townx

My brother-in-law (Jason) is a builder, based in Caterham, Surrey He asked me if I'd put together a site for him to advertise his company (he's self-employed), Alljays Building Services. The main things he wanted were somewhere to host a list of services, address and contact form, and a portfolio of work.

I decided to put him a site together with Drupal 5. The static pages and contact form were easy. But I wanted to add in a portfolio which he could edit himself. So I used the following Drupal modules to add the functionality I wanted:

• CCK, to create a custom content type to represent portfolio entries. This meant I could create an "Example of work" page type.
• The Image field for CCK, which gives you a simple image upload field.
• The Views module, which enables you to produce custom summary and detail views for nodes.

With these in place, I created a taxonomy of types of work Jason does (e.g. Conservatory, Garden), and specified that each Example of work page has to be added to at least one of these categories. I then created some taxonomy-based views, to first show the types of work in the portfolio as links; each link then becomes a link to the nodes in that category, again shown in a custom view (see the site for more details). Most of this can be done through the Drupal GUI; but I wrote some custom templates to do the rendering.

The idea is that Jason should be able to login, create a new portfolio item (using Textile markup if he wants), upload a picture (and have it automatically resized), and categorise it. It will then find its way into the appropriate part of the site with no further work. On my own site (this one) I use these great, flexible Drupal features to build the navigation: create a category and/or node type, add items to it, then link it to the navigation. It makes adding new content to the right section trivial: you just set a category and Drupal does the rest.

The end result is basic but functional, and took me maybe a day to do (most of which time was spent toying with CCK and Views, which I hadn't used before). I think Drupal is a great little CMS for this type of small dynamic site, or for pretty much any kind of site; but I'd add that I think CCK and Views should be more readily available as part of the core; I'd also like to see more comprehensive documentation and examples to make it easier for people to pick up. I know I could write some, but I think it would need a good slab of time I don't have at the moment.