Well, it’s been a long road and I am almost at the end. There has been another delay in the Drupal Content Management System for Big Jump Productions. Working on small projects to bring in more work to the studio has taken precedence. Although I cannot talk about what those projects might be I can say that they are well worth the interruption in the CMS project.

In the past few weeks, a lot of progress has been made with the CMS.  To sum up, I’m using Drupal 6.15 and a plethora of contributed modules to extend the core installation.  Notably, I am using Views 2, CCK (Content Creation Kit), and Panels to give the CMS the flexibility required to manage the information of a typical animation production. The contributed module, Front Page has been a huge help in giving users a unique home page where I can list content that summarizes the productions and departments they tend to. With the help of something in Views called “relationships”, I can make custom tables that list content that individual users are involved in maintaining. If you are at all familiar with Drupal, you know that each piece of content, be it a page or blog entry, is referred to as a “node”. Users who create a given node become that node’s author.  In the case of Big Jump’s CMS, an Animator, for example, can create a node (or be assigned one by their supervisor) that represents a scene that they are responsible for animating.  Of all the hundreds of scenes that an animator may work on over the course of a single production, I can list them apart from those of other animators and add them to that animator’s custom start page. Very nice.

There is also private messaging which provides each user with an inbox and notification when new messages are available.  Instead of buddy or contact lists, the user just starts entering the first name of the other user they wish to send a message to. The system auto-completes the name and list multiple choices if there are more than one users with the first name entered. I am using usernames that list each user’s first and last name, separated by a period. With the auto-complete feature, I think this will help people learn each other’s last names in the process.

I am using a contributed module called “Pathauto” which enables me to set up automated URL aliases that retrieve their names from fields within nodes. So URLs make sense to users and can be linked to reliably. A given scene page might look like this http://www.awesomestudio.com/production/awesome_show/episode/10/scene/101. Nice and clean. Before using Pathauto, the same URL might read http://www.awesomestudio.com/node/123. If I didn’t have “Clean URLs” turned on in the core settings, the URL would be even more “unfriendly” and look like this: http://www.awesomestudio.com/?q=node/123. So Pathauto rocks.

There are a few more modules I have to install, configure and test before I am done. Still to some is a module called “Timeline” that can be used to view all production departments and the episodes they are working on, set to a defined schedule. It uses DHTML and AJAX and is quite slick. I would like to have it become more interactive in the sense that you can click on elements in the timeline and have it take you to episodic pages. Currently, it just reveals pop-ups that give details on elements on the timeline. Like so many of the contributed modules, they can only take you so far in how they were originally designed. To go the rest of the way, you have to get in there yourself and start coding PHP. Since a 10 week scedule has only allowed for mostly site building rather than development, I will have to save the programming to a time later in the future.

Next week would be the 10th and final week, but this latest test project has me putting the CMS on hold until sometime next week.  So the actual remaining weeks are week 9 & 10 which will most likely re-comence after next week. I’ll keep you posted!