I’ve been evaluating Drupal as a hosting platform for about a year and a half now, and have been using it to run Deef’s Net for about half a year. This is the first platform that hasn’t made me itch to change back to my homemade Mason system — in fact, if I did so at this point, I’d definitely be losing out.
So, my plan is to dive in and get as familiar with it as I can, so that I can host it effectively for others (unlike many hosts who just set up a CMS and leave the customer to figure it out). The result is that Deef’s Net is probably going to undergo some layout changes over the coming days and weeks, since it’s much more fun and rewarding to play with a live site than an artificial testing site, and since it really doesn’t matter a whole lot if Deef’s Net looks correct or has all of its content at any given time of day it’s okay that I’m testing on a production site.
To get started, I’ve been playing with themes, since this is not one of my strongest points. This new Deef’s Net layout/theme is more or less what I had at midnight last night, which was followed by three frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful hours trying to get a flexible div-only layout to work properly, and that wasn’t even trying to do it cross-browser, just Firefox. So, since I wanted to get some sleep last night, this layout has one table for the sidebars (not that there are any on the vast majority of pages right now if you’re not logged in, but that’ll be coming next). Changing font sizes also doesn’t work as well as it does on my prayer letter site (which didn’t have multiple columns or Drupal to worry about, so it was simpler). For some reason, the YUI grids failed miserably out of the box, so I’m 0/2 on that. Presumably there’s something in the Drupal default CSS file that’s causing problems, but I couldn’t figure out what.
More changes to come!
