drupal

I'm back. Fran forbade me from posting. She wanted all the comment love for herself. She's tried to keep me out of this game, but I can't leave all the Pat Reed fans hangin'. 2009 is my year.

As you can plainly, see we have revamped pnf.com. It was long overdue. We launched the site in November of 2002, and we really hadn't updated the back end or look of the site until now. Ooops. Hope you like it because we are not due to update it again until March of 2016.

If you like the nerdy crap and want to know about the site development, keep reading.  If not, skip it.
I ditched the old home-grown blog platform in favor of a Drupal-based site. Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is developed and maintained by a community of thousands of developers (and it kicks @$$$$). I started messing with it about a year ago when RIT Libraries was looking for a CMS for our sites. RIT Libraries now has about 12 sites running on the Drupal platform. I am definitely partial, and when I decided to ditch the home-grown system, it was the clear pick for me. Porting the content from the old site to the new one was a bit of a biatch. We had roughly 700 blog posts and almost 6,000 comments. I had to spend several hours understanding the database differences and working on the scripts to massage and port the content. Now that it is done, I am really excited about all the possibilities. I created the custom site template. It is based on the Genesis framework. I'll be prettying it up some more over the next few days/weeks. I wrote most of the JavaScript on the site using the jQuery library. I plan on writing a lot more Ajax-y site functionality soon. I configured Drupal to work with the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. Our home-grown CMS required us to write the HTML for the posts, so this is a welcomed addition. I think that about sums up the majority of the technical aspects of the project. If anyone wants any more information on any of this stuff, please don't hesitate to get a hold of me.

The things that I am excited about:

• A stop to the daily hate mail demanding an RSS feed
• Relief from the shame and ridicule that I had to endure for the outdated site look
• The ability to easily reposition site elements
• Easier site updating
• Larger images in blog posts
• Keyword tagging
• Picture of the day
• WYSIWYG editing during blog posts

-Pat

A picture of my girl.

The Bean - 1/2/2009