Weekly update #5

[Days spent on website this week: 3.5]

I lost half a day this week due to an emergency with the school newsletter!

- I've started to experiment with CSS a bit more to theme the content. This is how I go about actually changing the default appearance that Drupal gives, to look like the desired Web Visuals. So it lets me tweak all sorts for things such as the font, colour, etc. for specific areas within the design. I've managed to work out for example how to add dotted underline under each News item (on every page that a News item appears).

- I've started experimenting with the Panels module (version 3). It's been a bit tricky to figure out as all the tutorials I've found online are relevant to version 2, and I think it's changed quite a bit since then. I've laid out panels for each component of the home page. This is one of the things I've been slightly terrified of (along with styling the pages, which will come later), but the module seems to work pretty well. Although it did take a few attempts to work it out!

One thing I've decided to try and avoid with this module is the 'flexible' layout option, which turned out not to work very well (it didn't mark the css up for me nicely). But fortunately one of the templates it comes with works perfectly as it is (although I've used css to adjust the column widths). There are still a few things I need to iron out on the Home page now i'm displaying it as a panel, but I feel like this is a great step, and that I'll know how to lay out all the other pages now!


Home page using the Panel module to set the layout

- Created a design mockup for the Expressive Art faculty and the Art department, taking into account a realistic example of what text may appear on their page, and changing the page design to give a more realistic idea of how the finished page may look (although this is still subject to change). I created two versions of each of these - one for how it'll look when finished, and the other with my guess as to how it will look for Sept.

- Went through the content with my amazing boss, to figure out things like what exactly we need for each page, and word limits for each section.