Hey everyone, I'd like to introduce myself and post a site that is still under development but which I feel is at a stage that it might benefit from some public exposure. The client loves it and with very little training they have been able to add and maintain content throughout each of the areas.
www.culhamwriting.com
Though the learning curve was a bit steep (I'm a long-time PHP coder but new to Drupal) I created a heavily customized theme using overridden theme functions from the various modules. I used the following modules:
ecommerce (to show prices now, ordering not yet enabled)
event
image
img_assist
tinymce
views
frs (a custom module)
I wrote the custom module for certain things that the views module couldn't accomplish. But, the nice thing for me was that I did it all using the stock beta 4.7 Drupal code, first with beta 2, and upgraded with each revision through beta 4. I achieved my goal of not having to edit the modules or Drupal code (I want to be able to upgrade, relying only my theme and CSS to maintain look-and-feel). I used this project as a bit of a case-study in Drupal and have to say I'm very impressed with not only its flexibility but the coding standards.
Despite the rather sparse documentation I was able to create an XHTML compliant theme (the majority of non-validating code is a result of TinyMCE and client updates on her own content) where the visual customization is handled not in theming functions but rather using CSS. Custom image borders are handled in JavaScript, navigation text image replacements are handled using a PHP-driven text/graphic class and CSS (that's just a standard Drupal menu under there).
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
