drupal

Web Design: 22 Great Drupal Sites

PauloGabriel — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:53:26 +0000

For some time now, I'm getting to know Drupal, a really powerful, open source cms. With it, it's possible to do virtually any kind of site you want, and it's great for magazine style sites. If you don't know, Abduzeedo is made on Drupal.

Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.

So I went through the internet, looking for some nice sites made on Drupal, and for my surprise, it looks like people don't explore it too much, making mostly magazine, journal style sites. Anyways, here's a selection of sites, and at the bottom, the sites made by our staff.

Sites made by our staff

About the author

Hello, everyone! I'm Paulo Gabriel, designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil, born in 1984. I have worked as a webdesigner since 2006, but websites and blogs have been a hobby for me since 1999. Here in Abduzeedo, I try to bring only the hot stuff for you... and hope that all of you enjoy my posts! For more cool stuff, you may also follow me on Twitter.

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Zee's redesign

abduzeedo — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:10:10 +0000

After some weeks planning, designing and developing, the Zee's new website is online. Much more than simply a redesign, we have changed everything, mainly because we needed to use a good and scalable CMS and create a blog for the company.

Zee's old site

With all these requirements, Drupal became our only choice. Firstly because we've been using it for a while so it wouldn't take us too much time learning and developing for it, giving us more time to spend on the design matters.

Our goal for the site was basically create a very simple interface using few images and put all of our efforts on typography, colors and CSS.

Listed below some sites and blogs inspired us.

We also followed some ideas we learned from some excellent podcasts such as the @media presentations: How to be a Creative Sponge, Diabolical Design: The Devil is in the Details, Five Simple Steps to Better Typography and Interface Design Juggling.

Among all of those lessons, we were able to apply on this project the very useful Jason Santa Maria's tip of creating a sort of wireframe, but with the real content, where we could play with the typography elements without worrying about colors and images.

With the site well structured we started applying some colors and testing different combinations.

Wireframe and first color scheme

Although our first idea was to use a light background, we chose to keep it dark. That decision is explained because we have always used dark backgrounds, and wouldn't be a wise move to change our identity so drastically. Visit the site at http://zee.com.br

Final Version

About the author

Abduzeedo is a blog about design. There are all sorts of articles for those who want to look for inspiration. Also you will find very useful tutorials for the most used applications out there, with a special selection of Photoshop Tutorials and Illustrator Tutorials. You can get in follow us via Twitter at @abduzeedo

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New Design

abduzeedo — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 12:02:36 +0000

Last night I finished the transition to the new version of my blog. It's been like 4 months since the first release, although I really liked the previous version, I had to make some adjustments in the design.

When I designed the first version, I had no idea about who would read it, if someone would read it. However one of the most important thing, which resolution would they use, browser, system and stuff like that. Analyzing my blog's web traffic for the last 4 months I noticed some issues with my blog's design.

Resolutions: Firstly, my blog was designed for a minimum resolution of 800x600, after 4 months, no one has visited it using that resolution, besides, the most used resolution is 1280x1024.

Browsers & Platforms: I thought Internet Explorer would be the first in the list, and for my surprise, Firefox has been the most used browser when visiting my blog. Now talking about platforms, Windows continues to dominate the market.

The new design

The new version is totally different from the previous, starting from the logo that I changed to make it simpler and easier to reproduce, I think I’m going to make some stickers. The color scheme has changed too, now I’m using a brown and orange combination. However the most important thing was the better use of screen, white spaces and to make it more organized.

I hope everybody enjoys the new design, and feedback is really appreciated.

About the author

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Using Performancing Blog Client with Drupal

abduzeedo — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 19:51:39 +0000

This is my very first test using Performancing as blog client. I have to say that it looks pretty cool so far.

The whole process of setting it up and use it was really easy, I had to install a module on my Drupal called Blog API, and after that select the content types that I want to allow to post content using applications that supor XML-RPC.

Selecting and installing the module

Selecting the content types to be used with the blog client

After that I ran a wizard pretty straight forward, very easy, and that's it, it's done.

Using Performancing

Now the only thing that I want to know is if there is a good blog client like this for Safari, because I really like the way that Safari render the page, allowing text-shadows and other cool stuff. Maybe with the new Firefox and that Cairo, but that is for another entry ;).

Technorati Tags: Performancing

About the author

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Creating a blog

abduzeedo — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 17:27:04 +0000

Here it is, it took a while but I have finished my blog, yes I know there are a lot of details to be fixed yet (sorry IE 6 users, I haven't hacked it yet), though, pretty much of its functionalities are working just fine.

I would like to talk a little bit more about this blog, one thing that I'm always trying to figure out when I'm visiting a site is, what CMS or Blog System this guy chose to use and why. I have noticed that Wordpress seems to be the most used at this moment, however there are a lot of good CMS's and Blog systems out there such as Joomla, Textpattern, Movable Type, Typo3, CMS Made Simple.... A good place to test them is >http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ and http://www.opensourcecms.com/. This curiosity made me test a bunch of them, and as a designer one of my goals with this blog is always share my opinion about the experience that I got using them.

For this site I chose Drupal. Why did I choose it? Well I've been using Drupal since May or June and I think it has everything that I need to create a good site not only visual but well coded, accessible, valid and stuff like that. Now the Drupal's guys are about to release its 5th version (it's in RC1), it has a lot of improvements such as new default theme, css compressor, more organized, faster, and one of the best for me is jQuery as its javascript library.

There are a lot of good article about Drupal on the web, below I list some of them.

http://www.drupal.org http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource5/ (series of articles about drupal) http://www.lullabot.com/(they have a really cool podcast about drupal)