The Slane college at Bradley University houses the Art, Communication, Multimedia, Music, Theatre Arts and Global Scholars programs. When I arrived at Bradley, the Slane College site was quasi-content-managed and also quasi-Drupal. This was back in the Drupal 4.7 days, and the previous developer had implemented Drupal, but had chosen to use it only for its backend and had built a custom PHP scaffold for the front end.

A New Look and Engine

I initially worked with Michael Courier, an excellent web and interactive designer and former student, to get a new look and feel for the site. Michael came through with flying colors, working with the Dean to get the look and feel we currently have on the site. I then went about implementing the site into Drupal 5 using a real Drupal theme.

When the site first launched, it was fairly plain, containing only stories and pages. With all the media that Slane College departments produce, this would not suffice. By the time I was finished teaching at Bradley University, the site included video, audio clips attached to stories, an audio podcast that I did the audio production on, feature stories pinned to the top of the homepage with banner graphics, and image galleries presented through Flash.