On choosing Drupal... Harvard Science site recently went through a revamp and decided to go with Drupal platform for the development.

Here is a little excerpt on the process:

Choosing a CMS
During the six months before I began building the HarvardScience site, the Harvard News Office had been working with designer Claudio luís Vera of Studio Module. The result was 28 beautiful templates, which had been chiseled, filed, and polished to the client's adoration. Unfortunately, during this time the News Office had still not made up its mind about what CMS to use. In fact there was still some muttering about how a custom CMS was the way to go.

So approximately six months ago, I built the first draft of HarvardScience using Drupal over the course of a weekend. The result was exactly what I had hoped for - the news office was so excited by the speed at which the site could be built they decided to go with Drupal. The rapid development of a prototype or draft site can be built using Drupal made the CMS issue a fait accompli strategy.

The sIFR Drama
My first draft of the site did not use any of the mark-up, styles, or sIFR that the designer had provided. I instead created my own custom theme, relying heavily on blocks and views. I had assumed that if the site looked very close to the original design and that the CMS was in place, everyone would be happy. This was a huge error on my part. The designer had been working with the client for nearly six months at this point, and everyone had become wed to the "Whitney" font used heavily throughout the site. So despite a devious experiment on my part proving that the client couldn't tell which page used sIFR and which did not, I was asked to go back and add Whitney into the site.

Thus began draft number two. I installed the sIFR module Jeff Robbins and began to add in the style I had originally left out. The module itself is super easy to use. Sadly I didn't find sIFR2 so lovely. Regardless how much I fiddled with font-size, letter-spaceing, padding, margins, height, and width, I could not get consistently sized sIFR text replacement. I was informed by the designer that if I moved to sIFR3, which was still in beta at the time, all my problems would go away. In short, at the end of this draft, everyone was pretty frustrated - most of all me.

Thus began draft number three. This time I did what I should have done to begin with. (What is that saying about hindsight?) First I threw out the theme I had built. Next I grabbed the directory the designer had used to store all his stylesheets, flash, javascript, and images to run his 28 templates, and stuck it at the root of my drupal install.

Next I copied the mark-up from one of designer's templates, and named it page.tpl.php. Then piece by piece, I replaced the static content with nodes, views, and blocks - themeing as I went - ensuring that Drupal spit out the exact same mark-up as the original template. So after a very long journey through the land of sIFR, the site emerged as the designer originally intended.

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