Much like many people, I am a person who lives different roles all at the same time. There are instances where different aspects of my life overtake other aspects.

I am deeply interested in the FostAdopt and Foster Care sphere, having personal connections with that world which led to my founding TraumaAdoption.org - a community site. I have a love of technology, and while I'm not a programmer, I have been managing technology projects for many years ranging from the development of ArtistsRegister.com to Web producing the re-build of Popular Science. I love the development process and helping people see what they imagined become a reality. I have worked in the theatre as a lighting guy - theatre was my minor in University. I have also spent most of my life as an artist.

I've started painting again.

This led me to the realization that I needed a presence for my artwork. Over the last few weeks, I have been building a gallery in my spare time in Drupal. I've become extremely comfortable with Drupal - starting that journey with WESTAF in 2006 and continuing it with my employer, pingVision in Boulder.

It was a natural fit to use Drupal in building out this presence.

I had a few requirements:

• I needed an ecommerce presence but at this point don't need or want much more than PayPal
• I wanted thumbnails that would expand using something like lightbox with a mini-carousel to show details of the work
• I wanted a blog - blogs are good for SEO
• I wanted clean URLs
• I wanted to be able to break up art work by medium
• I wanted some flexibility with layout
• I wanted to build fast
• I wanted to be able to replicate for others quickly

So, what got put into the recipe?

• CCK
• Chaos Tools
• Various Optional Core Modules
• ImageCache
• Advanced Help
• FCKeditor
• Lightbox2
• Mollom
• Page Title
• Pathauto
• Poormanscron
• Panels
• Google Analytics
• Ubercart
• Views
• XML sitemap

I am using Acquia's Prosper theme which provides plenty of regions and fits the Ubercart shopping cart nicely. One complaint is that without a logo, the site's title in the header gets cut off on the bottom.

Panels was used on the home page to combine a couple of nodes to give it a little bit more interest.

The art work is broken up via Ubercart into different media. Each media has been given a menu item up top.

By taking a snapshot of the database before the site was populated in any serious way, I'm in a position to be able to replicate the site very quickly.

All in all, I am pleased with the effort made since returning from Drupalcon Paris. The site didn't take a huge amount of time to construct and I think looks clean. It is easy to navigate and will be simple to add to and maintain.

This is just the first iteration of this project. I intend to keep working at it to improve the experience. I still have some tinkering to do with the sales agreement. I need to tweak the tax rate a little bit.

So, this brings me back to my roots as an artist with a twist. My love of technology, open source, and Drupal have seeped into this aspect of my life.

I owe the Drupal community a great big thank-you once again.