I'm sorry to have been away for such a long time. The short answer is that I've been rather absorbed in my new job.

The longer answer is that I'm not sure what effect my new life is going to have on my writing. Having been out on a spiritual ocean for so long, I might need to find my land legs and see if I can write on the ground.

But enough of that. Let me tell you about my new job.

I'll start with a general description, then give some technical details for those who are interested.

A college roommate of mine, whom I last saw at his wedding in 1983 (I think it was '83), found Real Live Preacher, read a bit, and contacted me. He was until recently the president of the American Cancer Society Foundation. Executive guy. Smart, driven, high-achieving. Nice guy too. His name is Rob Mitchell. Rob and his friend Hank Zachry, who is also a serious business guy, currently the president of his own company, started Philanthromax, a consulting company for nonprofits that produces instruments that assess and analyze charitable giving trends.

Rob told me about his new company and asked me to evaluate their website, which I did. It was a standard Web 1.0 site. Nice graphics. Static content. Based on the image roll-over menus, I suspected it was laid out in Photoshop, sliced up, and published with Dreamweaver.

I sent Rob a rather lengthy email in which I described Web 2.0, the power of social media, Content Management Systems, and so on. Web insiders are already yawning but it was new to him.

We had some conversations, yada yada yada, and Rob and Hank asked me to take their current site and turn it into a Drupal site, Drupal being the ultimate (IMHO) open source CMS. I was also asked to install a payment gateway system for the purchase of their new product, the highly technical and hush-hush PhilanthroDEX, a fancy nonprofit forecasting instrument developed by a team of Ph.D. statisticians. When the team "hit" on their algorithm that ties nonprofit giving in the U.S. to a series of 40 or 50 financial markers, there was a rush to the patent office.

Don't you love the intrigue?

So I developed their Drupal site on a contract basis. The project was completed and I got paid, which was nice because we were COMPLETELY out of money. Here is the site I finished for them. I did the theme work myself, using the graphic look from their original site. Technical details below if you are interested.

Apart from a few little things, their site isn't making use of Drupal's considerable abilities. My next project is to actually use some Drupal muscle to turn their site into a robust social media site around which conversations about nonprofit fundraising, giving trends, and other topics can take place. I have 10 weeks to finish that project. (10 weeks to put the machinery in place, so to speak, and begin working the site to encourage those conversations.) At the end of that 10 weeks, their our site will be the model for a website package that we can also sell. "Like our site? We can set one up for you."

What does this mean for me?

1. If I do a good job, I have a chance at a permanent position with Philanthromax, which I think I would like.

2. I'm also thinking of temporarily changing the name of this blog to something like "Chronicles of a Clueless Working Boy" or something. I'm going to return to blogging regularly, but I'll be writing a lot about my new job for the next couple of months. Kind of a subject change for me. Life in the corporate world.

3. This is kind of a secret. but you could help me in my quest to land a permanent job. I'll tell you more about that in my next post.

Technical Details for those interested

The new Philanthromax site is a Drupal 6.16 site. I developed the theme using Artisteer, a tool that is looked down upon by serious Drupal gurus and professional theme designers. However, I think it is a marvelous tool if you need a straightforward design. A wysiwyg interface that produces a master file that is then exported to a theme collection of php and css files. If you need to change something in your theme design, you return to your master file, make your changes, export, upload, and you're done. With tools like Artisteer you simply need to know their limitations. If you need a fancier theme, go to a serious theme developer. If not, you can keep your work in-house without having a theme specialist on the team.

Modules I'm using:

1. The standard drupal core and optional modules like blog, poll, etc.

2. Node Block - turns sidebar blocks into standard nodes for easy updating.

3. Taxonomy Access Control - allows me to restrict content access based on user roles and tags. Only members can see the highly confidential PhilanthroDEX files. Oooooh!

4. Panels - a free form layout module that I used to design our landing page for PhilanthroDEX members. Demo here.

5. Views - a module which allows me to construct various ways for users to view information. (Example: "Take all blog entries labeled as "news" and put their titles in a block on the front page) I think this module has been adopted into Drupal's core for Drupal 7. It's practically a core function now for most serious Drupal users.

I'll be rolling out a lot of new functions and cool stuff over the coming weeks.

More later...

Gordon