-forth on various deep drupal ideas and are putting much of this stuff here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Drupal_Upgrade_Plan_2010

See below for some of the context and issues I laid out for John.  Hope that catches you up to date after my spasmatic "get it done" approach this week. ;)  All are welcome to contribute.

Tyler

>> John wrote:
>> In regards to Views, I can help there...<snip>
> 
> For some reason our views from 5.x didn't come over into 6.x.  Not sure what 
> happened there.  Once you're set up on osgeo.org (the 5.x site) you could see 
> the various views we have in place.  Then you could attempt to port them to 
> the www2.osgeo.org  (the 6.x site).  I tried a couple exports and imports but 
> got errors at least once.
> 
>> For the home page, I would go with it's own template (page-front.tpl.php)
>> with five block regions (think html divs) coded in there....<snip>
> 
> I can certainly see the value in using updatable blocks but do think either 
> way could work.  Again, we can try this right away.  I've put block.css from 
> http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/marketing/website/design/alpha_mockup/ into a new 
> theme folder on the 6.x server - so if you want to build toward that, it be 
> awesome.
> 
>> Just curious but are you planning to keep a similar architecture as in the
>> current osgeo.org site?  ...<snip>
> 
> We will boil everything on the existing site, down into the new one for sure.  
> But we won't have massive long menus like we do currently :)  Instead, as you 
> can see with the front page concept, we'll target user groups and concepts 
> instead of a free for all.  You can see the thinking for site reorg in this 
> mindmap - with the old site on the left, migrated to the hierarchy of the new 
> site on the right (think I got the order right).
> 
> http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/marketing/website/sitemap/sitemap.svg
> 
> The green text are items matched between the two.  The black text on the right 
> shows new content we'll end up creating.

And another email to John and Sylvain Maillard who also responded to my email to discuss list:

> A couple things I can tell you about the work so far.  I've migrated from 5.x to 6.x and only a few modules were absent in 6.x or ran poorly.  
> Two modules to note that I have to find a solution for are: 
> 1 - localization - deprecated module replaced by core feature, but I don't know how well it works with content that we have already had volunteers translate :)   
> 2 - Second, views, it seems none of our custom views (several based on CCK) seemed to come across well.  Not sure why..
> 3 - How are your theme skills?  We have a newly designed site layout we want to try to implement.  An example of the front page can be seen here:
> http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/marketing/website/design/alpha_mockup/index.html
> And what the basic secondary pages will look like:
> http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/marketing/website/design/subpage1.jpg
> Wolf already set that first one up using CSS, but we have to warp it to run as a template in Drupal.  Maybe as a fancy special front page type, or a set of panels or regions?  This is where we could use some advice.
> If you are interested in poking around at the semi-migrated site I can create accounts for you on the test server.
> I hope some of this makes sense to you and that you can at least share your thoughts.