thinkdrop

Claudina and I have been working as ThinkDrop Consulting since January, but we had no time to work on our website until DrupalConSF came around. We had a major project to keep us going the first few months, and when it was over, we were going to build our business and our website in time for DrupalCon. In the spirit of innovation, I decided to try and build the new site in Drupal 7, specifically alpha3, which was the most recent release at the time. We decided to keep it simple, and grow organically, rather than just keep a "Coming Soon" landing page up until we built the whole thing. That's why the theme is nice and simple. The logo, initially designed for the Business cards, looked so good we decided to follow the design ideas for the website. As we built out the site, we realized that it is inspired by our principles and philosophy: content is substance, marketing is style. We want to define our reputation by our knowledge, our output, and our involvement in the community. Having a thoroughly designed, highly polished website is not important to our business. Granted, eventually we will go through some redesigns, and the site will get bigger and sexier. But for now, it is a tool to express ourselves, and I think the site does that in spades. And now on to Drupal 7... it's basically great. There are so many little improvements it is impossible to list. But I'll go ahead and mention my favorite parts.

• Fields on Users! Our Bio pages are actual user/x pages! So far I'm using the default user picture field (with Image "Styles" built in!), an "About" textfield, and a "Connect" textfield. When I get some time, I'm going to try my hand at upgrading the Link field module to D7.
• Logical Block Regions! In page.tpl.php, $content is now a Region! That means I was able to put the Latest Blog Post block on the homepage in the Content Region without panels or theme tweaking! Brilliant.
• Slate Theme! Our theme is a clone of Slate. The only template file I've added so far is page.tpl.php. It is nothing but .info, css, and image files. FINALLY a blank theme in core Drupal.

So there's still a lot to do with Drupal 7. Funny thing about open source software is, no one really has time to contribute patches unless they are actually using the new software. As we build the site and want to add modules, we're going to do our best to upgrade the modules we want to see in Drupal 7. And you should too.