I have found that making a public web site on Drupal 6 isn't for the faint of heart. We have been looking at WordPress as an alternative. But then I did some research and found that Drupal 7 has major improvements on site content editing and makes it a lot easier to set up a public site. Any word on when Groupanizer will be upgraded to Drupal 7?
Thanks,
Wow, you got that right. I am one of the "faint of heart" and I've been trying, on and off, to get a Public page up for more than a year. (I'm not a technically adept person, but I do have some common sense, and it's not helping me much! Hah!) Some of the issues involved tracking down the "official" registrar for the "marinbarbershopchorus.org" domain. Finally found that, and if you go to that URL today, you see black text on a white page, everthing kind of helter skelter, no color. Arrgghhhhh! I must develop the patience to read the somewhat disjointed manual and make this into an attractive page! Argghhhh again! I'm all for Drupal 7, or whatever makes the whole process a lot easier!
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E. Bond Francisco
President (2012) - Marin Golden Gate Barbershop Chorus - D039
415.342.3295
I had the same experience with the Drupal learning curve. Or learning cliff maybe. I intended to create a public page way back in February but just now got up the courage to do it. As I went through the process I documented every step in a new version of the user manual. If you haven't looked at the public site section recently it's worth another visit.
http://www.groupanizer.com/feature-publicwebsite
If you do see things that are missing, unclear, or just plain wrong then please let me know. I'll update it with everyone's suggestions so the next brave Groupanizer explorers can learn from our experience.
My own experience has been very good now that our public site is running. Updates are a lot easier than with our old system so we are adding much more content and keeping things up to date in a more timely manner.
Tom Nisbet
Webmaster - Heart of Maryland Chorus
www.HeartOfMaryland.org
tom27@HeartOfMaryland.org
Tom,
I have read through your additions to the public web site features and applies all of them. What I am mainly having trouble with is themes. Some themes work ok and others (mostly the ones I want to use) really scramble my whole site and our members can't make sense of it so we have to default back to a basic theme. What it looks like to me is that you have to know something about css style sheet files and be able to edit them to make your theme look the way you you want it just to be functional. I don't call that user friendly at all! I'm an IT guy and work as a domain administrator for the state of Oregon and been doing IT for almost 20 years and this just isn't clicking with me. But I've never claimed to be a develop/designer type. I set up servers and apps and do break/fix. Anyway, we are currently using a Wordpress site and going to sit and wait for a Drupal 7 upgrade before diving into the public site here. We do have our public site up with the Danland theme and I will continue to play with it to learn. But it was just taking too long to create it and we had a deadline to remove our old public site from our old provider.
Steve Moore
Webmaster
Salem SenateAires Chorus
Here's our site address if you want to see what I have set up so far. It look just "ok" and some may say that it looks better than that. But I guess we are looking for a higher level of presentation as we have had with past web sites. And I just got lucky with the theme that didn't jumble everything around. I just wish there were some better online web page editing tools similar to other online web editing sites.
http://senateaires.groupanizer.com
Steve Moore
Webmaster
Salem SenateAires Chorus
Love the slide show! Was that part of your theme?
Would love to have our main banner as a slide show too. Pretty sure there was one in our theme, but not something Tom could figure out for us 2 years ago when we moved to groupanizer.
Might be time to revisit.
Philippa Gelinas
webmaster - Rhythm of the Rockies
www.rhythmoftherockies.org
Philippa,
Yes, the slideshow was part of our theme. I just had to replace the stock images with our own. I also had to rename our images to match the stock image names.
Steve Moore
Webmaster
Salem SenateAires Chorus
How can you tell what version we're running? Also, how did you replace the stock images. I've chosen the bluemasters theme, but it looks like the path for the home page slide show is outside of the area I have access to.
Jordan Truesdell
VP - Music & Performance
Virginia Gentlemen
Roanoke, Virginia
You'll need to get Tom to change the slide show images... you can provide them to him to do.
The version of Drupal can be found by going to Reports > Status Report, or to Reports > Available Updates. Both will show you that you're on Drupal 6.22.
Antony Currington
Musical Director :: Harbour Capital Chorus
Email :: acurrington@paradise.net.nz
Wellington, New Zealand
I think when we went to the new servers and lost FTP access then we don't have file access to our themes anymore which is very disappointing. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. I do want to change our slideshow images but don't want to bug Tom every time for it.
Steve Moore
Webmaster
Salem SenateAires Chorus
Tom changed the Danland code for me so that I can put photos into a directory called danland_slideshow on my site, and then flush the caches, and the slideshow is updated... you might want to get him to make the same change for you...
Antony Currington
Musical Director :: Harbour Capital Chorus
Email :: acurrington@paradise.net.nz
Wellington, New Zealand
Hi Steve,
Upgrading would be a major project, and a lot of modules are not yet available for D7 so I don't think it's the right time to move yet. But often the new features are just old modules that have been rolled in to the standard distribution, such as CCK.
What improvements from Drupal 7 look good to you? Perhaps I can track them down.
T
I originally posted the question before the Sing 2 upgrade with the Public site improvements and specifically the file finder which I find very useful. But what I was talking about in Drupal 7 was one of the main feature highlights was "Improved support for integration of WYSIWYG editors". I know it's a vague statement but it's a core feature and not a module. I wasn't asking for an upgrade and totally understand that would take a major undertaking. We will eventually be switching our other web site to Groupanizer but we had a deadline last August to renew with our current hosting provider or cancel. We decided to cancel and I was wanting to use Groupanizer as our public site but could not get the public page set up the way we wanted with the tools that we had. I think that has changed now and you have made it easier to set all of that up. We went with a temporary public site (Wordpress) that has really user friendly WYSIWYG editing tools as a stopgap as we had no finances to pay anyone to help us develop a public site so it needed to be very user friendly. I appreciate your offer of finding modules that will work for us and if I find any that I want to check out I will certainly ask. What I would like to ask though is if you can set up our Danland Slideshow folder so i can change the photos in it like you set up for Antony.
Thanks!
Steve Moore
Webmaster
Salem SenateAires Chorus
I just set up a new site and selected Danland as the theme. As soon as I set it up the folder for the pictures was there.
If you added the Danland theme some time ago and didn't get the folder, I suggest that you un-enable it and then re-enable it. Hopefully you'll get the folder you need right in ELfinder like I did.
Check admin > content management > files look for a folder called danland_slideshow in the folder list under home
Ian Harrop
Western Hospitality Singers www.sing4fun.ca
Alberta Sport Parachuting Association www.aspa.ca
ian.harrop@live.com
Thanks for the suggestion Ian. I disabled the Danland theme and re-enabled it then checked ELFinder and the folder didn't show up unfortunately. I have a "color" folder under home with garland and gracenote images but no danland_slideshow folder. Looks like I need help from Mr. Groupanizer.
Steve Moore
Webmaster
Salem SenateAires Chorus
This folder is available within the theme, but with the way that Drupal and the theme is set up on the host server, it's stored centrally. Tom had to change some code and load the theme into my "space" for me to get the ability to do this. Then I can have a "local" copy of the theme, rather than a potentially shared one, and have more control over it.
Antony Currington
Musical Director :: Harbour Capital Chorus
Email :: acurrington@paradise.net.nz
Wellington, New Zealand