There is a great opportunity for Drupal to provide every primary school and secondary school with a cutting-edge, purpose-built CMS distribution. The elves at ImageX Media have been working extra hard over the last few days to cram as much information and innovation as possible into our Knight News Challenge grant application. At present, most school boards cannot afford to roll out websites for every school location, leaving the schools on their own to create complex websites that need to deliver up-to-the minute information about special programs, events and alerts.

A few weeks ago I was tasked with developing an Intranet for a client of ours. We decided to set them up with an instance of OpenAtrium, a Drupal project from the guys over at Development Seed. It’s a fairly new project, but what I’ve seen has really impressed me. I won’t use this post to detail the pros and cons of the system (that’s for another day, after we’ve had time to really test it out), but rather will guide you through the process of getting OA set up in the first place, and then in the next post I’ll show you how you can expand its capabilities using Features.

My last post served as an introduction to designing for content management systems (CMS) in Photoshop – how to get set up and get started. In this post I’d like to give you some tips for designing some of the main components of a CMS website: the background, navigations and columns and content blocks. Next week’s post will show you how to finish things off with headings, footers and lots of fine-tuning.

Usually the first thing that comes to a designer’s mind when designing a website for a Content Management System (CMS) like Drupal is the “boring square style.” It can be challenging to have an out-of-the-box design that is still flexible enough to be scalable, but it is possible. You might say that in order to be truly creative a designer needs some rules to break, and the tight boundaries that can come with designing for a CMS can offer new challenges. This is why designing for Drupal is anything but boring – it can be interesting and challenging for any designer.