Web 2.0 web design techniques seem to be taking over. This is a breath of fresh air from the typical three column layouts that are all over the web. Over last weekend I got curious as to how hard it would be to implement some of the Web 2.0 design techniques using a CMS. The result was better and easier than I expected.

I first tried to do a Web 2.0 layout with Joomla 1.5. It was fairly easy but making the necessary changes to the components and modules became frustrating after ten minutes. I dropped it. I did not want to spend more than the time I would normally use watching television.

I then picked up Drupal 4.6 but stopped in the middle because my curiosity about Drupal 4.7 and the differences took over. Not wanting to do a fresh install I just grabbed the first 4.7 install on my hard disk. In this case it happened to be the windowscomputer.com domain. Since the site was a mess and always being experimented on by any one of 4 people I did not feel bad about destroying the layout. So I grabbed a list of stuff to do and started in.

Two and a half hours later windowscomputer.com had a fresh web 2.0 look. The only mods necessary were to the tagadelic module, quotes module and some changes to the template.php. The site was using the channel nine theme which had some simple CSS and proved to be easily modfiable. As a last minute change I threw in the siFR module. Presto! 100% better. siFR should definately be on the list of any Web 2.0 design list. Though it does have a bug in the auto path finder, the siFR module for Drupal makes it a breeze to implement Flash titles that are dynamic.

Joomla while easy to template proved to be too inflexible when it came to small code changes. Wordpress I have not tried yet but my feeling is that it should be cake. Wordpresses plugin system is very easy to modify. I will do a time trial later to see which Drupal or Wordpress has the least amount of dev time. But two and a half hours (including Photoshop time) is hard to beat. So if you are going to start doing Web 2.0 design for a CMS. Then Drupal 4.7 is the way to go.

Web 2.0 Design Resources:
• The Top 10 Web 2.0 Designs
• Layout tutorial at April Zero
• The Web 2.0 Secret Weapon
• MaxPower’s List of Free Icon Sets
• Web 2.0 Design Kit from Photoshop Lab
• download 16 Soft Gradient Styles from blirk

With ten years of experience in web development he spends most of his work day developing in PHP,mySQL and Drupal
Carl McDade - Systems Developer