It’s great to be involved with something that promotes a good cause and REOC provides a wealth of useful information on clean energy
initiatives in Cornwall, both at a business and domestic level. Cornwall location and geography offers such a unique environment for taking advantage of a vast array of renewable tecnologies, and hopefully the website will help promote REOC’s aim to establish Cornwall as a leading example of practical implementation of these technologies, and a source of expert knowledge for the industry.

In terms of functionality, site visitors can register to receive updates, or make paid contributions to get more closely involved in the future direction of the group and gain exposure for their own organisations in a Cornwall renewable technology business directory. I decided to use a combination of Drupal, it’s e-commerce package Ubercart, and a community module called Userpoints to acheive these goals, and on the whole I think this combination worked out very well. Members are awarded site credits on payment of their member subscription, which can then be used for posting a defined number of blog entries or other content on the site.

Ubercart in particular is an awesome set of modules, offering a very high level of customisation and options. This is the second time I have used it and the developers and community behind it are always on hand to solve problems and put a lot of hard work into making it the de facto e-commerce solution for Drupal.

Go take a look at the new site here.

With WordPress justifiably gaining ground as a fully-fledged content management system rather than just something to get a half-decent blog together, and the continuing popularity of Joomla (despite Joomla in my experience being an ultimately extremely unmalleable solution for anything but the most simple sites), it’s brilliant news that top design firm Mark Boulton Design are in the midst of giving the Drupal website a much needed redesign.

As most people’s first experience of Drupal, the project’s home site has always been functional more than a beautiful example of design, and until the last few months, few of the available themes for skinning your Drupal website have compared to the quality and choice available for WordPress and Joomla in particular. Faced with the critical decision of choosing the correct CMS for a project, WP and Joomla have always offered in my opinion a ‘friendlier’ face from the outset. Unfortunately there’s maybe been a tendency to go for something that looks good out of the box, rather than choose the most suitable platform and a skilled Drupal designer to create a good-looking theme on top.

The new drupal.org designs should go a long way to both addressing this first impression of the project and challenging the image of Drupal as a ‘developer’s platform’ rather than a designers’ one. It still looks ‘like Drupal’ – but cleaner, more approachable and like something you’d want to be involved in.

Thousands of Drupal developers across the globe have contributed their time skills to the project, hopefully the new-look site and redesigned architecture that promises to make search a lot easier than the present system will encourage more designers to get involved too.