The Modular Company (TMC)

Slowly we're making progress, the feeling is good and we've decided to go 'live' with the drupal based corporate site. So, http://themodularcompany.com/ is now the official homepage.

Catchall (our not-yet-developed domain parking lot) has been moved completely over to drupal now and Joyce has done some really neat stuff with it for http://softwaremagazines.com/, and in the next couple of weeks she will work on getting more of the domains developed.

After a week of looking at drupal and lots of conversations the consensus seems to be that drupal is very impressive but extremely large, and that it seems to be more geared towards building sites from the ground up than porting existing sites and structures into it.

Statistics are now working, but it still takes a bit of fiddling to get it right. You have to manually add the stats entry to every template where you want stats tracking, there is no 'add this to all templates' option.

To get the stats to work required a custom made module. The other alternative would have been to manually add the stats tag code to all the templates but I thought that would have been a pretty ugly modification.

After fiddling all day yesterday to get the first site ported to the new system I rigged up a little script that does a basic configuration and then makes a bunch of modifications, adds the right users and sets up all kinds of access permissions. That way adding a new domain is a matter of seconds.

Also I've added the google ads to the skeleton so it automatically displays advertising in the top link bar and on the left hand side.

So, after talking with Joyce today we decided to port catchall (static sites) to drupal. This is going to be quite a bit of work but it's a good start because these are our simplest sites.

User subdomains are a common thing on the net, users have come to expect it and will blindly type username.domain.com to get to their site. It's up to the provider of the service to make sure it works. In drupal this functionality is not present right from the start, but it is fairly easy to add it in such a way that no core file modifications are required.

Today I added 'friendly urls' instead of those node ids that are all over the place in drupal. I like to have pages organized. The 'autopath' module allows you to specify patterns that will be used to automatically create aliases based on fields in the content.

I've tried to figure out how to give a user a subdomain (such as jam.buzzem.com), but that seems to be harder than it should be. That's pretty basic functionality I think and I'm more than a little surprised that it isn't in there.

Amazing stuff, no other words for it. I spent half the day just looking at the various modules and themes that are available for Drupal. I'm sorely tempted to backport my current sites to drupal but I think that before I start to get distracted too much I should keep an eye on what I wanted this for and not let the 'new toy' feeling get me off on some unproductive tangent.

So, here it is, the new Modular Company corporate website. This is where all the people associated with TMC can hang out, collaborate on projects and keep track of things like bookmarks and contact lists. I'm still playing around with this and slowly getting up to speed, drupal is pretty big and it will probably take me some more time to get to any level of proficiency with it.

At a minimum I expect this site to:

• provide a per project todo list and bug tracker
• keep track of bookmarks and useful links
• keep our contacts database