The Pratt Center for Community Development works for a vibrant, livable, and sustainable New York City. We’ve been working with them for five years, on everything from deploying multiple web sites and blogs, to consulting on various online services, to producing web site content. As we’ve worked together, the Pratt Center has begun to seize the potential of online publishing and promotion. They’ve been demanding more from their online tools, and it was becoming inefficient and costly to rely on us to manage their content.

Well last month we helped the Pratt Center take the biggest leap forward in the organization’s online history when we launched their new Drupal-powered web site at prattcenter.net.

The new site sports standard Drupal goodies like multiple types of content, arbitrary groupings of content with separate RSS feeds, and a powerful interface for administering the site. We also developed many custom content types and fields that fit the Pratt Center’s specific needs, using some rockstar modules contributed by the Drupal community, like FileField, Imagecache, and Embedded Media Field.

We tied it all together with a custom theme built around the Pratt Center’s branding, custom menus, whatever content listings we could dream up thanks to Views, and CCK node and user references.

All told, the Pratt Center now has an incredibly powerful platform for managing their own online presence and publicizing the great work they do. All of the day to day content management is in their hands, with many site features handled automatically by Drupal.

This allows us to serve the Pratt Center much more efficiently: we’re in a more administrative and consultative capacity, applying software updates, supporting their usage of the site, and helping them make architecture and policy decisions about this amazing technical platform at their fingertips.

PrattCenter.net now runs on Drupal.

Earlier this year the Popular Science web site was rebuilt with Drupal to much fanfare within the community. The new popsci.com is an example of how Drupal can perform at the “enterprise level”, and I think it’s fair to say that the site set a new gold standard for Drupal. So, I was thrilled to recently have the chance to work on the 2008 Best of What’s New “microsite” for popsci.com — BOWN is an annual event for PopSci, but obviously this was the first time it was built on Drupal.

I was working with Bad Feather, who had a contract with the Bonnier Corporation, publishers of Popular Science, to develop BOWN 2008. The project had to come together fast, but thanks to the hustle of Heather, Brad, Josh and I, and the PopSci editorial and technical teams, we launched BOWN 2008 on-schedule within the existing Drupal framework.

Obviously the heavy development work was already done thanks to the excellent existing Drupal site, but we had our work cut out for us adjusting the Drupal configuration, modifying the existing theme, and managing all of the BOWN content. On the Drupal side, we used the expected Drupal pillars: CCK to create a new content type for BOWN and make some small extensions to a few existing content types to hook into BOWN; and Views to create all of our custom node lists. On the theming front we created new page templates and theme functions to make BOWN match the graphic design spec we were given, including BOWN navigation, block and ad placements.

Check out the write-up of the original Drupal migration for background, then dig in to BOWN 2008!