Drupal Articles

Last summer, nearly every client that I talked with who wanted a CMS would ask for Mambo. This was in spite of Drupal's obvious superiority in terms of code, flexibility, and power.

I was forced to conclude that Drupal's biggest weakness was the first impression it was making. I spent about 2 minutes looking at drupal.org, and Mambo's homepage, and the cause of Drupal's weak first impression was dead obvious:

Michael Angeles' post on creating different looks for different sections by switching body classes and ID's inspired me to write up a related method.

The advantages of this method are that it dynamically builds classes on the basis of vocabulary and term that allow you to have wildy different styles for every node.

This method requires two parts, one snippet in your template.php file, and a special body tag in your page.tpl.php file.

I'm not a betting man. However, I'd bet you 25 cents that your users will have a much easier time learning how to use Drupal with the interface I've designed below:

WHY? 

This interface is superior to the drupal defaults for a couple key reasons:

1. We can assume that if someone is using your website, they are already familiar, and comfortable with this type of navigation. Nearly every desktop program, from Firefox, to MS Word, to Photoshop, to Explorer, to the Macintosh Finder use this UI pattern. Always seek to design interfaces which your users will already be familiar with.

I first discovered sIFR last October. If you've never heard of sIFR, then I suggest you pretend otherwise. Simply nod, smile, and read all about it.

The module is now available for download on CVS.