Show off your Drupal site

We recently re-launched Needlenose our progressive-leaning political weblog based on the Drupal engine. It's a collaborative blog with three main writers and guest contributors. The reviews have been pretty good so far. Based on user feedback, some favorite features are the threaded comments and the 'recent posts' feature.

The old weblog was based on pMachine and it lacked a lot of features we were looking for. It also had some database bugs that once got us kicked off a hosting site when we got too many hits and locked-up their server :-( We didn't even try to migrate the content over from pMachine to the new site (just archived it on the site under 'Classic Needlenose').

We did a lot of searching and finally settled on Drupal. Some tech-notes: it's based on the 4.4.2 engine. Custom theme with some third-party modules enabled (weblinks, news aggregator, etc). We tried to keep the core code untouched since we knew we'd be upgrading to the new engine. We haven't enabled the forums, even though we'd like to, because it doesn't support 'read-only' announcement areas (hopefully in 4.5.0?) The theme is a three-column design, but for now we've only enabled two columns. The third-column will be turned on once we start rolling out plug-in 'block-apps' -- little mini-apps that run inside blocks -- that we've been working on. Drupal's performance has been pretty good so far. It even went through a little spike where we got over 2000 article views in an hour when we got a link from a big news site (on our second day on Drupal, no less!)

Just wanted to thank the community for making the install and launch for our XBRL community news aggregator (www.xbrlspy.com),rss feed and message board so damn simple!

We're still tweeking a bit so comments and suggestions are always welcome..we had only one bug in the archive calendar (which we submitted the fix for) and we're up and running..

We launched this baby about a month ago. It is build to Connect German Canadians in Vancouver, Victora and elsewhere in British Columbia. Most of the modules are default (some hacks here and there).

I love creating new sites using Drupal, such a flexible solution. I was so impatient, i could not wait for v4.5. Hopefully I will upgrade as soon as it is available. therefore I am not going to make much customization on adsensed.com yet. Just wanted to announce that you can be a part of community as well.


Thanks again to Drupal community!

I just received word that my site, which just "officially" launched last week (following a month-long beta period), will be featured on CNN Headline News' "Internet Buzz" segment tomorrow.

:-)

Hi - this is my first post here. I've installed Drupal on two sites and will install it for a third.

http://www.saveourcommunity.us -- an actual site

http://www.riceball.com/drupal -- my personal site (pretty dead)

and I intend to implement the following site with Drupal:

http://www.riceball.com/montebelloashiya.org/

with this layout (warning - fugly first draft here):

http://www.riceball.com/montebelloashiya.org/samples/homepagemockup.png

Now, onto my comments.

About me: I'm just a guy installing and customizing Drupal. I know PHP well, and have programmed for a long time. And in case you're wondering: yes, I'm going to write some modules if I continue to use the software.

Things I like about Drupal: the extensible plug-in architecture; the built-in features you get with install, especially the navigation hierarchy; the taxonomies; and active developer community. I think Drupal is awesome.

Things I dislike about Drupal: not a great fit for the last project listed above; weak support for "CMS"ey "brochure sites"; most of the layouts.

I will start with the layout. I just don't like the three column PHP Nuke style layout. To deal with this, I'm using phptemplate to implement the SOC pages. It's got it's qualities, the main one being that I don't need to learn that much about the templating system. Still, the three column layout is pretty much wired into Drupal.