Red Leaf Media Feed

SmallTown Heroes Redesign

mike — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:04:52 -0800

Awhile back I build a Drupal 5 site for the SmallTown Heroes, a college friend's band. At the time I was somewhat new to web development and Drupal. I was able to build a site that had sufficient functionality and was not terribly ugly, but I felt that it was a little lacking in many areas. So, when I heard that they were releasing a new CD, I decided to ask them about a re-design. They were excited about the possibility.

So, I have spent the last few weeks working on a redesign of their site. I began comp'ing t

Converting an Existing Drupal Site to CVS

mike — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:04:49 -0700

In an earlier post, I explained how to use CVS to install and update a Drupal website quickly and easily. However, many Drupal sites are installed before the site developer is aware of the benefits of CVS site management. As such, it would be useful to have a tutorial on how to convert a conventional Drupal install into a CVS-controlled version. In this post I aim to explain how to do just that.

Fast Drupal Installation and Updates with CVS

mike — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:23:37 -0700

Background

I have developed many Drupal sites over the last few years. They have varied in scale and scope, but one thing has

Building Church Websites with Drupal (Installation)

mike — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:58:11 -0700

In the first post of this series, I discussed the initial steps towards setting up your own church website using Drupal. Specifically, I showed how to get your own domain name and webhosting set up. By following those steps, you would have your own domain name and server space, but you would not have any actual site to display your church's information. This is where the Drupal content manageme

Building Church Websites with Drupal (First Steps)

mike — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:54:10 -0700

This is the first post in a series on how to build church websites with the Drupal content management system. In this post I will cover some of the intial steps that need to be taken before building a Drupal site.

Step 1: Getting a Domain Name

Simply put, the Internet is a massive network of connected computers, each of which has its own IP address. For example, 216.239.51.99 is an IP address of a computer that runs Google's website. The seemingly random numbers that make up

Building Church Websites with Drupal (Introduction)

mike — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:42:11 -0700

Much of the work that I've done recently with Drupal has focused on churches and ministries. As such, I wanted to write a short series of blog posts about building Drupal church sites.

Why Drupal?

A good church website should contain many types of content. For example, events, sermons, videos, photos, and normal "static" information pages can provide a nearly comprehensive view of a church's philosphopy and personality. Additionally, various groups of people, such as pastors

Elston Family Church redesign

mike — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:08:40 -0700

We have re-designed the Elston Family Church website. The navigation has been greatly simplified and cleaned up. Additionally, the front page has been used as a highlight of the church's various ministries, guiding site visitors to their pages of interest.

Druplicon in Blender

mike — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 19:43:20 -0700

Drupal is my CMS of choice. I really enjoy its power and flexibility. The more I learn about it, the more I like it. Awhile back there was talk in the Drupal community about a lack of nice wallpapers. I thought that it would be cool to have a 3-d version of the Druplicon as a wallpaper. So, I decided to use the great open source Blender software to create a model of the Drup

Lindsay I AM

mike — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:20:19 -0700

Background

Lindsay Goodwin wanted a site where she could share her thoughts and life with anyone's who's interested. So, she had Red Leaf Media develop a website for her, with the primary focus being a blog.

Design

The design of Lindsay I AM symbolizes much of Lindsay's life and personality. She has written a post explaining the design of the site here.

Features

Built on Drupal 6, with all associated features
Blog - http://www.lindsayiam.com
Contact Form - http

visit the Lindsay I AM homepage

First Southern Baptist Church

mike — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:23:22 -0700

Background

First Southern Baptist Church in Terre Haute, IN is a growing church with many active ministries. They previously had a website consisting of static HTML pages. However, they wanted a more modern and powerful way of managing their content. After trying their hand at several open source solutions, they decided to hire Red Leaf Media to develop a new site.

Design

The First Southern site was designed completely from scratch. We tried to prominently feature the church's sanctuary in the design, and focused on rather dark, earth tones for the p

visit the First Southern homepage