David Thrale's blog

Astonishing Nandos

Today we went to Nandos in Wembley. It was lunchtime and almost full. We asked for a table for six and were told by the waiter that we would either have to wait or sit at the table in the separate back area that the waiter said no-one likes. We didn't want to wait, so we asked to see the back area. On the way we passed a six-seater area in the main restaurant at which were sat just two people, without food and working on paperwork. I soon realised that they were Nandos staff.

From HTML table via Tablemanager to cck and views

Before I discovered content management systems and Drupal, I had a list of birth, marriage and death records to which I added each time I went to the archive and looked up records.

In time I thought it would be an idea to share this, so I created a static HTML table, and all was well with the world.

The Anchor and The Castle

The AnchorThe AnchorFor some time Thrale.com has had an article on a The Castle inn, Bankside. It was not clear about how The Castle related to the present day pub. I have been able to rewrite this to clarify how the two names are related.

I am also delighted to have found a fabulous photo of the newly refurbished pub, which looks great.

Infoboxes

As a long time admirer of Wikipedia, I sometimes pay them the ultimate compliment of adapting some of their ideas on Thrale.com.

I am pleased to say that I have improved Thrale.com by developing my version of their infoboxes, using Drupal's blocks facility. It took me a little while to get the CSS right, but now I have some infoboxes on the following topics:

Thrale's of Croydon

Well its almost two years since I have made any significant updates or added any new information to Thrale.com. My time has gone into rebuilding the website based on a database. It has been a success, but it took me an inconceivably long time, with at one time when I lost several months work when I had to start over again from scratch.

Pullquotes or callouts in Drupal

This is an example of a pull quote or call-out.

I am in the middle of moving Thrale.com from a traditional static HTML/CSS & PHP website to a database driven content management system using the fantastic Drupal.

One of several challenges I am tackling is how to transfer pull quotes (or call-outs) from the static site into Drupal. Inevitably a straight transfer didn't work.

This article explains how I cracked the problem and developed an approach to standardised markup.

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