The problem facing the JRF's web site in early 2006 was what drove Content2zero owner Shai Gluskin to find Drupal. With over 800 individual HTML files forming the labyrinth called the JRF web site, there had to be a better way.
In the Fall of 2005, Shai, together with the help of web developer Sharon Cooper, began organizing some of the more easily organizable material and began building a very primitive content management system on a LAMP stack.
The moment came when a choice had to made about whether to further develop the custom CMS or move to a proprietary or open source solution to help. After investigating Plone, Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal, the decision was made to develop in Drupal.
One of the many nice things about Drupal was that we could take the primitive CMS we had developed to manage 200 sermons and 100 newsletter articles and embed those mini-aps right into Drupal. We knew that Drupal comments and other good stuff wouldn't be available, but it allowed us to move quickly and not need to have everything done at once.
Highlights:
- Originally built in Drupal 4.7, upgrade to Drupal 5 was made in 2008 and upgrade to Drupal 6 is scheduled to be done by June, 2009.
- JRF Convention site for 2008 built on same code base with different theme, making use of the Taxonomy Theme module.
- Extensive use of Sign Up module for conference call sign-ups.
- Use of Organic Groups.
- Staff Intranet developed with Taxonomy Access Control
- Drop-down menus implemented using the Nice Menus module.
- Site has over 2500 pages.