Projects Site Redevelopment Complete

I have just finished getting in place the basic structures behind the sites for my new projects and redeveloping my older sites accordingly.

The main reason behind this was that in the next couple of months I want to start looking for work again and was conscious of topping up my programming and tech skills with a real project. However each project also had it’s own requirements in a site and I wanted to investigate more ideal solutions for each one instead of just doing everything in Drupal like I usually do.

Along the way I have attempted to improve my knowledge of many associated skills and techniques such as LESS, SASS, Headless Drupal, Swift, Java, Responsive Design, DevOps and much more.

The Gregarious Mammal CMS built in Drupal is the central repository for most projects content and some CRM data. The Lean Traveler, Chip Shop and centralised production blog all utilise Drupal’s domain module to effectively serve different areas of the site under different domains from one installation. As they are all basically content driven sites, this seemed the most effective solution as apart from layout and some features, they are all fairly similar sites.

Next up is my personal site. This could have been undertaken in the same method as above, but as it’s a very simple site it seemed an ideal opportunity to try something new. Content is still housed and served from the Central CMS, but through a restful API into a JavaScript Application. For the JavaScript Application I settled on AngularJS, mainly because it had the most documentation and seemed most in demand in the jobs market. To build the initial application I used Yeoman and I will be experimenting much more with it in the future, it’s very simple right now.

For the ‘One Day the World Ended’ project I again opted for something a little different. I have wanted to learn Ruby on Rails for a very long time and as the project doesn’t share much with the other projects and will require some different features in the near future, it seemed a good candidate. It will pull in the projects production blog from the central CMS.

This enables all of the various pieces to do what they are good at and gives me a great basis to experiment and learn in the future. I didn’t really encounter many problems accomplishing this plan as everything is quite simple right now, just the expected hurdles of learning something new. Any more specific details and tips will be covered in the future, including the configuration if various tools I used.