Monthly Archive for June, 2009

http://www.treeoflifecolorado.org/

Description: Tree of Life Colorado Connection is a non-profit organization helping the Arbol de Vida orphanage in Juarez, Mexico.

Objective: The website runs Drupal. Content is updated by several people at the organization, so I neede to make sure the site was easy to update for people with only average computer experience. I still manage the site from time to time, but for the most part it’s user run.

Work Done: I created the template (from a base template) based on a design the organization uses in their paper newsletters. I also did the Drupal installation, selected additional modules to enhance the site, wrote some custom PHP snippets, and debugged conflicts with the site.

Observations: I learned a lot about CSS, PHP, and CMS setup and support in this project. Drupal is a decent CMS, but it still needs work to make it completely usable for novice users. After I finished the majority of work, a new version of Drupal was released which fixed a few of my complaints but I still think it’s not quite polished ‘out of the box’. The code is pretty good, but it doesn’t use objective methods, which would make it nicer to code with at times. I would like to, at some point, write my own cms that would address some of the issues I have with CMS’s in general. I’m hoping I’ll be able to upgrade the site this summer.