Making of progrock-dt.de

Der folgende Beitrag ist ausnahmsweise auf Englisch. Denn er entstand ursprünglich für das "Drupal Showcase"-Forum auf drupal.org und beschreibt den Aufbau von progrock-dt.de als Drupal-Website.

New community website progrock-dt.de

www.progrock-dt.de is the website of a german-language community of fans of Progressive Rock, built in - you probably guessed it ;-) - Drupal, Version 5.5 to be precise.

Instead of giving a global overview which modules are used on progrock-dt.de I think it might be interesting to describe the events section in more detail. It's there where most of the modules which we use work together.

Events are of a CCK node type, using text, date and link fields, formatted via Contemplate. Events are categorized by three taxonomy vocabularies: region, event type and a free tagging vocabulary. At first I planned on using one of the cck taxonomy modules, but I decided to stay with "normal" taxonomy because then event nodes play nicely with the Related Links module which, based on taxonomy and content type, suggests similar nodes to users.

Events should have a standardized title struture (title of event, location, date), so the Automatic Nodetitles and Token modules are used to generate titles from the event information entered by the users.

As many of the events are concert listings of tours where part of the information is identical to other concerts from the same tour (for example artist name, event type, artist link, free tags), we use Node Clone so that users can copy existing event nodes and just change to information that is specific to the new date.

The listing of upcoming events, including filters for taxonomy, date and title, is generated by Views, the calendar view and block is generated by Calendar module.

As the content in the events section is user generated, we use Workflow and Actions: On creation event nodes stay unpublished and are set to a state "to be checked". An e-mail action is triggered which notifies the editors of the new content. Editors can now check the content, make changes if necessary and change the state to "approved", which triggers an action to publish the node.

User can also submit concert reviews as comments to event nodes. We use the (relatively) new comment rating feature of Fivestar to allow rating a concert when entering a review.

That's it in a nutshell for the events section. Other modules we use are

• Audio module for a podcast
• TinyMCE and Image/Image Assist for html-challenged editors ;-)
• FeedApi with the SimplePie parser for an aggregator of relevant blog posts
• pathauto and Meta Tags/Nodewords for SEO
• Tagadelic for a tag cloud
• Notify to inform editors about new comments on the site
• Block Cache: the site runs on a shared host, so we have to keep a very open eye on performance
• Custom breadcrumbs, Feedback, a modified version of MiniMenus, Suggested Terms, Frequently Asked Questions, Diff, Mass contact, Imagecache

The theme was developed using the Zen theme as a starting point.

Thanks to the power of Drupal and these modules we had a working prototype after a few days of spare time work which was tweaked and polished over the course of a few weeks before launching the new site. Many thanks to all the Drupal and module developers and the Drupal community for the great work!