Eric+M

Hi, my name is Eric. Welcome to my wiki page. :-)

In this page we are looking to discuss aspects that will help people create an effective Drupal Website. I shall also be providing some helpful links that have helped me along the way. This wiki page will keep being updated right till the time of submission of my final project on March 29th at 1 p.m.


 * __Ideation: __**

The first step of any design process should be ideation. A designer needs to bring out his thinking cap and come up with an imaginative concept to work on. When working on a Drupal there are many things that need to be considered. Firstly on must have a theme. A theme is the basic layout that caters to what a person's main idea. There are different types of themes that are available on Drupal. When I was doing my personal search for them, I personally found quite a few good themes, but unfortunately they were all paid themes. However, if you are patient and you dig around enough you are likely to find quite a few good themes that are completely free. A key thing I did manage to discover was that a lot of the paid themes have a free lite version available. But if you are looking at developing a full blown website I would advise against it, because it could end up limiting you and a lot of your ability.


 * __Wire-Frame: __**

Now one thing good about Drupal's open source interface is the fact that if you have a general idea of what you want to do then you can pretty much take any plain vanilla theme and change it up to meet your functionality requirements. A helpful tip would be to get a wire-frame set up of what your website will look like. A wire-frame is a sort of low fidelity prototype/sketch of your final idea. This is a great toll to fall back on and helps you through every subsiquent phase of the design process. I would advice anyone trying out a design process be it webdesign or any other design, to always start up with their wire frames. There are many tools that can help a designer to make a wire-frame with ease and they do not require a high level of design competence for the users. A friend of mine in this course recomended the use of a tool known as "MockFlow" to design a wire-frame.MockFlow is basically an online drawing tool that is very easy to use, just go to www.mockflow.com and take it from there. The steps are pretty straight forward. I personally did not use this website to make my wire-frame. i relied on a more traditional approach, which was to use Adobe Photoshop. At the end of the day it depends on a person`s preference and what you are most comfortable using as long as it gets the job done. A crucial thing that helped me with the design of my wire-frame was receiving some initial feedback. What I normally do is get my friends who are in the CCIT program to check out my sketches and prototypes and I collect their initial feedback. They normally make comments about the information architecture and other basic userbility pointers. This is very helpful as it helps provide a good start to my project which reduces errors as I move along to the final stages.




 * __Implementation: __**

This is the next major step of the design process. Now that we have all the ideas in place what is left to be done in the implementation of those ideas. We start of by installing our theme. So we start of by going to www.drupal.org search for the theme we have selected and then we select the file that is compatible with Drupal 7. This is very important because if you do not pick a theme compatible with Drupal 7 or what ever is the current version of Drupal you are using, you might bump into trouble while working with it. This is the same principle when we try to load any module as well, since the same logic follows this and you could encounter similar trouble if you do not install a compatible version.

Now that we have our website more or less set up in terms of themes and modules, we move on to content. The content on your website is as important as the look and feel of the website. They type of content we put up is as useful as the way we organize and arrange the content of the website. It is crucial for any designer to have good architecture in terms of content display. It is also helpful if the user designs the website well for wayfinding. This can be done effectively by providing proper set of Structural, Associative, and Utility Links. These are just some of the key issues to reflect upon while working on the early design phases of your project. Also at this stage it is helpful to go back to the wire-frame for some assistance.


 * __Demonstration: __**

Now here I am going to give a step by step demonstration of how to install one of the modules. The module I am going to be installing is the Drupal Commerce Module. I picked this module because I had to do some extensive research for it for the class seminar and I feel I can guide you best through this module. Most of the modules use the same basic principles and the only places they deffer is in their personal settings. So if you can get the hang of working with this module then I think overall you should not be having a problem. Also if you are interested in designing an E-commerce website in the future, this could be a helpful tool. So here is a step by step guide as to how one would install the Drupal Commerce Module:

Step 1: Download the latest dev versions of the following modules to your site's modules directory:
 *  Address Field
 *  Chaos tool suite (Views 3 dependency)
 *  Entity API (Rules 2 dependency)
 *  Rules 2
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;"> Views 3

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">Step 2: Download the latest version of Drupal Commerce to your site's modules directory. You can find the latest supported release through the Drupal Commerce project page (or get it from its Git repository if you prefer)

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">Step 3: Enable the modules in the Commerce package on your module installation form. Most sites will end up using most of the modules in the package, so for your first site you should just enable them all.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">Step 4: Once the modules have been enabled, you're ready to start configuring the Commerce components


 * __<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">Problems I Faced: __**

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">Personally I feel Drupal has been rather kind to me, not that I am lookign to jinx it. There have not been any major issues I have had to deal with. There was one issue that I did face, but it was a minor one that got resolved. When I had made a banner for my website, I had put it up but its placement was a bit off. This was a problem a lot of my classmates were also facing. We tried padding, aligning it a particular wat and everything. Some of my friends gave up and just ended up chaning the dimentions of the banner. This is one way to deal with the issue, however what I did, which was far easier and solved the problem well was to add this line to my CSS

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">#branding { <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">margin: 0; <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">}

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">This ended up solving my problem and if you ever face a similar problem then do try this out and it should work for you.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">I will be updating you about more problems and solutions to them as I come across them.

<span style="color: red; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12.5pt;">I will also be posting more updates as I keep going along through my projects in this course so do stay posted. Thank you!