Well, I figured that while I am building the new site, it would be good to keep sort of a record of what I am doing, and how I am building it. I will do my best to actively update this post as I make changes

  So the site is built on the excellent open source content management system, Drupal. The version I initially install was 6.17, but is often updated. Drupal was chosen for 2 reasons: it is incredibly powerful, the community is very active. Often I am reading through the active issues for a particular module, and some one has just posted to the same forum.

On the other hand, Drupal has a pretty steep learning curve for a CMS. We have built several Wordpress, Texpattern, and Joomla sites. none of them have proven as challenging for me. The Drupal theme system is significantly different than Textpattern, which I love for putting together quick blogs or other light CMS sites. Drupal is also significantly slower by default, especially when you start loading up a bunch of modules.

Here is a list of the modules we are currently using:

  • Administration
    • Front Page - Not currently in use
  • CCK
    • Content
    • Content Copy
    • Content Permission
    • Fieldgroup
    • FileField
    • FileField Meto
    • Imagefield
    • Node Reference
    • Number
    • Option Widget
    • Text
    • User Reference
  • Chaos Tool Suite
    • Chaos Tools
    • Page Manager
    • Stylizer
    • Views Content Pane
  • Charting
    • Chart API
    • Drupal System Charting
  • Core - optional
    • Blog
    • Contact
    • Database Logging
    • Forum - Not currently in use
    • Help
    • Menu
    • Path
    • PHP Filter
    • Poll
    • Profile
    • Search
    • Taxonomy
    • Throttle
    • Tracker
    • Trigger
    • Update Status
    • Upload
  • Easy Module
    • Easy Glider
  • Image Cache
    • ImageAPI
    • ImageAPI GD2
    • ImageCache
    • ImageCache UI
  • Node Gallery
    • Node Gallery
    • Node Gallery LightBox2 Integration
  • Other
    • Advance Help
    • GetID3
    • IE6Ban
    • Lightbox2
    • Mollom
    • Pathauto
    • ShareThis
    • Token
    • Token Actions
    • TokenSTARTER
    • WebForm
  • Panels
    • Mini Panels
    • Panel Nodes
    • Panels
    • Panels In-Place Editor
  • Statistics
    • Google Analytics
  • Support
    • Support
    • Support Charting
  • User Interface
    • jQuery Update
  • User interface
    • jQ
    • jQ Bridge
    • jQuery plugins
    • jQuery UI
  • Views
    • Bonus: Paged Feed
    • Bonus: Panels
    • Bonus: Views Export
    • Bonus: Views Spy
    • Views
    • Views Exporter
    • Views UI

  Because of the limitations that have been widely documented (Wikipedia), it was decided early on that we would not support IE6. This is a somewhat controversial decision, but with IE6 usage dipping below 7% (W3Counter), we felt that it supporting it not really worth the effort.

  Even dropping IE6 support, we still had our work cut out with supporting the various CSS3 features we wanted to implement. At this time, the site is best viewed in a Webkit browser, like Chrome and Safari. We recommend that you download and use one of these browsers. Firefox and IE8 do support some of the features that we implemented. For instance, Firefox (tested in FF3.5), we get rounded corners and transparencies, but no gradients. In IE8, we are getting gradients, but no rounded corners or transparencies. We wanted to avoid "hacks" or scripting to achieve these effects, so left the site in the hands of the browsers.

   What we eventually settled on was the practice of progressive enhancement. We went with a fairly minimal XHTML 1.0 strict, semantic markup. We used unordered list (

    ) for menus, proper headings (

    ,

    ,

    ), and
    for layout and

    for the content.

       We hope that you like the new site. If you experience problems, please send us a note.