A Challenge

There is a challenge on the Drupal site to create a simple "brochureware" site with about 5 pages. I thought it might be good to do that and document what I do here. It might even be a good addition to my "Cookbook."

The challenge and background are here: Site configuration challenge: corporate brochure<.

The goals are:

  • An About Page
  • A Contact Us Form
  • A Products (or services page)
  • A simple front page with two paragraphs about your company and contact information plus a sidebar with links on the right or left which link to headlines from your five latest news articles
  • A news page with news articles about press releases, events and news.

My initial thoughts are:

  • The "Contact Us" page is very simple - we'll use the built-in Drupal contact form with a few departments listed.
  • I think I'll attack the "two paragraphs on the front page" and "About Us" as a single item using a story with a two paragraph teaser. I've never seen this done, but it sounds interesting to me.
  • The sidebar links to 5 latest news articles would be a block.
  • At first blush, I'm thinking that I'll do the news page and products page much the same way, using taxonomy to group stories.
  • One thing that was not mentioned in the challenge was overall layout and branding of the site. So I'll start with a core theme, and probably "tweak" it a little when I've accomplished the main goals. This is not the way I'd do it in the real world, but this is a "learning" exercise.