building
Part 3 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.
Now that my feet are firmly on the ground (and hopefully will stay that way for a time), I have a little time to write about the final stages of the Open Source Catholic website development... even though it's tagged as in 'beta.'
On the plane flight home, I was mostly finished creating the theme for the site. I hadn't opened it up in IE 6/7/8 yet, but I knew the main three or four bugs that would crop up, and prepared for them. I decided to write some postings (two articles, two blog posts, and a website review) for the website, as it's never a good idea to try to build momentum for a website on which nothing exists!
I wrote the posts, edited them a little, then browsed every page on the site once or twice, fixing little CSS bugs and tweaking the design until it was just-so. I had created the header image in Photoshop, and I worked to make it so it would be easy to change if I needed to—especially when (if ever) the site goes out of beta status.
Next, I did a little (VERY little) performance testing, and made sure things were working well on the backend. I didn't Boost the site (I don't think that'll be necessary... at least not yet), but I did turn on page caching, CSS and JavaScript aggregation, and am working on following the rest of the YSlow rules.
The second-to-last step on this site was to open it in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (I haven't tested 6 yet) to make sure there were no show-stopping bugs. Luckily, there really weren't; just one column that kept floating right behind the content. I fixed that by floating the 'second' column to the right instead of left, and adjusting its margins accordingly.
The last step I have is to monitor the site's performance and metrics, test from an end-user's perspective, and make sure the 'moderator' role has the right permissions/access to do everything he or she will need to to keep the site in tip-top shape.
I haven't tried the Flag module yet, but I may at some point; seems pretty interesting to me! Also, I'm going to try to submit the theme, "Airy Blue," to Drupal.org's theme repository... wish me luck!
This weekend I am going to attend the Catholic New Media Celebration. I'll be on two plane flights, I'll be sitting at an airport for a few hours before each flight, and I'll be at a convention all day Saturday. I'm hoping to build out a new site idea I've had lurking in the back of my head for some time: Open Source Catholic.
In the past 45 minutes, I've been jumping around Drupal.org downloading all the different modules and tutorials I think I'll need. I've also saved some of my previous work on other Drupal sites in case I need to refer to a code snippet along the way while I don't have Internet access. I'm going to call it a night for now (I need to pack!), but tomorrow, beginning at the airport, I'm going to start working on the site.
Right now, there's a splash page. No theme, no Drupal installation—nothing more than a simple welcome message. By Monday, I'm hoping to have a Drupal site with a new theme (which I hope to contribute back to d.o as a zen subtheme) and all the community features I can possibly cram into it. One man, three days; almost no free time to work with. Think it can be done? I think so! Follow me as I begin this fun and crazy journey!
[UPDATES:]
- Part 1: Putting the Puzzle Together
- Part 2: Theme Development
- Part 3: Going Live...
- Part 4: [Final] Releasing a Theme on d.o!