Hey!  I thought I would highlight some of my recent freelance web work.  My latest project was done for the guys over at The Roofing Dog website.  I've known Cory, the owner/operator, and his crew for quite a long time and they are a great bunch of guys.  I actually came to know Cory when I went to work for him years ago.  I was finishing up school and through some friends I got hooked up with Cory.  He was great to work for and we've been friends ever since.

Well, since those early beginnings, things have changed significantly for both Cory and myself.  The Roofing Dog business has expanded greatly and continues to do so every year....because they do AWESOME work!

As for myself, I've since went on to complete my Bachelor's degree and I have a great job as a web specialist; plus some freelance web work.  I like to think I do great work also!

Enough history...Obviously, as the web has grown, so have businesses and their needs to stay on top of the web game.  I mean, seriously, how many great companies don't have a website these days?  And a good website at that?

The Roofing Dog parternered with Willard Web Design to create a drupal-based website for the 3rd version of the company's website (Another history lesson: Willard Web Design was also a part of the 2nd version of the site several years ago).

Here is a screenshot of the current homepage (click for larger image) or just go to the site.

The site theme is a modified version of an existing and freely available drupal theme.  We really wanted to create our own look without reinventing the wheel for our first drupal deployment with The Roofing Dog website.

Fortunately, the next time we want to revamp the look, the drupal backbone is already in place and we'll have time in the schedule to tackle our own completely custom theme.  This project scope was already full of changing the existing look as well as transitioning the old site into the lovely drupal cms.  Time for a completely custom theme just wasn't in the cards this time around, but the way website life cycles run; we'll get our chance soon enough!

Well, we just released the site this week, and we will be tweaking it over the coming weeks as we continue to flex all of drupal's muscle.

Take and peek and let us know what you think...

In my last post, I talked about my experience setting up Drupal Clean URLs.  I had a very minor problem, which basically resulted in me having to add the correct .htaccess file to the root directory of my drupal installation.  Feel free to go back and read the last post for all the details.

The reason I'm posting again on this topic is because I found out there was a problem with my setup.  I have other folders which don't contain drupal content in my root directory.  Well, these folders (which house other websites that I develop) were not functioning properly.  Basically, the content was showing up, but it wasn't displaying properly.  The index.html page inside of these folders was showing up as a list of items but nothing else was displaying properly.  I found this to be strange behavior and when I checked all the other sites they were exhibiting the same behavior.

The only recent change I had made was to the .htaccess file in the root of site.  So I removed the .htaccess file and everything worked fine for my other websites housed in subfolders; but my drupal clean urls were of course no longer working properly...bummer!

I researched around the drupal website and I found the following helpful links in regards to .htaccess setup:

http://drupal.org/node/167169

http://drupal.org/node/30334

Of course, none of those suggestions worked for me.  After reading all the stuff I could find on the topic, I began looking deeper into the default drupal .htaccess file.  After looking at this particular section:

# Set the default handler.
DirectoryIndex index.php

I noticed that it seemed kind of odd.  The drupal .htaccess file is telling apache to only look for index.php files within directories.  Well, of course I had regular html content in those other directories and it wasn't displaying properly.  I added index.html to this line as follows:

# Set the default handler.
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html

Uploaded to the server...PRESTO! Everything worked fine!  All my content in subdirectories is working without any problems and this is the only change that I made to the defualt drupal .htaccess file.

Here are my drupal install details:

drupal version: 6.4

.htaccess version: # $Id: .htaccess,v 1.97 2008/11/22 13:46:11 dries Exp $

PS: when installing drupal don't forget to copy over the hidden .htaccess file that comes with all the other drupal files.  Also, if you already have a custom .htaccess file; back it up first in case you have problems!

Well I'm continuing work on the new drupal site...at a snail's pace...LOL. Anywho, I got my Drupal install completed a little over 2 months ago and I've let it sit on my server for awhile. Part of the reason it has sat so long is because I've been really busy and the other part is that I really did want to get the installation in place and then sit back and wait to see if any errors popped up along the way.

Fortunately, no errors popped up and I now have time to get more work done on the site. As a result, I've setup the clean urls feature of Drupal. I simply enabled the clean url module and the path module to enable the pretty url you see in your address bar. I did have one problem where I was not initially able to set the radio button to enable the clean urls. I did some research and my .htaccess file was not correct. For some reason that particular file was completely blank. Evidently when I installed Drupal that file did not copy over correctly for whatever reason. So, I went to the Drupal site and found the following link (http://drupal.org/node/15365) for the clean urls info. Further down that page there was a link to the .htaccess info (http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/drupal/.htaccess?view=markup)

I copied and pasted the information from the .htaccess page into my own .htaccess file and the uploaded my file to the server. Guess what? I was able to enable my clean url module in the admin panel.

After getting that cleared up, I enabled the path module so I could actually write meaningful titles. Clean urls removed the question mark and equal sign from the url, but it still gave it the generic node/1 as a url. The path module, once enabled, gives you the functionality to rename your urls to whatever you like.

While that was all well and good; I wanted something more dynamic or automatic. That is where the pathauto module comes into play. The pathauto module is not one of the modules that automatically came with my particular install of Drupal so I had to go download it, upload/install it, and then enable it via the admin panel. Once enabled and configured, it spits out the clean urls that you see automatically.

Pretty sweet!

Well, that is the latest update so far. I'll keep you posted as I chug along on the site makeover. Look for updated navigation and the actual content pages very soon.

Well the site update is going slower than anticipated, but I'm slowly but surely getting this moving around here. I guess it is good to be sooo busy!

That is all to say that I'm going the easy route first. I've taken a drupal template off-the-shelf and I'm modifying it to fit my needs at present. I really want my "own" template, but I need it quickly and this was the best way to fix that problem.

Then, the next phase will be to do a complete drupal template of my own from scratch. This will result in a couple of things. One, it will quench my thirst for understanding the drupal theme system. Two, I'll have my very own completely custom theme!

Sooo, that is all for now. I'll update you again real soon.

JW

Welcome to the new willardwebdesign.com website.

The site is undergoing some major changes...all for the better of the site of course, but changes nonetheless.

That said, please be patient as our site is being put back together again! I'll post more details about the site upgrades when possible.

If you have any questions or would like to have a website built...please contact me via email: questions@willardwebdesign.com

Thanks!