Recently I was chatting with a friend, Adin Miller, on Skype. Adin and I met about a year ago after being introduced by a mutual friend, Beth Kanter. Beth introduced us because the Grants Manager Network was looking for someone to present on a social networking panel. I was delighted to be tapped as that resource.

Adin shared with me that he needed someone who could create a few static web pages for him on his 1&1 shared server and perhaps link a Wordpress blog to those pages. We chatted for a while, and it became evident what he really wanted and needed was a way to:

1. Bring all his content under one "roof"
2. Have easy ways to update and add content
3. Have a blogging platform
4. Be able to richly tag his content
5. Have something that could start to raise search engine rankings
6. He wanted RSS
7. Social networking links
8. "Categories" like Wordpress
9. Include static informational pages
10. Spam Control

You see, Adin is a consultant to the nonprofit community. He works on high level strategy from a communications, program management, grants managment, and social media. He needed a site that communicate what he does and allow him to communicate what he is up to.

There were certain requirements that needed to be fulfilled.

• This was a shoestring project
• 1&1 hosting needed to be used (more on that later)
• Fast turnaround was important
• A WYSIWYG was important
• An easy way to place images from within the WYSIWYG was desired

The first thing we did was gather our Drupal resources. Contributed modules used in this project included:

• admin menu
• chaos tools
• fckeditor
• imce
• mollom
• nodewords
• page title
• panels
• pathauto
• poormanscron
• service links
• token
• tweetmeme
• views
• xmlsitemap

The colour scheme of the project was influenced by a tag cloud he had put together in the past - it seemed like light text on a dark background was favoured. We opted to use the Acquia Slate contributed theme. I like it for its flexibility.

Admin Menu just provided an easy way of getting around the back end of the site. We used Chaos Tools for Panels. There was a desire for no real content on the homepage - only the customized tag cloud graphic.

When I first logged into 1&1, I discovered that Adin was using the Windows instance of the service. We settled on side-grading him to a "Linux Home" account which would give us MySQL, PhPMyAdmin, and of course a Linux environment.

Some things to note about 1&1:

1. PhPMyAdmin is quite crippled in it, at least on the "Linux Home" level of service. I had some pretty challenging experiences importing the database from my localhost to Adin's server. I had set up the DB, exported the DB from localhost, and then tried to import it using PhPMyAdmin's import tool. I continually got "No SQL query" errors. Finally, I ended up doing the import by opening an unzipped copy of the archive up in TextEdit and pasting the whole thing into the SQL query panel on 1&1. Thankfully the database wasn't large.
2. You don't have ssh access to the server instance.
3. You will need to alter your Drupal .htaccess file to enable clean URLs. You'll need to open the .htaccess file up in some kind of editor and then edit the following line:
   #RewriteBase /drupal
   to
   RewriteBase /
4. Keep in mind that 1&1 Linux Home is only suitable for small sites. The PHP memory limit is set to 40M - a situation quite conducive to the WSOD.
5. 1&1 doesn't host your database on the localhost of the account. You will need to change your settings.php file to point your db at the host indicated in your control panel.
6. Finally, if you are changing your service from Windows to Linux, be prepared to wait at least 48 hours for anything to show up on the Web side. Trying to look at the site via the IP provided for FTP purposes will prove futile.

The site was built in just a few days in the evenings on my localhost. It was hosted on 1&1 so Adin could start providing feedback based on the actual site rather than screenshots. Then, through Skype, Adin and I discussed additions and changes he would like to see occur. For example, there was a desire for an RSS feed from Blog comments. I quick little jaunt into views took care of that. IMCE is allowing him to pull photos into content from picassa without touching markup. The desire to allow social networking links was fulfilled by using service links and the tweetmeme module.

Over the next few days, Adin will finish up getting content into the system. Hopefully the site will provide him with the flexibility he was looking for! It was certainly fun putting it together for him.