I was hired at the Davis Applied Technology College in August of 2007 with a sole purpose in building them a brand new website that worked. Their site, at the time, was running on an old version of DotNetNuke that had been customized to a point where it couldn't be upgraded. That wasn't the only thing bad about it, the content hadn't been managed on it for years in some cases. Onto the case study:

Design

I started with a theme called "Tech" for the new website. I've always been a fan of starting with something and going off of it even if it ends up being completely different.

Tech Theme (click for larger preview)

I narrowed down our options of themes down to 3, and that was the one above was the one that everyone liked. Once I was done making my alterations it turned into this:

DATC Theme (click for larger preview)

This was my first really hard core Drupal Theme that I have done. It looks great... the CSS needs some cleaning up, but I think that most big Drupal sites would look the same, or worse. We went through probably 3 or 4 different revisions before settling on this one. The 2nd revision was pretty darn close to what we ended up using.

Development

I've never considered myself a developer, but one day I'd like to be able to reach that point. I'm to the point where I know my way around in PHP enough that I can tweak things here and there. Between Drupal having such an awesome community and their collection of modules I hardly had to do much customization on the modules to make them work.

The main thing that the web team was focused on for the new site was our Program Pages. That is the bulk of our site. Initially that's where I spent most of my time. Most of which was working on getting the node content to display properly. I had to display some of the node's cck fields in a block (Quick Facts) and the rest in the main content section. Once that part was functioning the rest was just getting the data input for each page.

Aside from the Program Pages the rest of my time was spent doing the following:

• Setting a new and improved job board
• Configuring magic_tabs in the navigation block to show content pertinent to the current logged in user
• Integrating the website into our LDAP server for easy authentication
• Mapping LDAP Groups to Drupal Roles to make the process easier
• Setting up a way for users to submit cases for fixes/issues on the site
• Migrating all other content from the old site
• Coordinating with a developer to develop a Plug-in for Webform to feed into our CRM App
• and much more...

Conclusion

At this point I think that the best decision that I have made was to go with Drupal as the CMS for our site. In the end I was able to meet and exceed my expectations. The College only had to pay one third-party developer to develop a module-all the rest came straight from the community.