New deployments

Czech it out at www.dessaules.com. Artwork by Cindy Salstone -- first of many projects with her and other artists. Z-Com is committing to upgrading our art direction throughout 2010!

Be Outdoors Arizona (www.beoutdoorsarizona.org) is an AZ-based nonprofit organization dedicated to getting kids outside, and educating those who care for and about kids to understand the benefits of getting outside. As an avid lifelong outdoors enthusiast myself, I was extremely excited to get involved with this group.

BOA has been struggling for a couple years to get itself on firm footing. The biggest struggle has been to get a website up. Lack of funds meant no site, but no site meant it was nearly impossible to raise money. Chicken, egg, I'm sure we've all seen this story before.

What I proposed very early on was a staged rollout. Stage one, online as of mid-October, is largely informational. I also set up some Paypal links so they could start taking money online. We had to do this in a very affordable way, squeezing as much functionality and good plumbing out of a non-existent budget as possible. The result is a nice template site filled with great images, good words, and a very strong first start for their group.

Finally, after beginning work a year ago on content development, we're launching the sexy new Swing Real Estate website today! This one's new for me not only because we implemented Drupal in lots of interesting new ways, but because we integrated a very attractive MLS search thing into the site. Highest praises for Diversified Solutions, whose Google Maps-based IDX frame made this site possible.

This is the third version of www.universityvet.com I've lauched. They're the biggest vet in the east valley and an excellent client. This is my second major commercial Drupal launch, and I've done a lot more fancy stuff at universityvet.com than the first time. Good site, gets the job done. I'm looking forward to seeing how their viewership reacts to all the cool new stuff we've got going on.

So I successfully and very quickly updated Z-Com and all my testbed sites to Drupal 6.10 today, and it was pretty painless. Combined with the various and somewhat constant little module upgrades, it all goes very smoothly now. I wish I could fully automate it, but I suppose it's good that there's still a hands-on component to site management.

So I got my first commercial Drupal site up and running: www.360teambuilding.com. It's still slightly Drupal-y (blocky) but functionally it's very nice. I like this new method a lot. Moving it from testbed to final home wasn't even that big a deal.
I was able to include all the Analytics code goodness in it right off the bat, which was nice.

Well, I started the whole Drupal thing from scratch. I was a little intimidated by the prospect of uninstalling and then reinstalling everything, but it's not bad at all. I'm having trouble getting one of my proto-testbed sites to come up. That's disappointing and confusing. In better news, I've got image uploads licked.