After a 3 week side project, I am back into my CMS work. So if anyone was keeping track, I only finished my fifth week on Friday instead of my eighth. The side project warranted the brief break from the CMS.

I only got back onto the CMS project mid-week last week, so most of my time was spent getting my brain wrapped around Drupal all over again. The hardest part was I had installed quite a few contributed modules.  The common modules, like CCK and Views aren’t a big deal, but there are others that change the landscape somewhat while administering my clients site. There was a point, around Thursday morning, when I thought it would be best to just start over. I haven’t been given any “live” content to enter into the system anyways.  It’s pretty much left up to me to decide from a complete library of past production files which content to load and test with.

Things started looking up Thursday afternoon when I started cleaning up my use of the Drupal “Books” pages.  For those who might be new to Drupal, it’s the best thing they have to creating structured pages in the form of hierarchies. It’s almost perfect for animation production where most projects usually have heirarchies like 1.) production name, 2.) episode name, and 3.) scene number. From there, everything else is individual assets like characters, props and backgrounds. assets get their own dedicated page. Asset pages are always linked to a production “book” and most often, they’re linked to episodes and their scenes as well. I am becoming hesitant about making scene pages part of the production book heirarchy. Mainly, that’s because their might be anywhere from 150 to 300 scenes in a 11 min. to 23 min. episode and that’s a lot of child pages that would appear in various UI drop-down lists. It’s not a huge problem, yet, but, like I said, I have my hesitations about it.

So this week ended with me cleaning up the book hierarchy and also setting up some of the home pages that each user would log in to.  I also made a more logical setup of side bar blocks that act as navigation tools for moving around the production book pages. This was made possible through the use of Views 2. It took (and is still taking) some time to gain a clear understanding about how Views works with Blocks. I am trying to make summary pages using Views as well. That’s pretty much where I left off on Friday. Drupal is amazing. Frightening at times, but always amazing. Frightening because you realize that you can do almost anything with it, and that’s a huge responsibility to keep it simple and get it done within a specific time frame. I’m sure I can speak for site builders everywhere when I say that if I had unlimited time, I could rock this site with Drupal!

Week 6 starts tomorrow and there are only 4 more after that! Test sessions with actual users begins later in the week. Wish me luck.