The Nuketown7 redesign is finally done. Or rather, it’s finally done enough to launch. Over the next two weeks Nuketown will be on hiatus as I upgrade the site to Drupal 7 and implement the new theme. During the upgrade you can check out The Atomic Age for status updates. That’s my ancient Blogger site, and I’m dusting it off to support the downtime.
All of the content from the old web site — articles, blog posts, images, podcasts, comments — will be part of the new site, and most of the web addresses should remain the same. The big change will be the look; say good-bye to the old white-text-on-black, and say hello to black-text-on-white background!
Behind the scenes it will be powered by Drupal 7, and frankly that’s going to make my life a hell of a lot easier. We’re moving all of our Drupal instances to D7 at work, and it’s been painful having to keep up Nuketown in its D6 interation.
On the design front, this final push comes thanks finishing the home page views and styling them. This was the thing I was most concerned about, as I knew it could take me deep into the bowels of Drupal theming.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to go there. Instead, I was able to leverage output rewriting in Drupal Views to take my existing HTML code and insert the necessary field values into it. The approach is documented in “Styling Views using Output rewrite” and “Rewriting Drupal Views Output for Custom Theming & CSS”.
This did exactly what I wanted, and because of it I was able to knock out the remaining views work in about 30 minutes. With another half-hour of tweaking, I had what I wanted.
The site isn’t perfect — there’s still some nit-picky formatting to do, and I’m not satsified with the way the primary navigation turned out, but the site is functional, it looks better than the old site, and it implements some time-saving features like post-to-Twitter.
My goal is to have the site up and running at nuketown.com by the end of Thanksgiving weekend, sooner if I can swing it.