Friday, November 17, 2006
Developing with Drupal on the Cheap in the Arts
In every project you have three resources:
1) Time
2) Money
3) People
In every project you can increase or decrease these resources within the limitations you have set either within reality or have arbitrarily set.
When you have time but little money and/or people, Drupal can allow you to develop quite inexpensively using the existing core and contributed modules. The question becomes, do you concentrate on developing a custom interface (theme) first and then make Drupal fit into it, or do you take an existing theme and try to fit your design into it, or do you look at the functionality you want and then develop adapt or use an existing theme that is "good enough".
The desire for aesthetic design in the Arts tends to be pretty high (although I have seen some pretty awful designs).
There are several ways to keep prices down IF you have a high need for a custom look and feel.
You can create a custom launch page that acts as the home page and then use an existing theme that you modify using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for internal pages. The challenge here is that most folks do not come through a home page any longer. They use Google or Yahoo to find interesting content and then enter and leave the page from that point.
In other words, in the world of Web 2.0, the homepage is dead.
So working on the cheap, you really have to consider whether you want to spend money on custom designs or try to make do with existing free designs.
Where do you find themes? On the Themes section of Drupal.
1) Time
2) Money
3) People
In every project you can increase or decrease these resources within the limitations you have set either within reality or have arbitrarily set.
When you have time but little money and/or people, Drupal can allow you to develop quite inexpensively using the existing core and contributed modules. The question becomes, do you concentrate on developing a custom interface (theme) first and then make Drupal fit into it, or do you take an existing theme and try to fit your design into it, or do you look at the functionality you want and then develop adapt or use an existing theme that is "good enough".
The desire for aesthetic design in the Arts tends to be pretty high (although I have seen some pretty awful designs).
There are several ways to keep prices down IF you have a high need for a custom look and feel.
You can create a custom launch page that acts as the home page and then use an existing theme that you modify using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for internal pages. The challenge here is that most folks do not come through a home page any longer. They use Google or Yahoo to find interesting content and then enter and leave the page from that point.
In other words, in the world of Web 2.0, the homepage is dead.
So working on the cheap, you really have to consider whether you want to spend money on custom designs or try to make do with existing free designs.
Where do you find themes? On the Themes section of Drupal.
