The Melton South Community Centre did have a free website which was put together as part of the Federal government's “Work for the Dole Program”. The site was not particularly up-to-date and had a few other problems. It was time for an overhaul. Drupal came to the rescue.

The Melton South Community Centre operates educational courses, activities, self-improvement courses and general community support. It operates on a non-profit basis. Its previous Web presence was hosted on one of those free providers. The old site was forced to use frames. There were also the obligatory advertising banners. The banners linked to third-party sites that did not always reflect the values of the community centre. Added to that was the fact that the site was not easy to update, and not particularly accessible. The worst part us about the free Web site was that it calls Firefox to crash. We could open the site with Explorer without too much difficulty. That had to be fixed!

The goals were to provide a low cost alternative that was easy for the staff to update, flexible, and fitted in with the values of the Melton South Community Centre. I visited the community centre and spoke to the manager. Made her an offer of a free website with free hosting. This fitted her budget quite nicely.

Modules Used

• Drupal 5
• Backup
• Content Construction Kit (CCK)
• Date
• Event
• Event Repeat
• Image
• Image Assist
• Javascript Tools , JS Calendar
• Panels
• Pathauto
• Scheduler
• TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor
• Token
• Update status
• Views

Initially the site was set up with Drupal 5.2, but a series of security advisories to use several upgrades, finally arriving at Drupal 5.7.

We used a series of modules to bend at Drupal into shape. The first two were the indispensable Content Construction Kit and Views. Using CCK, we created a new content type called Course. We added some extra fields. A simple integer was added for the field Sessions - a count of the number of times each course ran. There was a field for the price and a concession price. Due to the complexities of Australian tax laws some courses attract a GST and some don't, so we added a GST field to show that.

The other important thing was setting up a classification system for the courses. Using Drupal's taxonomy module, we set up a category simply called category. This category was used to classify all written content on the site. We set up a master category called education and further divided that into various branches for things like art and craft fitness of being hobbies languages etc.

The next thing to do with the courses was to fit them into some kind of calendar. The obvious candidate for that was the Event module. So we installed Event and the Event Repeat modules. We then went back to defining Content Types to make Courses become Events as well. This means that all courses would be entered into the calendar.

To make life easier when inputting the courses, we added the JS Calendar from the JavaScript Tools module.

The next bit of functionality to add was to get modes to expire on predetermined dates. We used the Scheduler or module to do that. This added an extra field for publishing nodes where we could hold off and embargo some and set some to be not published after the course has completed. That was automated using Drupal's cron process.

We modified the front page using the Panels module. The top part contains some straight HTML. The bottom part is divided into two columns. Headlines is a custom block made using the Views module that lists article titles which are not Courses in random order. The Upcoming Courses is also a custom block also made from the views module listings some upcoming Courses.

The Views module was also used to customise the output. For example the courses list is in alphabetical order by default. But the user can also elect to see the courses in chronological order.

Theme

The last part to be developed was the theme. The theme is a customised version of the Zen theme with a few alterations. We kept a three column layout as it fitted our needs.

We modified to the template.php file to create a new region called “top menu” into this replace the “primary” links block for the navigation bar. The tabbed backgrounds in the Zen theme is a very nice little trick, so we kept that and adapted it. We hybridised it with the suckerfish drop down technique to produce customised menu. Another examples of this kind of technique is to be seen in the No Koala! theme.

Going Live

Initially the site was tested on our faithful Linux server that runs our Intranet. Several versions were tried and scrubbed. We did run an experiment with the Drupal Ecommerce module that had a couple of problems trying to get it to adapt to our needs. Chief among those was trying to distinguish between two sets of prices for concession and full price. We dropped that idea that may come back to it in the future.

The domain name meltonsouth.org.au was free. The community centre fitted the registration criteria so we registered it. Transferred the site to our Web server. After spending a couple of weeks checking the content site went live.

Staff have been updating the site, adding new courses. Long may it continue to be that way