Drupal 6

I have been blogging about it for ages (well, a month) but today I launched the Alpha version of Blog to it.

I bet there are loads of bugs, since launch at 4pm GMT I have fixed three, but I want to get a real world view of how it is being used. I have loads of new features that I am developing for it which will come over time and be moulded to fit the usage.

If you have a blog, or have been thinking about setting one up go over to http://blog.to.it and sign up and get listed. If you have no interest in blogging still go and take a look, you may find something good to read, and if you do make sure you vote it up.

Blog to it development seems to be getting to a point where I know what I am doing. I like to work in a way that I develop something to a point where I know what I am doing, then finalise how it should be done, then develop a prototype / beta.

On the current development site (http://blogtoit.millwoodonline.co.uk) there is all the features and functionality the final site will have. It just needs to be finalised to aid usability, and all the little bits like, only showing comments for the current blog in the recent comments block, need to be added.

Since my last post about Blog to it, 1 week and 20 hours ago, I have been working solidly on the idea. So far the development site features the creation of your own blog using wmostrey's DrupalMU install profile, Twitter integration using walkah's Twitter module and rating of blog posts using Eaton's Fivestar module.

After playing around with Raincity's Basic theme and creating the crude looking theme for this site I thought it was time to make a custom theme for my "web development company" site.

So this time I used the layout-fixes.css file to create a fixed size page. The main page div is set to 800x600 so the content looks good on most screen sizes and the proportions also look good in the ratio 4:3. The content-inner div is set with an overflow of auto so that the 800x600 size is always maintained and scrollbars are added to the content if needed. The site background was generated using one of the many stripped background generators, but all the other graphics where hand made in photoshop.

It seems to be a big question in the community whether to develop new web sites using Drupal 5 or Drupal 6.

For this site I am using Drupal 6, and I am yet to encounter any problems. This is mainly due to the very few modules I use. Most of them are core apart from Google Analytics, Tagadelic and the collection of image solutions I have been trialing my way through until I find one that it better than writing the HTML.