Last week, I set forth to start and finish an old project idea as quickly as possible, using only Drupal contributed modules.
The result was www.LocalArt.biz.
Using Views, Panels, CCK and an array of plugins for that power trio, I was able to complete a reasonable facsimile of what had been brewing in my head for years... a simple, easy to use site for artists to post work and fans to buy it from them, locally.
I decided to go with the core profile.module, once I noticed you can add a "Relationship" for Users to a view. This allowed me to add arguments to filter nodes by a user's profile field, in my case, Location.
The real killer app I found for this project was the Custom Fields module for Views. This module allows you to add custom PHP code as a field in a view! This is how the location of an artwork is turned into a link to the city's homepage.
Oh, and some serious bonus features:
- Twitter Integration: Shows an artists Twitter feed on their profile and allows them to announce new artwork on twitter as soon as they post it.
- Facebook authentication: Login using your facebook account, critical to viral success.
As I get my new site up and running, I'll try to edit this blog and turn it into a real case study.
It was a really fun project.
