On September 17, 2008 Amazee released a fully redesigned version of its social collaboration platform. We made this case study for all Drupal developers interested in how the site is being built and what the challenges have been so far.

What is Amazee

Amazee is a platform that channels any kind of activism and provides powerful tools to help project initiators organize, promote, and fund projects of any size with participants from anywhere around the world.

Whether the goal is to assemble a multinational football team or set up a massive number of broadband connections in remote towns in Africa, Amazee is easy to use for any kind of project.

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Davis Applied Technology College

The Davis Applied Technology College (DATC), located in Kaysville, Utah, offers open-entry/open-exit, competency based programs on a year-round schedule. Our programs are broken up into the following schools: Business & Information, Construction & Apprenticeship, Health Professions, Manufacturing, Service Professions, and Transportation. For 30 years the DATC has been offering opportunities to individuals with difficult schedules or tight finances to further their education. Which is why our motto is "we change lives."

Web Team

With a medium-sized College we definitely had a lot of people willing to give feedback regarding the new web site. With that in mind we decided to put together a team of about 10 faculty and staff members that met regularly to discuss the progress and plan for the site. This team made the preparations for the site a lot smoother because we were able to look at it from all angles. It helped us feel more comfortable about the decisions that we were making along the way. In the end it definitely made the outcome more welcome.

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Caribbean Resumes just launched - It's is a
little monster.com that is geared towards providing a job portal for all the recruitment, career advice and hiring needs for Caribbean residents.

The following details how I built the site, including the history, overall design approach, what modules were used, and more.

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The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) is one of the world's premier art museums, best-known for its collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and American paintings. In addition to housing famous paintings such as Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles and Grant Wood's American Gothic, the Museum also has world-class collections of photography, arms and armor, ceramic figures, portrait sculptures, miniatures, and galleries of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts, including the mummy of Paankhenamun.

Palantir.net has worked with AIC since 2005, when we helped them develop and implement their site redesign and CMS integration. Their existing site only showed a small selection of material from their collection; the goal of this project was to integrate the site with their backend asset management system to allow users to browse the Museum's entire collection online, as well as allow the Museum to quickly and easily create micro-sites to promote exhibitions.

Palantir worked on the AIC Collections site in collaboration with design partner Studio Blue, who provided the original design direction for the AIC Web site. Larry Garfield (Crell) and Colleen Carroll were the joint architects of the site, with Larry working as lead programmer and Colleen as lead themer. Tiffany Farriss provided strategic leadership for the project.

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Last week, I released thevintageaviator.co.nz. It was probably one of the most challenging Drupal sites I've ever done, but also the best so far. It's a presentation of a local WW1 Warplane workshop, containing build stories, reference material, and thousands of great images of plane reproductions and archive materials.

The build story is a long one, mostly because the requirements shifted along the way quite a bit. This story is targeted at current Drupal site developers who are interested in the tools and techniques used. Mostly to head off the "so how did you do that?" questions we get whenever we do a write-up :-)

However among the interesting thing for developers and designers will be the complex layered look, the way this layout was optimized to scale to all screen sizes, and the surgery I did to Drupal to make this all happen.

Initial feedback we've received so far has been overwhelmingly positive (save some justified grumbles about the page weight) and I'd like to share this case study.

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Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce is Packt's new book, written by Michael Peacock, aimed at users wishing to create an online store, and uses Drupal and its e-Commerce modules to achieve this. With more and more websites aiming to integrate all of their components to give a more slick and streamlined effect for users - by using Drupal e-Commerce, the site and the store are already integrated providing both a powerful website and a powerful online store.

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The recent explosion of social networking sites has led to a rush to tap into new markets. A case in point at ISL (Insight + Strategy + Logic) is Red Room, an online community for writers of all stripes. The project is the brainchild of entrepreneur Ivory Madison. The goal of the site is to be the premier destination for authors to congregate with fans and discuss their books and ideas. Many high profile authors including Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini and Salman Rushdie have been on the site since day one.

While the Web has plenty of sites on which you can buy books, there is a paucity of places geared toward building dialogue about the books beyond what is necessary to move product. On many book-related sites, the authors themselves have largely been left out of the picture, leaving them to either establish their own limited Web presence or do without. This is a shame when you consider what could be on a good author website — who better to blog than someone that makes a living spinning a good tale? Red Room offers every author the opportunity to easily build a presence to interact with their readers and with each other.

The client came at us with a list of features: blogging, comments and reviews, biographies, information about published works, event listings, streaming video, and podcasts. They required a robust, moderated, and extensible backend, with tagging and search tools to allow the user to navigate the large volume of content that thousands of writers would pump into the site. Most importantly, the site’s content generation tools needed to be easy to use by authors that wouldn’t necessarily have experience using technology.

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The release of Drupal 6 isn't the only big news in February -- this week also marks the launch of a newly redesigned, Drupal-powered FastCompany.com! Fast Company Magazine has covered cutting edge business and tech industry news since the heady days of the early 90's, and the massive redesign of the magazine's site was a major undertaking for its publisher, Mansueto Digital.

The new site combines the magazine's print content with web-exclusive features, integrates the social features of Fast Company's long-running Company Of Friends business network, and gives members tools to filter through the web's river of news to find business topics they're interested in.

How was it built? Teams from Lullabot, Achieve Internet, Advomatic and Tree House Interactive worked together with Mansueto's internal development team to translate existing specs and wireframes into a working Drupal site. Views, CCK, BuddyList, and Organic Groups form the backbone of the site's structure, and a host of off-the-shelf contrib modules were used to add additional functionality. Examples include Views Fastsearch, used to build customized search screens for specific sections of the site, and the SimpleFeed module, which pulls in the content for each user's customizable news feed.

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