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Thursday, April 23, 2009

1st Drupal website: Ecotourism in Yunnan, China

For a while now, I've been working on making a new website for Xintuo Ecotourism, an ecotourism company based in Lijiang, Yunnan, China.

The old website was not well compatible with Firefox and was difficult to update. I considered WordPress but I have finally chosen the famous Open-source CMS Drupal as a platform for the website. Mostly because I wanted to learn by doing and this opportunity allowed it, I was sure I could do a decent website with Drupal.

I'm pretty happy with the result. I haven't been disappointed with the possiblities. The only thing is : Drupal is much more hard to keep up to date (Modules, Themes...), but maybe it's not that important once your website is up and running.
I find the theme update most troublesome, because I did some change in the theme, but when you update it (when the author released a new version for bug fix for example), you have to do these changes again...

The most difficult task was maybe to get Clean Urls to work. At first I had difficulty to understand the "help" section about this. But I finally succeeded.
My biggest disappointement was about some modules which are not available in Drupal 6 (but in Drupal 5, which makes it frustrating). For example, a module to deal with Picasa Web Album, or to have a Google Sitemap.

I had fun to play with the Weather and Maps modules, and I had difficulty to find a WYSIWYG editor but in the end, i think it's a good website for that company.

List of the main modules I added:
Views, CCK, GMap, Location, Google Analytics, Tagadelic, Wysiwyg, Fivestar...
Theme:
Marinelli

Next time, i'll write a bit about 2 other websites I did, this time with WordPress.