Porting an existing layout to a drupal site
April 13, 2007 - 7:01pm
Should be ok
-You should be able to set up a drupal site. It's designed so that non-programmers can handle it.
-Maybe I don't understand, but I don't see how it will be a problem that the church is small.
-I suppose the login box might scare some people, but are people like that going to be using the internet that much? You could think about hiding the login box. Ultimately you'll have to weigh the benefits of utility vs simplicity.
April 13, 2007 - 7:19pm
The small part comes into
The small part comes into play when there's just not very much content to manage. I know I need to sit down with the pastor and discuss this, but I was just wondering if anyone had some ingenius ideas.
-Oh, and one more thing i forgot to address. Ideally, the text size should be able to be scaled all the way up without breaking the site. Durpal should be abl to handle that, right? I know it was mentioned in the podcasts that it's quite friendly on screen readers.
By the way, thanks to RF and MF for the podcasts. They've helped quite a bit.
April 13, 2007 - 7:34pm
April 13, 2007 - 8:53pm
Hiding the Login Box
A lot of sites hide their login box. Then they navigate to /user on the site and the login form will appear to users not logged in.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.mattfarina.com
I was tapped to do a website for the church I'm at because I'm pretty much the only one who knows anything "techy" about the internets. I refreshed myself on html, and tried to teach myself some CSS, and ended up with a regular html & css based site. I was wondering how difficult it would be, me having zero php knowledge at present, to use my existing style to theme a potential Drupal site.
I messed around a bit with a CMS at first, but I felt they looked far too slick and same-y. Slick is definitely not the personality of the church. That and we're on MS hosting with no sql and no php. Ugh. But hopfully that will be remidied soon.
It wasn't until listening to your podcasts that i felt i may be able to pump out a custom theme for a CMS. If I understood correctly, my having done all my styling on a seperate style sheet has got me in good standing, and now it's just inserting the proper php into a page.tpl.php file and making sure the divs match up, correct?
Auspiciously, my design has three columns plus a header and footer, which i understand from the podcast mirrors drupal's content, right and left side and header & footer areas.
My only lingering concerns are about how well a CMS works for a pretty small church and the login box scaring/confusing the old folks.
The pros are that when i head to school in the fall, they'll be able to update it easily and it won't fall into a state of disrepair.
Also, any ideas for making a small church's page seem fresh and updated would be very much appreciated. Going at this alone is pretty frustrating and creatively stifling.