The Project - www.tnbuildcommunity.com

Three weeks ago Mark Shiffman from Nomad Communications asked me to build a web site to support local organizations participating in an episode of ABC's Extreme Makeover Home Edition.  Cool, but what's the catch?  First, the site had to be ready in time for a press conference on September 15. Second, the requirements were vague and scope creep was a sure bet. Third, this is a charity project so no money.  A challenge for sure.

I'm not a web designer and don't build many web sites, so a web project with a tight deadline for Extreme Makeover Home Edition had the potential to be a big headache.  To keep things contained "inside the box" I set several high level project objectives:

1. No coding, no customization.
2. Minimize design effort - use an existing theme or template for look & feel.
3. Everyone involved in the project must take responsibility for their own content and data - good support for roles based permission is a must.

Drupal seemed like the best choice. 

1. Core Drupal has a rich feature set, plus there are a large number of contributed modules that do pretty much anything you can imagine. 
2. There are a huge number of free and commercial Drupal themes.
3. Out of the box Drupal supports granular permissions.  Drupal permissions go pretty deep and can be tough to get your head around, but allow you to make things really clear and easy for content managers.
   

Installing Drupal

Installing Drupal 6 is pretty straight forward.  Hosting for the project is being provided by G4 Communications and is just a basic CPanel account with no shell access.  My firms standard project setup includes SVN, development environment, and root access to the production server so it took me a while to become comfortable working with just CPanel and basic FTP.  The limitations imposed by this setup were a pain at first but reinforced my goal of keeping the project "inside the box". 

Getting Drupal configured properly and installing all of the modules needed to support your requirements is a bit tedious.  Using Acquia Drupal can resolve most of this but part of the exercise here was to start with core Drupal and only install what was needed.

Look and Feel

After spending some time looking through the hundreds of open source and commercial themes available for Drupal it became clear that a good commercial template would save me a lot of time and minimize the amount of customization.  AllDrupal Themes has a nice theme framework in the theme repository and Jurriaan Roelofs graciously donated one of their commercial themes to the project. With a built in color picker, configurable layout, and plenty of collapsible block regions to work with the project was now moving along well. 

In the end couple of CSS tweaks were needed to adjust the theme colors to work with the light beige used in the header and it was faster and easier for me to add the HTML for the AddThis widget directly to the theme template than to add another block region. 

Volunteer Sign-up Forms

A key requirement for this project was to have a web based volunteer sign-up form for support volunteers and skilled tradesmen.  Support volunteers are organized by the Upper Valley Housing Coalition while skilled trade volunteers are organized by Trumbull-Nelson, the builder leading the construction project.  Project managers at both organizations need access to view and edit the volunteer sign-up data as well as the ability to export data to a spread sheet.  The Webform module was magic.  It took me an hour or so the install Webform and setup the first form, then only about 20 minutes for the second form.  Quick adjustment to role permissions and the project managers were could easily view and access their data.  

Within two days of the kick-off press conference over 600 people had volunteered through the web site.  Wow! An email from one of the project managers said it all - "I just did my first download - everything looked beautiful!".  That's what I call success.

A Work in Progress

Like all web projects the tnbuildcommunity.com is a work in progress.  The flexibility and power of Drupal contributed modules like Webform and CCK (Content Construction Kit) have provided the flexible platform I wanted without having to any write custom code.  So far the project has remained inside the box.  Of course there's no such thing as a free lunch.  Drupal's power and flexibility adds substantially to the complexity of configuring a site.  Luckily the Drupal community shares nicely so there is an abundance of tutorials that show how to setup everything from multi-user blogs to image galleries.