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 [1] 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.
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.
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Web 2.0 Design Resources:
- The Top 10 Web 2.0 Designs [3]
- Layout tutorial at April Zero [4]
- The Web 2.0 Secret Weapon [5]
- MaxPower’s List of Free Icon Sets [6]
- Web 2.0 Design Kit from Photoshop Lab [7]
- download 16 Soft Gradient Styles from blirk
Happy Publishing!