Today marks an historic milestone in the evolution of the young GreenAsh web site. After two long months of development, patching, hacking, and refining, a brand new version of the site has been released. The old version was managed by a crude, home-spun administration system that was little more than a skin over our backend database. This version, however, is managed by the powerful and constantly evolving Drupal content management system.
I'm not going to turn this post into a rambling advertisement on the wonders of Drupal: if you're really interested, there's plenty to read on the drupal.org site. However, there are a few key features of Drupal that I can't help but mention: the PHP code behind it is very modular, well-written, and easy to extend or modify; it uses a flexible theming system that allows you to design the look of your site really easily; it boasts an unrivalled categorisation system (called 'taxonomy') that lets you classify any page in as many different ways as you want; and last but not least, its URL aliasing capabilities mean that unlike with almost every other CMS out there, your site can have URLs that are not only human-readable, but also easy to remember.
With Drupal taking care of things under the surface, GreenAsh now offers all the functionality you'd expect from a large-scale web site. You can fully customise your user profile, and your details will be automatically listed in the GreenAsh user directory. You can browse all content on our site according to whatever classification system you find most convenient: for example, you can browse our news items by topic or by priority; either way, you will have access to all news items, automatically sorted from newest to oldest.
You can vote in polls. You can comment on anything (pretty much). You can search the entire site (every page is indexed). You can bookmark your favourite pages, and next time you log in, you can quickly access them. You can subscribe to any post, so that whenever someone comments on it, you will be notified by email. Basically, there isn't much that you can't do... wait, hang on, there's actually quite a lot that you can't do! Did I mention that Drupal also has an integrated security system, that allows access levels and permissions to be defined for each user? So if you're wondering where the 'delete' button is for this news item: sorry, but you're not permitted to access it!
GreenAsh has many new features now, but that doesn't mean that it's lost its old features. Our forums still allow threaded, hierarchical discussions - although they have been improved tremendously. Our site design is still fully standards-compliant and accessible - even though it bears little resemblance to its forebear. And our cute little animations are still lying around in places (a few minor improvements have been made to them).
Already, you will notice many of the changes that we've made. Design-wise, we've built a new header and navigation bar from scratch. The rest of the new design is still largely unchanged from the Chameleon Drupal theme on which it's based (but we will be making improvements). We are also now able to track every visit to every page on the entire site. Using this information, we are able to display the number of unique reads for any page, and are also able to show you the most popular pages in terms of unique visits.
So what have we got planned for GreenAsh over the next few weeks? Well, now that we've customised Drupal to our liking (and let me tell you, we did a lot of customising), we're going to be focusing on getting as much content online as we can. In particular, our number one priority is to fatten up our resources section with plenty of notes, essays, and other helpful documents to help our students (and any other students) for the upcoming school year. We're also going to be posting descriptions for each web site in our portfolio, and we're going to start building a massive list of weblinks in the who we recommend section.
With GreenAsh up and running, we're also going to start migrating most of our other sites to Drupal. In particular, Jaza's World - which is currently updated by editing the raw HTML, and which is a maintenance nightmare - is in serious need of a Drupalisation. And of course, we're ready and willing to start developing new sites for our customers using Drupal (the official platform, as well as our customisations).