How Not to Build a Page with Drupal

A few weeks ago I was asked to build an Intranet-Site for a small company. Nothing too fancy – just the usual groupware stuff like News, Calendars a Blackboard etc. I was given some Photoshop Files which were easily translated to XHTML. The layout was already approved by the client so this step was pretty much a no-brainer.

I always wanted to try out the Drupal CMS and figured this Intranet-Site would be a perfect fit for it. Drupal was developed with community sites in mind; every aspect of it was designed support the extensive built in User and Rights management. Just what I needed.

My XHTML file was quickly adjusted to function as a Drupal template. Not everything was working right from the beginning, but I figured I’d first work out the hard stuff and care about these “small rendering bugs” later. So I carried on to build my content – which is where my odyssey started.

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All Hail the New PhobosLab

Doing logo design isn’t easy. Making a logo for PhobosLab felt particularly hard, because the name, despite of the very real Mars moon Phobos, is quite abstract for a weblog. Well, I settled for the real thing and actually used Phobos as a logo, as you can now see in the page header. No, it’s not the Deathstar – Phobos has a huge crater on its side, in case you’re wondering.

I also pimped the stylesheet a bit, but in the end didn’t do the complete redesign I intended to. The image on the right was a first draft of it.

Update: Yeah well, as you can see, I did do the complete redesign now.