Insights

Today I imported a small sample of one of Digett’s subscriber lists housed at CampaignMonitor into Flowtown for the first time. Flowtown is a brand-spanking-new social media mining tool that takes my company’s email subscriber lists and tells me way more than I thought possible about my subscribers. The results are pretty stunning—almost scary, really.

For the past several months we have had the privilege of working with the Little Black Dress Society, an organization dedicated to ending violence against women. Founder Amanda Graybill has made it her life’s mission to provide resources, support, and assistance to abused women and their families.

Now that I have been here for more than a month, I have had a solid opportunity to really dive into the inner workings of Drupal. Coming from a background where I worked with object-oriented programming and the MVC design pattern (model, view, controller), it has been a little overwhelming to get a grasp on exactly how Drupal is organized.

I am used to a very clear separation of concerns that the MVC design pattern affords when using popular frameworks such as CodeIgniter and CakePHP. While there is a tool named Movico, which is essentially an MVC approach for structuring a Drupal module, I have yet to fully wrap my brain around how it interacts with Drupal.

Normally, I leave all the artsy talk about graphics to Andrew, and for good reason. However, my background includes editorial work, and art selection is an important part of that role. Properly sourced and prepared artwork can set the tone for any content item, but the process is often done outside the glare of critical eyes (except in egregious missteps) or given second billing to other creative pursuits. No more, I say.

Six months ago I wrote a blog post called Cooking up a Homemade Drupal Theme. A visitor recently submitted a comment to my article that's left me contemplating the target audience for that particular post. "Wait," you think—"shouldn't every writer know for whom they are writing before they publish content to a website?" Technically, I agree with this sentiment, but considering the varied interpretations of the skill sets required of a Drupal themer, defining an appropriate Drupal audience can be a real challenge.